Easy on the Turkey

President Harry S Truman admiring a Thanksgiving turkey in 1950. Presidents have annually "pardoned" one of the delicious fowls since JFK. The Guardian has a slideshow of past presidents getting the bird.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! The Passengers wish we could be close to our nearest and dearest Americans to enjoy the holiday. Instead it's a normal working day in Singapore. We do get the gift of a public holiday tomorrow but not because of any navigationally challenged religious dissidents. It's the time for pilgrimage to Mecca for Muslims, Hari Raya Haji in Malay. The Passengers will do Thanksgiving with a number of expatriates and sympathetic Singaporeans on Sunday evening.

The Thanksgiving holiday in America provides a number of benefits. Firstly, the occasion is secular and can be enjoyed by anyone willing to participate. It seems especially fitting as a reminder of the immigrant beginnings of our national experiment. Along with the absence of creedal partisanship, Thanksgiving celebrations are hardly commercial, mostly an excuse to eat as much food as possible while spending time with family or friends. There is, of course, NFL football and a parade with marching bands to watch. Yes, Americans can only go so long without shopping. The day after Thanksgiving, also a public holiday, marks the opening of the Christmas shopping season ("Black Friday") with "doorbuster (link to this year's Wal-Mart circular)" offers to those who can wait in the cold for a big-box retailer to open at 5:00 AM. It's a rather crass coda to a national tradition, but Thanksgiving continues to play an important role in keeping the Christmas decorations and holiday jingles off the cultural landscape at least until December is a reasonable possibility. In Singapore the Christmas decorations went up before November, in part because of all the visiting dignitaries for the APEC Summit earlier this month.

Mouth Watering Prose

The dining room at A Voce Columbus. Image from Joonbug. More pictures from Sam Sifton's review here.

I recommend reading Sam Sifton's review of the Manhattan restaurant A Voce in the New York Times. The piece demonstrates how great and descriptive food writing can be. The author's standards for every category of the dining experience are clear, and he can be surprisingly generous, as exemplified by his straightforward acceptance of the restaurant's corporate remit to produce top fare with calibrated regularity. Combining flavors creatively and choosing ingredients impeccably earn the reviewer's praise, but he dismisses as callow efforts to meet various NYC menu obligations, like strip steaks even for Italian eateries, without any attempt at culinary invention.

And the sentences Sifton uses for describing the food make for enjoyable reading. He liked the grilled calamari so much that it "could come with yard grass and used tennis balls and still be decent." Wonderful, evocative images are laid out alongside the gastronomic options, and the author does not refrain from punctuating each description with a verdict. The recommendation to enjoy a glass wine and cold cuts while reading the rest of the menu prompts Sifton to write us our own gastronomic tour.

Any two of these [appetizers] will do; there are many courses to go before you sleep. The appetizer list yields a remarkable house-made salt cod, with taggiasca olives, raisins and pine nuts, that is somehow both delicate and brawny — a football player in ballet's fourth position. There are also roasted mushrooms with mâche, hazelnuts and a creamed fontina, rich and earthy, quietly elegant, sensual: it's bedroom fare.

I additionally recommend you have a glass of red wineas a pleasurable accompaniment to such a tour de force review, maybe something Italian and reliable like a Valpolicellia, .

United Homeless Organization Revelations

One of the streetcorner tables where homeless or formerly homeless people ask passersby for donations to the United Homeless Organization. Photo from the New York Times.

On Monday the Attorney General for New York State Andrew M. Cuomo filed a lawsuit against the president and director of the United Homeless Organization alleging that the leaders used the charity's funds for personal expenses while doing little, if anything, to help the homeless in New York City. The organization has long maintained a visible presence in the city. Almost every day people on the Manhattan sidewalks pass by one of the folding tables draped in a distinctive red tablecloth with an empty water-cooler jug to collect money. The lawsuit alleges that the UHO president Stephen Riley and director Myra Walker used the charity's funds largely for personal expenses.

The details suggest a case of small-time crookery. This was not a racket that provided powerful people with the opportunity to unnecessarily fly business class on dubious business or to condemn large swaths of Brooklyn for a sports arena. As reported by the New York Times:

The expenses, the lawsuit said, included premium cable television service at Mr. Riley's apartment, restaurant meals; trips to Cleveland, Mr. Riley's hometown; and shopping purchases from GameStop, the Home Shopping Network, and the web site for Weight Watchers.

But the filing also shines a light on how those ubiquitous donation tables work. Each homeless or formerly homeless person who staffs a table pays the first $15 of donations back to the group for using their name and equipment. The rest is kept by the table's worker. Essentially UHO has been sanctioning begging on the city streets. The arrangement has been known since 2001, but it appears now that all those $15 fees collected by UHO have done little to provide any wider relief to those in need.

John Sentamu

In 2006 the Archbishop spent a week living inside a tent in York Minster.

The Guardian has published an interview today with the Archbishop of York John Sentamu. The article includes a funny anecdote in which the interviewer Stephen Moss assumed the Archbishop lived within the precinct of York Minster. Actually, the Primate of England has his official palace at Bishopthorpe and has lived there since 1241.

The Church of England's No. 2 came to Britain as a political refugee from Uganda in the 1970's. The presence of an African like Sentamu at York emphasizes the global scale of the Anglican Communion and the challenges it faces in holding together such a diverse flock. Hopefully, I will have the chance to meet him on one of my travels up North. Also the Archbishop gets to sit in the House of Lords.

Music video - Bangkok

Unruly Bangkok traffic underneath the SkyTrain. Taxis come in just about every color.

Now for some images from Bangkok. The Passengers stumbled upon this music video shoot outside the Bangkok Arts and Culture Centre, near National Stadium BTS station. We have no idea about the names of the artist or the song being performed, but the crowd did feature cub scouts.

Music video extras line up outside the Bangkok Arts & Culture Centre. Little scouts on the left.

Everybody to the right...2...3...4!

Big finish now!

Sin Huat Seafood: More Crabs

Geylang hosts Singapore's wild side, unless the APEC Summit is in town, like last weekend.

Though we are in Bangkok this week, we thought we should share our extreme gastronomic experience from Saturday. A birthday dinner was organized for a new friend at Sin Huat Eating House, one of Singapore's most revered food institutions (follow this link for a great 2003 article highlighting almost all of Singapore's food traditions). Revered should not be taken to mean refined. Sin Huat is really a streetside cafe with plastic chairs and poor service perched hard against the traffic of Geylang, the artery of Singapore's red-light district. But chef Danny Lee keeps up the coffeeshop's reputation with outstanding seafood of all sorts.

No white tablecloths or starched napkins here. Bring your own package of tissues.

The meal involved a progression of platters served up according to the whim of the chef and/or the stall aunty, staring with a perfunctory vegetable platter of kailan. After eating some greens, it was a serious seafood derby.

We had fresh scallops, pulled out of the bubbling fish tanks by Chef Danny himself and heartily slathered in a dark garlicky black-bean sauce, but bigger adventures awaited with the gung gung lala.

Gung Gung lala with spicy dipping sauce. The garlic scallops appear in the foreground.

Gung gung come steamed in the shell with a fistful of wooden skewers by which diners can spear and drag out the meat. The dipping sauce provided was a sinus busting combination of chilies, spring onion, coriander, and salty soy sauce, plus a number of other additions. Gung gung are only a little bit chewy and taste slightly of the sea, as might be expected when uncoiling the body of an animal from tidal waters.

Prawns. Prawns. Prawns.

The prawns in garlic presented one of the real standouts from the night. Again the seafood was fresh and the garlic was generous, and everyone was ecstatic to find the motherlode of flavorful buttery drippings pooled underneath the rows of shrimp tails. Just about any edible item on the table got dredged through that nectar, including the al dente squid rings that followed.

Three-crab pile-up on the east end of Geylang.

However, the crab bee hoon was the real piece-de-resistance of the evening, and THE reason visitors flock to Sin Huat. Big Sri-Lankan crabs are served with vermicelli that soaks up all sorts of essence from the shellfish. The combination is wet and salty and flavorful. Seasoned diners, like the generous chap directing the evening, ask specifically for female crabs because they include potent dry roe that mixes in with the ginger, chili, and stock sauce and hides itself amongst the noodles. Divine. Of course, female crabs do have one drawback: no claws. Not that I let this detail stop me. I think I was full for the rest of the weekend.

Bound for Bangkok

The Passengers need some more stamps in their passports. They are off to Thailand for 5 days in Bangkok. Send them an email (address on the right-hand sidebar) with any suggestions for sights to see.

Deepavali in Little India

Welcome to Little India.

I have waited too long to present these photos, but here are some scenes from Little India here in Singapore. Last month marked Deepavali, the Hindu New Year, and Serangoon Road was lit up in a festive display of color. One of the side streets was converted into a seasonal market selling all manner of fireworks, decorations, lamps, and flowers. Much of Singapore's India/Subcontinental population includes migrant workers on a hard-driving schedule. This means on Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons the streets become crowded with men, almost exclusively men, enjoying their only day off work.

The hustle and bustle around Tekka Market on a Saturday Night.

The lights along Serangoon Road. The holiday greetings here are written in Tamil, one of Singapore's four official languages.

The Deepavali market crowded with festive garlands and shoppers.

Mobiles and ornaments for the holiday season.

Upstairs Overlooking

The Singapore skyline on a clear Saturday. The curved slope atop our previous address The Sail can be seen jutting above the white Bank of China building. Notice the three towers of Marina Bay Sands casino now have complete glass facades. Classic HDB apartment blocks dominate the foreground.

The Passengers have been rather busy of late, in part due to the arrival of so many boxes full of worldly goods that need unpacking and storing. I will have to delay sending out pictures of our apartment until after we resolve that problem. Until then, here is a large image of the view from our bedroom. Our neighborhood Novena sits on a modest hill. Combine that elevation with our position on the eleventh floor, and the result is a great view of the Central Business District (CBD) skyline. Click on the image above to see a much bigger, detailed version.