my masterchef friend

im sure everyone has that special friend. that friend who has a knack for whipping up delicious dishes, hunting for the latest grocer in town, ability to tell the difference between meats from swiss or huber butchers and in-the-know about the latest pop-up dinners. put it in the simpler-singaporean-language, a FOODIE (plus the cooking part, that is!).

yes, i do have that one friend. he would even tell me that devonshire clotted cream will not be the best choice for fourseasons warm scones during high tea. and of course, he was given the honour to head the bbq cooking at a friend's rooftop party somewhere along surrey road just a few months back in june. the group was back in singapore as it was summer school vacation in the uk. contrary to my usual singapore-style bbq, there were no traces of sambal stingray, squids, burnt hotdogs or typical bbqwholesale.com kinda frozen food. the menu included toasted nachos topped with cheese, beef and avocado; kongbakbao-burgers with kurobuta pork belly (prepared days before, i salute his effort); marinated eggplant, BBQ-ed beef skirts along with the likes of chicken chop, some foccacia, corn on cob, sweet potato. finally, dessert time we had BBQ-ed pineapple slices with vanilla bean ice-cream drizzled with homemade (effort again!) caramel sauce! although we lack some good vodka watermelon, the chang/singha/tiger beer made up for it. good times i would say. or at least it was nice to engage in something different for a change, other than our standard cnc and poker sessions.

this friend was also the very same sous chef for the pop-up dinner, Under The Table (UTT) 3 (third one already!) at Appetite 75 back in july. menu:- amuse bouche, salmon confit smoked with applewood, braised beef cheek and black sesame panna cotta + BYOB all with just a ticket price of 35sgd for invited members and 40sgd public.

recently, he even went as far as to participate in the student cook-off in his college with a spicy cake which was already favourited in round 1. imagine dark ginger and molasses cake sitting on sweet pumpkin puree, all done up within an hour. his dish charmed the judges soooo much he was instantly granted entrance into second round the following week. the cook-off is organised by The Devilled Egg Kitchen Academy, also part of a fund-raiser to raise research dollars for cancer research centres. read about it here and exercise your culinary voice by voting for his dish right here as well. remember it's the spicy cake you are voting for!

WOO'S SPICY CAKE!

am doing him this favour to garner votes because he said he would bake it for me if i did we all know he deserves to win ;)

pssst lawyers arent boring afterall because this friend is a law school student himself