Food, deplorable food!

I've never been fussy about food. I don't even eat much of it.

Food that I like are mostly cheap junk like instant noodles and veg crackers (I can't remember how many packets I munched through while watching a marathon of a drama series, Jewel in the Palace).

And to emphasise my apathy, my colleague likes to narrate the tale of the day when we escaped from the office and holed ourselves up at a hotel in Orchard Road for a sumptious high tea buffet that was supposed to last a few hours and test our gastronomical stamina, but I quitted after a tuna sandwich and a piece of fruit jelly. All that for 30 bucks. That was an exaggeration on her part for dramatic effect I guess, because I did recall dutifully cramming in some finger food before whinning while they soldiered on with sashimi and cakes and dim sum.

So if I say that a meal I partook irks me, you can be sure it was really irksome. I had a dory fish dish with some pretentious name at a coffee club outlet. Another friend also had dory, with red chicory(?) and anchovies. We were complaining aloud about how dry and hard the fish was. Below are the pictorial evidence of those nasty dishes with names to trip up customers' tongues.

Looks a mess, no? Pieces of dry, cardboard-hard fish with red, unidentifiable crap heaped upon them.

A sorry excuse for the use of dory fish, if you ask me. An indistinguishable mishmash of fish, potatoes, and crumbs with the gritty texture of sand. M asked me how it was and I spat kindly: "Indifferent."

H's beef whatever was no better. Pieces of suspicious-looking meat and mashed potatoes drowned in a grey-brown sauce, creating a gruesome mess. M's "excellent food award"-winning garlic prawn pasta fared somewhat better, though she blurted out that the spices were "weird".

We each had to fork out about 24 bucks for the meal, including drinks and the passable calamari. I guess what irks me so much was that our country is known for an abundance of good, local, cheap food and yet we had to pay to endure such indifferent food with phony names. Give me the food court next time.