Macritchie, LingZhi, and the Ice Cream You Won't Find In Texas

On Saturday, we met up with a friend for a long walk around the Macritchie reservoir in the middle of Singapore. It gave us the opportunity to revisit the tree-top canopy walk that we'd first experienced when Patrick Meeker visited us. This time there were no shortage of monkeys throughout the walk. (note monkey on tree branch).

We finished up around lunchtime and decided to try something different for lunch. We headed up to Novena on the MRT and tried out a combination 'dim sum and mushroom hot pot buffet' at LingZhi Vegetarian restaurant. It was great and the waitstaff was very helpful in navigating the experience and any choices.

Dim sum are steamed dumplings filled with variety of different things. And being a vegetarian restaurant, we could enjoy everything they had to offer. There were also a variety of other appetizers, all great fun to sample. The main course, was hot pot. The waiter puts a pot with two types of boiling broth in the middle. There are five flavors to choose from, some earthy, some herbal, and some spicy. You then pick out the various ingredients you want to cook in the broth. There were 5 types of mushrooms, various green vegetables, some crouton-like things, corn on the cob, lotus root (new to Raye), okra, and many others. It all goes into the soup for about 5-10 minutes and, well, the rest is delicious.

We walked around the mall for a while and then headed over to a place we'd read about and wanted to try. It's called Udders and it's Singapore original ice cream place. It's a fun place with an eclectic feel to it, like it really should be on a college campus somewhere. There's a chalkboard that lists the flavors they have and continuous voting for the next flavor customers want them to introduce. The place makes all their own flavors (and has regular weekend workshops that let people make their own flavors, too - sold out until November!).

The flavors range from typical to tropical. They have mango and two different kinds of durian flavors. That's like having a both 'valencia' and 'navel' types of orange ice cream. (In this case it's Mao Shan Wang and D24.) The completely new one to us was cempedak, another local tropical fruit. The durian flavors were true to the fruit. The cepedak was best described as interesting: not quite as strong as durian, but definitely from the same neighborhood. It would be a good "dare you" flavor.

And while these tropicals are flavors you're not likely to find in Texas, the flavors that you'd be even harder pressed to find are the adult flavors. As in made with liquors and liqueurs. They even have a different number of martini glasses on the flavor label to indicate the 'proof' of the ice cream. We were tempted by the "Tia Miss You", but opted for the bitter belgian chocolate with triple sec and were not disappointed. It was clear why it's one of the best sellers.

And just when we thought there was nothing else to post about ice cream in Singapore...