weekday breakfast

Breadtalk is selling a thick sandwich and a cup of orange juice in the mornings for just S$2. I was pleasantly surprised for about 2 seconds before my kiasu-Singaporean-nurtured suspicion kicked in. We're talking Breadtalk here, not some hole in the wall mamak stall. They've got high rents, lots of salaries to pay, high operating costs, how is it they can price this stuff so low? I checked out the sandwich and juice in a jaundiced light. Possible cost saving would come from using cheaper ingredients in the bread, maybe using a scarier cut of ham. And the juice is very likely sugar water lightly flavoured with orange. No pulp. Possibly no genetic resemblance to a real orange. Another avenue is to use slightly less ingredients, but smoothen and fill out the taste and bite of the sandwich with mystery mayo. Which I see a lot of, smeared onto the plastic wrap.

A bite. A sip. I'm right.

Sigh. And I didn't even step in for the S$2 deal - it just happened to cost S$2. I would've paid S$5 for the real deal.

Sometimes I look at the people who line up for the really cheap buffets (particularly those that dare to include sushi and raw oysters in the half shell) and I wonder if they know they're killing themselves with all this bad second quality food.

The husband complained last evening that I've never taken him to Morten's for their Happy Hour. Which I like to refer to as the Cheap Fucker's Hour. Buy a Martini and eat as many of their steak sandwiches as your stomach will permit. My personal record was five and a half of them steak sammiches. Then my stomach sent up a short note to say that if I sent the second half of the sixth steak sammich down, then it would be sending all six back up. And we would all be sorry.

The problem is, he won't enjoy it if he was there with me. There'll be no conversation beyond "When's that damn plate of sammiches coming back around?" "Do you think they'll let me take 2?" "No we can't order another martini, the whole point is to see how many sammiches we can eat whilst paying for only one."