Singapore Food Review: Roast Pork Rice and Peanut Soup

I love the way the Chinese refer to certain food items as ‘delights’. Is that not the best way to talk about food? Delights. I love the way they name their food too – ‘ants climbing a tree’, ‘crossing the bridge noodle’. So poetic sounding. I’m not really digressing, I’m about to get to the point that Chinese roasted meat stalls in Singapore tend to call themselves something along the line of ‘Roast Delights.’ It’s such a good way of naming your food.I can’t get over it.

Anyway, generally in a roasted meat stall, we usually the roast duck, roast pork, char siu pork and sometimes soy sauce roast chicken. I only had the roast pork rice today, so I’ll only be talking about that. Basically, it’s a big piece of pork belly that has been seasoned and roasted in a vertical Chinese oven. I’m not too sure if they deep fried it as well but I don’t think so. What we then have is a really nice piece of pork with crispy crackling (which I love). So the roast pork rice is thus – steamed rice topped with roast pork and some sort of soy sauce based sauce to flavour the rice and some garnish of cucumber. It also comes with a disproportionate bowl of peanut soup i.e. broth with boiled peanuts in it. And of course some description of chilli sauce on the side (which seems to feature rather heavily with all Singaporean food. I have had roast pork rice at the cafeteria at work and I thought that was much nicer because of the sauce that comes with it. But all in all, I find the dish rather uninteresting.

Being on a low-protein diet sucks sometimes.