A job is a job is a job, and the consolation to even the most stressful and depressing job is payday. Anyway, things have been rather depressing at work for recently, with most of the sh*t coming from someone I considered an useless a**hat in my department. The final straw that broke the camel’s back was of course an outburst from someone whom I suspect is either having menopause or suffering from PMS.

That probably is part of the reason why I am getting writer’s block and have no idea what to put on the blog for quite a while. Either way, in between paydays, my other solution is either eating good food, having a good time drinking with my pals, and sleeping.

Several months ago when our office shifted from Raffles Place to Tanjong Pagar, I was even more depressed because I am leaving my usual lunching places behind. Fortunately for me there is some good food at Maxwell Market, which is about 10 mins walk from the office so even I can get some comfort in between work. This is a ‘field report’ *wink* of two of the stalls we used to frequent there:

Stall Name: Traditional Claypot Chicken Rice

I personally hadn’t try their Claypot Chicken Rice because it comes in a big pot which probably requires at least 3 people to finish. But their chicken drumstick noodle (or mee hoon or mee sua) is heavenly. The soup is made from some medical herbs and the drumstick is so well cooked that it usually just falls off the bones with a slight push from the chopsticks. At $3.80 a bowl it is very filling and would usually last me from lunch until knock off time. The tonic in the soup might probably even go into repairing some of the damage done to my body when I blew my top over the idiocy of the usual suspects.

However, my personal advice is not to eat this too often. But if you can’t resist the temptation and would love to eat it everyday, I would personally recommend you take some Chinese herbal tea to ‘cool’ your body. I bear no responsibilities if you get nose bleeds from eating so much herbal tonic.

Stall Name: 75 Peanuts soup

When done with the main dish, my colleague and I would usually queue up to get ourselves some deserts. Diagonally opposite would be a store selling peanut and red bean soup. But what is really nice isn’t the soup, but the sweet dumplings made of glutinous rice flour. For a bowl of $1.30, you will get two where one contains black sesame paste and the other peanut paste – the real heavenly stuff. If you would like more you can just go for the $2 one which will contain four dumplings.

Business for this stall is so good that by 1pm or so they would have run out. Thus they are usually closed after 2pm and you can only try it during lunch hours.

So far, all of the people I told enjoyed the food from these stalls. So, head down to Maxwell Market and try these stalls out if you work nearby in the near future.