More Wet Market Wonders from Tiong Bahru

I had such a good visit to the Tiong Bahru wet market this week. As I've said many times it's just the best place to get fresh fish, pork, flowers, vegetables and prawns. However I'm branching out into more experimental local cuisine which requires me to tackle the tofu and dried goods sellers in the market too. Here I'm at a distinct disadvantage because with fruit and veges, you simply fill up the little baskets with whatever you want, hand it over, then pay. Likewise with fish I can point to what I want, indicate how I want it cleaned with 90% accuracy using hand signals, and my prawn seller speaks good English. However the dried good stalls are for the most part manned by an older generation of Chinese who speak a minimum of English so it's down to hand signals and imaginative pronunciation of ingredients.

I've been inspired by a great little cook book I picked up recently called Simple Treats written by Lisa Yam. She looks exactly like the ideal Chinese grandmother in the book, preparing delicious food using simple yet tasty recipes which are all accompanied by a question and answer session between her and her Filipino domestic help, Ah Ling. It's a friendly chatty kind of book and the dishes look sumptuous.

Fortunately I took the book with me as it's written in both Mandarin and English. I made the rounds of the stands asking for "Chouzhou Sa Cha sauce please. ChouZHOU Sa-Cha? CHOUzhou Sa CHA?" until giving in and showing the recipe to a wizened little lady nearly hidden behind fragrant piles of dried prawn, jelly fish, and pickled cabbage. "Huh?" was the invariable response as they would bend forward to try and read the Mandarin text in the dim light. When I got lucky their faces would light up "Ahhhh! Yes! Chouzhou Sa Cha sauce, I have, can, can!"

Then it was off to the tofu seller who passed the recipe around the neighbouring stall holders until one young enough to read without glasses was able to make out the Mandarin text for bean curd sheets. Each time, without fail, they would tell me slowly and clearly the proper name for what I was looking for and each time I would repeat it carefully, silently despairing of ever remembering any of these words by the time I got home.

I needed a bizarre vegetable called luffa, which looks like a cross bet wen a cucumber and an instrument of war, and there was a lively discussion amongst the vendors what I meant until one old lady silenced the chatter by scornfully rattling off a string of Mandarin at the men gathered round - obviously berating them for being completely useless - before producing one with a triumphant smile and a flourish from a tub full of the upended beasties. The men's' mutterings were clearly running along the lines of "well if the Ang Moh* had said LUffa instead of luFFA we would have understood the first time..."

So I'm well armed with my bean curd, by red dates, dried prawns, soy bean paste, red dates and Chouzhou Sa Cha. My luffa is chilling in the fridge until tomorrow and my bottle of Shaoxing wine is keeping my Pu Ning bean sauce company in the cupboard. My lily buds and lotus root are ready to go so with a bit of luck and lots of help from Lisa Yam we'll be eating even better than ever this week.

*Ang moh literally translates as red haired but is the term used to described Caucasians. I'm sure they've also got a name which translates as "that stupid white chick who thinks she can cook Chinese food, what a joke lah!"