You're the condensed milk in my coffee

Singapore gave me the best culinary week of my life; fuckin' beautiful memories, and a real motivation to keep my job so I can make more trips there on the company dime, and hopefully eat much, much more. Also would like to reserve the option of moving there for work if the F-word ever dumps me. Australia is good in many ways but if I can't have him I at least want fuckin' unlimited Asian food, and this place, as mentioned, is so. Goddamn. Caker.

(And Australians care about food the way cakers do, which is, they fuckin' don't. Their national dish is fuckin' 'meat' pies whose fillings are guaranteed to be at least 25% flesh, and if there's anything less fucking suitable for this climate than those disgusting little hockey pucks, it's roast lamb - the other national dish. And don't get me started on their fucking desserts; if all you saw of Australia was its dessert tray you'd reckon you were at a fuckin' church social in the Hebrides or one of the poorer parts of Scandinavia after the local Nokia factory packs up and moves to China. Well. Anyways. The Australian cities are apparently way better, with enough Asians and olive-skinned types in them to get to that critical mass where the food is really good, like in Toronto or Vancouver. But being babied and cosseted in Singapore after the annoyances of Brussels, etc., may have ruined me for any other urban conglomeration.)

Anyways again. Now is not the time to speculate on Plan Bs in the event the love of my life breaks my fuckin' heart and consigns me to a cold-hearted but pleasure-saturated life of lascivious gluttony, wherein I jog along the sterilised beach all morning so as to eat all afternoon and get a little work done in the evening in a country where almost everybody loves food as much or more than I do. Now is the time to tell you that one of the more tangible gifts Singapore gave me is putting condensed milk into my coffee - I thing I learned from the Vietnamese restaurant close to my boss's old office, Viet Express, which is one of only two restaurants I made two trips to during the week, it being so fucking good*.

The Spanish do something similar, I know, though I didn't try it when I was there - a cafe bonbon or bombom or however you say 'candy' in Spanish, which is half espresso, half condensed milk. At the Viet Express, they served a sort of strong, espresso-ground drip coffee, with a dose of condensed milk next to it - not quite half/half but almost. As for me, I just add a big oozing tablespoonful of condensed milk to the equivalent of three shots of espresso and that makes my afternoon fucking magnificent. The coffee gets exactly the right sweetness with an added caramel velvetiness. I recommend it strongly if you're a sugar-in-your-coffee sort of person.

*The other was the Thanying Restaurant, a fucking delectable Thai restaurant in Amara hotel which honestly - my family's finer efforts excepted - debatably served me the best food I've ever eaten. Ever. And I have eaten a lot of food. We took a business contact there for lunch and I nearly died of pleasure, so I took the F-word back in the evening. Going there also gave my boss the chance to deliver one of the funniest bits of attempted cultural education I'd heard since 2003: "Thai people are the nicest, warmest, gentlest people in the world, until they start hitting you."