FOOD ILLUSTRATED FOR THE IGNORANT TRAVELLER

I stumbled upon this over the weekend and thought it is brilliant. I love aerial food shots, so this is really something up my alley. Imagine you are in a foreign land and the food looks dubious. This is an awesome way to spell out what went into the dish.

Fair enough that if you look closely at this image, there is nothing too clever about it. You can pick out what went into the ramen just by looking at the dish itself. I would probably replace some of the ingredients to their original state. The egg could be an egg in its shell, the whole carrot instead of its shredded version, some soy beans next to the miso and tofu...etc.

There is a dish in Singapore called 'Char Kway Teow' which is simply stir fried rice noodles with bean sprouts, egg, cockles, Chinese sausage, and fish cakes. However it looks extremely unappetising for a foreigner as it is fried with dark soy sauce and it looks like a pile of black mess. For those of you who have not tried it, you have to trust me that it is delicious and it is one of the national dishes of Singapore. But how would a foreign traveller try it if they do not know what is in this dish? Or if this dish has not already been popularised in travel guides and blogs.

This is an overview of the ingredients more or less. You do see very clearly that there is nothing menacing about this dish. In fact, the dark soy sauce makes it so morish as the sugar in it caramelises during the frying, coating the ingredients. In this day and age of food transparency, it helps to see what goes into our food, and that there is no canned or unhealthily processed stuff.