Recently in Food Glorious Food Category

In my 2 months in France, I managed to check out two Michelin-rated restaurants. This one, Les Pléiades in Barbizon, was the better of the two. I’ll zoom in on my dish, which was most unusual.

Filet du canette migratoire du Canada a la sauce cranberry, puree vitelotte et bouquet de legumes printaniers

The air-flown duck arrived in an ‘Air Mail’ envelope which the waiter cut up. It was then laid out on my plate. It was explained that since we were in Barbizon, the town where many artists and authors resided, this dish represented a palette that we could paint on.

I was given a tube of warm paste which turned out to be more of the purple potato mash with an obvious hint of truffle. I decided to write my name on my plate.

Another dish on the menu that intrigued us, was called ‘Seriole Killer’. Turns out the El Bulli-trained chef has a sense of humour and it is actually a fish dish with a ‘knife’ sticking out.

We could see the El Bulli influence in various dishes, such as this dessert which came with cactus juice. It tasted grassy but not unpleasant.

Escale de fruits des iles avec ses dunes au sesame et sa fraicheur de cactus au citron

Finally the chef, Philippe Geneletti, emerged to chat with us. I told him he deserved his Michelin star. This was a very new restaurant with an obviously young, up and coming chef who still had a lot of ideas and enthusiasm.

The gastronomic restaurant (not to be confused with the more casual brasserie in the same hotel) is located in the newly-built Les Pléiades hotel. For more information, visit the hotel website.

I have hardly any posts on cooking, but I assure my readers I can help around the kitchen.

This was what we were cooking in the afternoon - fish soup. [All photos taken by iPhone]

First, I chopped up carrots, celery and onions (sniff sniff), then fried them with olive oil in a large pot.

We marinated the fish in white wine, and the prawns in XO sauce.

We had a problem with shrinking scallops the last time we cooked this dish. So this time, we seared the scallops (to lock in their juices) then removed them from the pot, to be added when everything else was cooked.

Separately, we soaked the clams in salt water to remove the fishy smell. Then we steamed them. Only the fresh ones open up, and those are the ones that make it to our soup.

We added fish, and then prawns to the main pot.

We added two cartons of stock.

Final product!

Serve with baked garlic bread (olive oil and garlic only - no butter! Must be healthy).

Tip: To have really finely-sliced bread, put the baguettes in the freezer so they’re firm when you cut them.

Cooking tips and recipe courtesy of my Cordon Bleu-trained grandaunt :)

I used to marvel at the Harrods food hall in my younger days. Somehow, this time I wasn’t wowed very much. In fact, despite the sale the place was relatively empty. It was late morning. We managed to grab seats at the Japanese restaurant.

Check out the caviar! BTW these weren’t even the most expensive … I think the priciest bottle was going for over 3,000 quid.

We had tea at the Illy bar.

I highly recommend the Strawberry Cheesecake. It isn’t too sweet, and has a cookie base.

Nope, this has nothing to do with Optimus. Check out my latest food review on Hungrygowhere.com, on the new steakhouse in Tanglin Village/Dempsey Road. More photos here.

While on Windows messenger just now, I noticed a URL beside my cousin's nickname - yum.sg. As she normally does not publicise URLs, I thought it unusual and checked it out. Turned out to be another food review site for Singaporeans, run by friends of hers.

I thought the website was more visually appealing than blurbme.com and Hungrygowhere.com. I was starting to wonder if anybody had already written a review of the review sites. Some quick Googling took me to a WhySGEntrepreneursSuck post in April.

As I expected, Hungrygowhere was rated the highest for community and content. I found specific restaurant reviews there, that weren't on blurbme. Of course, blurbme covers more than food, though I feel it's better to have one main focus. Amusingly, I know the brother of the guy behind Hungrygowhere. Singapore is a very small place. Maybe one day I'll meet the founders of Blurbme too - probably a friend's brother's ex-classmate's colleague.

The only thing is, we love food and like to share lobangs, so that's probably why so many Food 2.0 sites have sprung up and have managed to keep on going.

What's going to happen in the future? I predict things will firstly remain status quo - perhaps another new player or two may even venture into the market. However, given our small population, there will be a saturation point. The site with the strongest community and number of (good) reviews may just break away from the rest of the pack.

But what would be interesting is if these sites release their own APIs and you can embed your latest food reviews on your own websites. What if you could subscribe to an RSS feed on your favourite restaurant, or category of food? That would be so convenient.

And maybe some clever person will consolidate all these food websites into one mammoth portal and save us all the trouble of checking different URLs for the same restaurant. You know, something like the Bookjetty mashup. Ahem.