four sundays ago at “one night stand X edible gardens”: a most excellent 24-hour pop-up kitchen in a beautifully run-down shophouse on the corner of rowell and jalan besar, itself the three-month home to the growell pop-up, the workshop and performance space of the edible garden city urban farming collective. the previous owners (a restaurant) having moved out some time ago, and the fittings long gone, the farmers have moved in on the final months of the lease, turning the rooftop into a sea of herbs and vegetables and flowers: trough after trough, pot after pot, tray after tray. . (later i would walk down the backstairs of the building: the stony steps were pot-lined too, here and there licks of vibrant colours popping from the green, as if daubed on with tiny paintbrushes: a pot of chili padi, blue flowers aspiring towards a fence (though not of the butterfly pea for dyeing bakzhang, i think, some relative), cherry tomatoes ripening on small scaffolds.) the ground floor is half-showroom ( home farming paraphenalia) and half-workspace, and they’d put in large gardening crates for tables and seats. on the ground floor a small, sparse kitchen still remains: guest chefs come in on weekends with portable kitchen equipment to cook one-off themed brunches: thai, french, edible flowers, foraged salads, raw food. on the second floor workshop and performance space: a large blackboard listed all the coming events for february: food sustainability talks, saucemaking, flowers in cooking, photography exhibitions, film screenings.i’d gone in for breakfast during the pop-up’s final hours, not confident that there would be any food left (waking at 6am, for an owl, was difficult even for the sake of an interesting concept, but i cheered up enormously walking through little india — the sun had only risen, the light still that grey underwater tint, the world just stirring, the street peopled but uncrowded — a world at once real and unreal, coming alive..) nor that the chef, on his feet for 20 consecutive hours, would still be compos mentis. the mince pork congee , we were told apologetically, had run out, but they could still serve the snakehead ceviche on its own, would we like that? topped with sliced red chili and also crunchy little heart-shaped leaves — wild sorrel of some kind, perhaps? a tiny bit lemony, like little lilypads, more succulent than mint (they organise foraging outings as well — i’d like to go on one.) we eat it all immediately, it was so good. and then the kaya (basins of) made in-house with foraged wild pandan, spread on crisp toast and soft buns; goluptious soft-boiled eggs, glossy and large and melting sweet in the mouth, no soysauce or pepper but topped with a sprinkling of small grey beads, tiny caper-like bursts of flavour that turn out to be brined peppercorn pickles; a fried slab of luncheon meat (tinned: the chef says he’s experimented with making his own but has not yet arrived at one better than the commercial: a graceful concession.) the egg noodles were the only disappointment, the flat noodles (not meepok, as i’d expected, but something closer to banmian) had gone a little clumpy, as if they’d sat out all night clutching at themselves with strickened arms, and the broth was not hot enough to get them to relax. the broth itself was flavourful (chicken, i suspect),, and the dish came with a little ziplock bag, inside which an assortment of wild greens to dunk into your bowl (rather like having vietnamese pho, i thought, than bakchormee.) i find a variegated purple and forest-green leaf very like tang’orh (okinawan spinach is just the fancy japanese name for tang’orh isn’t it? or plants of that family, chrysanthemum leaves also), and dehydrated mushrooms, not quite homeiji, but fatter than enoki (chef: i serve it like that because i like to watch the way they blossom again in the broth.)
at that hour we had the place to ourselves: the sunday brunch crowd had not yet bestirred themselves, the post-clubbing crowd in the wee hours had alrady trickled off homeward. we stayed long, and later on they brought us an extra cup of coffee on the house (i wished they had local kopi, however, instead of western style coffees — in this instance provided by the good folk of necessary provisions: a place i’ve never been to because it is in upper bukit timah but which enjoys no small repute among residents of the far west.) then, at about 8.15am (a few small parties had come in then and we made to leave) the kitchen sent us an unexpected and enormous dish of fried eggs (from local farm “uncle williams”) drizzled with flavourful and aromatic soy sauce. i asked for the brand, they gave it to me: 广和兴： — it is made by some singaporeans in defu who also manufacture fruit vinegar. good, she says, hunting.
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