For more photos, please visit Rubbish Eat Rubbish Grow: http://rubbisheatrubbishgrow.wordpress.com/2011/12/18/makeshake-little-india/When people go to gym, they drink protein shake. When I go, I make milk shake. Because I need motivation for suffering. Over time, I make a mean milk shake. That’s right, “my milkshake brings all the boys to the yard, damn right, they’re better than yours.” (please get the Kelis reference, thanks.)

What makes a good shake? 1. The fatter the milk, the fuller the taste. 2. Quality of ice cream (usually vanilla ice cream because this is just a base for the ice cream to match with other ingredients). 3. Throw in whatever ingredients you want. For gym, I throw in bananas, peanut butter and protein powder. 4. Blend the daylights out of the shake. Consistency is important.

At MakeShake, they make their own vanilla ice cream as base for the milkshake, so the ice cream is less sweet. This is a good move because when the ingredients are blended in, the milkshake would turn out to be sweet but not saccharinely so.

When you order, you just have to pick the ingredients you want to add into the vanilla base. Each ingredient costs $0.70. The combinations are limitless. There are choices of chocolate (Kit Kat, M&M, Kinder Bueno, etc), fruits (banana, long’an, etc), tea/coffee (earl gray is a favorite among adults). Teenagers and studentswould love to mix their own favors, they are more adventurous than working adults. If you don’t want to customize, the shop has a menu you can order from. For the menu, the small sizes cost $3.90 while the big cups cost $5.40.

Hot boys, Jasper Aston Lim and Saunders Shen, customized their shakes. Jasper had a earl gray milkshake, which tasted refreshing. Saunders Shen had a peanut butter one; I forgot the taste. I ordered the shake on the menu, Peanut Butter Sandwich, consisting of peanut butter, banana and dark chocolate fudge. It was awesome! It tasted exactly like peanut butter sandwich, you can bite the bits of peanut in it. I love thick stuff–Saunders doesn’t–and peanut butter thickens the ice cream, which is fine to me. But the shake could be smoother. And towards the end, like all milkshakes, it got a bit excessive.

Ambience: MakeShake takes over the space for the horrible Cottage Waffle Place, so this is a kiosk with some tables and chairs to sit. The only bad thing about the stall is the location, inaccessible for most people.

Overall, it’s nice and fun especially if you concoct your own mix.

For more photos, please visit Rubbish Eat Rubbish Grow: http://rubbisheatrubbishgrow.wordpress.com/2011/12/15/island-creamery-bukit-timah/

After eating so much at The Curry Wok, we wanted to eat more. Naturally. Like kindness begetting kindness, eating also begets more eating.

We were shocked at how this looked like ulu land on the outside, but the parlor was bustling. So popular with families, teenagers, students, and bears aka fat gay men!

The decor looks like a bad and cheap imitation of 1950s American restaurants. Definitely not a date place, unless you’re a teenager.Mudpie was mine while Mr NGFL got two scoops of ice kalim. The mudpie was not bad, with coffee ice cream on the top, cookies-and-cream ice kalim at the bottom and a very awesome peanut-buttery(?) crust. After we finished – did we stop? OF COURSE NOT!

We shared an apple pie with a scoop of burnt caramel ice kalim. The two of them went very well together (I have good taste, I picked the ice cream although Mr NGFL insisted he was the one). The apple pie was cold when I like the apple pie to be hot. It wasn’t too sweet or sour. The crust wasn’t the flaky kind; it was the doughy kind. Mr NGFL liked it but I’m not sure how I feel about carb-by crust and wolfed everything down anyway.

You can see how run-down the ice cream parlor is becoming over the years. The ice cream is still good but then ice cream is ice cream – the few bad ice creams… we call it “sorbet.” But still, a nice way to end dinner. We liked everything we ate. Less noisy teenagers–or teenagers hanging out in groups with a confused teenager who doesn’t know yet he’s gay–would be nice but then again, in American movies, teenagers hang out at ice cream parlors all the time too. Recommended if you want good ice cream and don’t mind teenagers or are a pedophile. It’s Pedophile Hunting Ground, peeps! Licky lick.

For photos, please visit Rubbish Eat Rubbish Grow: http://rubbisheatrubbishgrow.wordpress.com/2011/12/11/the-curry-wok-bukit-timah/

The decor is old-skool homely style with two tables along the corridor. As a neighbourhood eatery, the boss/server knows everyone and is very friendly. She recommended a few dishes to us.

Ngo hiang ($5). Wah, really quite solid. Not oily, crispy and you can really taste the home-cook-ness and hand-made-ness of this dish with slightly bigger piece of carrots to give it a sweetness and crunchiness. Very delicious – but can be less expensive?

Fish head Curry ($20) is their specialty. I prefer more sourish assam fish head but the boss/server told us that different people feedback-ed different things, so they adjust the curry to be half-assam, half-curry. The curry was quite robust but not very hot-spicy and the fish was fresh but not extremely fresh. Crowd-pleaser, everyone would love this. We drank up the curry and about 5000 calories.Normally, obedient Singaporeans would stop at two – but we don't live in the 80s anymore and Mr NGFL said he wanted to try the lor bah ($8) or braised pork and beancurd. This was the only dish we weren’t very satisfied because the pork was cold and wasn’t tender. However, the sauce was very flavorful, and had a kick.

Including rice ($2/bowl) and drinks, we spent a total of $44.

Overall, great unpretentious place with friendly service, serving the food at a quick pace. Delicious food that has a home-cooked quality. Definitely an eatery worth returning.

For photos, please visit Rubbish Eat Rubbish Grow: http://rubbisheatrubbishgrow.wordpress.com/2011/12/07/shunjuu-izakaya-robertson-quay/

A lackadaisical day. Chiobu and I meandered slowly along Robertson Quay and settled on this Japanese restaurant, Shunjuu Izakaya. “Izakaya” means “place of comfort,” and of course, comfort means alcohol. Too bad we are almost teetotalers. Is the decor comforting? Well, it is fuss-free. Seats are placed along the corridor of Riverside View building, but still far away from the canal, so there isn’t a view to speak of. Not much of an ambience.

The restaurant is also known for its “sumiyaki,” or skewered BBQ meat over Japanese charcoal.The complimentary starters were quite appetizing. The raddish and carrots, as appetizers, were soaked in a miso-soup until the roots were throughly soft, absorbing the essence of the soup. Another free entree was a very hard white cabbage. (Chiobu said, “Can eat this raw meh???”) First, you squeeze sour lemon over the very salty, slightly sweet bean sauce. Then you dip the almost tasteless white cabbage in the sauce. Crunchy like celery but much tastier.

Mixed Sashimi for $40. While they were relatively fresh, we didn’t think it was value-for-money. $40 should buy you a meal, not a few pieces of sashimi.

We also had Set A ($19) and Set B ($25) of sumiyaki. Set A consists of beef short rib, asparagus rolled with pork, chicken meat ball, golden mushroom rolled with beef, and pork belly. Set B has rib eye, scallop rolled with pork, rice cake rolled with pork, chicken wing and goose liver (foie gras).

It is difficult to pick the better set because they all have positive and negative food in them. The bad ones you should avoid: from set A, pork belly (too hard), beef short rib (overcooked) and from set B, scallop rolled in pork (tasteless), rice cake with pork (too sticky and bland and starchy). The fantastic ones are: from Set B, rib eye (very tender), chicken wing (flavorful!), and goose liver (melts in your mouth!).

Service was good and attention.

Overall, everything–the food, the service and the ambience–was satisfactory but not overly memorable. We won’t come out of the way to eat this but if we are in the area, then we wouldn’t mind. Including $2 green tea per person, and GST, etc, we paid $104 for two persons.

For photos, please visit Rubbish Eat Rubbish Grow: http://rubbisheatrubbishgrow.wordpress.com/2011/12/06/food-on-fire-capital-square-three/

Featured on 8Days, Wine&Dine, and Exquisite, the decor is canteen-style, so this is really a eat-and-go place but there are several selling points:
1. Guilt-free healthy Indian food! less salt, less oil, less cream, no MSG.
2. “We don’t own a freezer,” says the owner; food is freshly prepared daily.
3. Chefs are from India, so there is a degree of authenticity.
4. The owner’s ancestry is from Gujarat, and it was the first shop in Singapore to sell Gujarati dal dhokli, only available on Wednesdays 12-3pm.
5. Owner’s extended family lives in India so they buy fresh spices, pound and mix them themselves and ship it over to Singapore freshly.

A friend and I shared the angmoh-influenced lamb kebab wrap ($11) with plenty of fresh vegetables, a naan as wrap, and two sauces, a spicy one and a yogurt-based one. This is good lunch food, as I remember fondly of my New York Ah Beng Training Days when I ate wrap for lunch. There wasn’t a stench of the lamb. The texture of hot lamb and crunchy vegetables fit well together. The spiciness of the lamb was padded by the vegetables and the spice left a tingling sensation on my lips. Hot lips! Good to kiss any time!Meat Platter ($20). The food came sizzling on the hotplate and the aroma was mouthwatering. Taste-wise, it was average for us–we thought the spices could be heavier–but the meat was tender and succulent.

My friend and I also had Chicken Masala set ($9.50) and Chicken Makhani (butter chicken, $9.50), which come with a naan each and are popular for lunch. The Makhani is definitely the better of the two. The masala was salty for us but the Makhani chicken has a deep roasted, very smokey taste that I like very much and can’t stop eating. The chicken really absorbed the essence of the tandoor (clay oven). I’d come back for this.

I don’t like lime juice ($2.80), because it’s either too sour or diabete-ly sweet, but here, the balance was superb. This is the only lime juice I can recall that I like but I wonder if it can be cheaper. $2, maybe?

In general, although I love spicy-hot food, I can’t take it but the food here is ok to my palate. Unlike my other experiences of eating Indian food, after eating, we didn’t feel heavy and lethargic. It tasted decent too. The price seems reasonable as the eatery is in CBD area. An eatery that survives 8 years in such a competitive area can’t be bad.