Singapore Pineapple Tarts

Posted on 01. Tue, 2012 by grace in Lunar New Year, Singaporean, Sweets

By Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, A Tiger in the Kitchen

When I was growing up in Singapore, Chinese New Year meant one thing: my grandmother’s pineapple tarts. The salty, buttery, bite-size circles topped with quarter-size dollops of dense, homemade pineapple jam were an obsession for me. We had them in the house just once a year, at the lunar new year, when Singaporeans spend two days visiting friends and relatives to swap tales of business and children’s test scores over tea and sweets. Quantities aren’t exact. My aunts don’t use a recipe, and they laughed at me the first 10 times I asked them for this one. The first set of instructions they gave me for pineapple jam was, “Aiyah, you just juice the pineapple, add sugar and then boil, boil, boil!”

Kaya (Coconut Jam)

Posted on 02. Tue, 2011 by grace in Condiments, Singaporean

By Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, A Tiger in the Kitchen

Prosperity Cakes (Fatt Gou)

Posted on 01. Sat, 2011 by grace in Fast Asian Recipe, Lunar New Year, Sweets

By Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, A Tiger in the Kitchen

Auntie Hon Tim has been showing me how to make some of her favorite lunar new year recipes. On her must list every year is fatt gou, or prosperity cakes — cupcake-sized desserts that she makes to send friends wishes of riches and sweetness in the new year. Auntie Hon Tim’s cakes are super simple to make — they require just four ingredients (all-purpose flour, pancake mix, water and brown sugar) and the instructions basically involve stirring and steaming.

Basil’s Grandmother’s Chicken Curry

Posted on 02. Sat, 2010 by grace in Indian, Poultry

A few weeks ago, I found myself on the phone, frantically shuttling between calls to my aunt and my grandmother, trying to jolt their memories and nail down the ingredients we needed for my Singapore family’s take on chicken curry. As the calls got more confusing and the ingredient list grew more nebulous, my friend Basil, a Singaporean of Indian ethnicity, sat nearby, listening in with an increasingly incredulous look. “You’re sitting next to an Indian,” he finally said, “and you’re not asking him how he makes his curry?”A very good point. It turns out Basil, better known to his friends as the hard-to-miss, gregarious guy at any bar that he frequents, also knows how to cook. He learned 20 [...]

Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan

Posted on 01. Thu, 2010 by grace in Chefs

Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan is a New York-based food and fashion writer who is researching and writing a food memoir about learning about her family in Singapore by cooking with them. “A Tiger In The Kitchen” is scheduled to be published by Hyperion’s Voice imprint in January 2011. You can read the blog that’s accompanying her travels and research at her Web site. She has covered fashion, retail and home design (and written the occasional food story) for the Wall Street Journal. Before that she was the senior fashion writer for In Style magazine and senior arts, entertainment and fashion writer for the Baltimore Sun. Her stories have also appeared in Marie Claire, Every Day With Rachael Ray, Family Circle, The Atlantic [...]