Cooking up a Singaporean storm

Although I manage a very different side of the business, last night I was invited to join our sales team as they took 25 local agency people out on a bit of a social. Sometimes these events can be a bit tedious, especially if they are heavily work focused, but fortunately last night was not even a little bit about work and was entirely based on having fun, so I was more than happy to join in the action!

            Having left the office early to go and set up the venue, we made our way over to My Private Chef, a private kitchen near the City where we had planned an evening of cocktail making classes and a cook-off competition.

            Once we had covered the place in company branded goodies – cocktail glasses, shakers, chopsticks and placemats, we waited for our clients to arrive whilst munching on some pre-dinner Korean fried chicken that we had picked up from the takeout window next door, and then we were ready to start cooking.

            With a glass of wine in hand (of course) we learnt how to make two of the simplest cocktails there are, the Singapore Sling and a Cosmo, before entering into a competition to make the tastiest and most inventive cocktail. There wasn’t really an excessive amount of ingredients to work with, but regardless, yours truly most definitely won the prize – a fairly random giant branded spatula, of course!

Once we were sufficiently lubricated, we broke into teams of three and competed to create four servings of food. We learnt to make very exciting things like nasi lemak, sambai ikan bailis and kair lime leaf chicken. Despite the fact that some pretty random ingredients went into the mixtures, we ended up with a delicious (if not slightly spicy) plate of food.

Sadly our team didn’t win on taste (way too much chilli pasta was included) but we got a little comment on beautiful presentation, and we got to eat all we wanted once we were finished, so I was more than happy with the one giant spatula to take home.

I’m practically a pro at this Singaporean food now. I wonder what we can have to eat at our next dinner party that might involve either the branded chopsticks or the first prize spatula. If only we had a nice outside space for a BBQ!