Free Flow of Kani Nabe - S$58 for 90 minutes

After I stopped laughing, I read the description again and it really sounded rather appetising. Kani-nabe is a kind of crab stew that is cooked ingredient by ingredient in a clay hot pot - lightly cooked, split crab-legs, cabbage, cubed tofu and a mess of tiny pale enoki mushrooms in boiling broth - basically shabu shabu without the beef. Too bad the offer expired yesterday. Kaninabe. Would've liked to have tried it, although the time limit would've just wiped me out mentally - imagine trying to cook and eat as much as possible in 90 minutes without giving yourself diarrhoea from undercooking the food to save time.

Do you:

1. tip ALL the ingredients into the hot pot in an almighty effort to cook them in the shortest possible time, then realise your hot pot is now a lukewarm pot; or

2. cook only 5 ingredients at a time, and whilst you're eating, you toss in more ingredients (subject always to a maximum of 5) so that you keep the pot hot, yet you have a constant flow of cooked food and the only lag time is at the beginning of the meal when the first 5 ingredients are cooking; or

3. sort the ingredients by cooking time and fragrance, and toss in the durables first (e.g. crab shells) otherwise the stock will get completely screwed up and the soup will not taste nice!!!!

Looking into my brain would be a lot like looking into a multiplex restaurant. On the 1st floor people are thinking of food, on the 2nd floor people are walking around trying to decide what to eat, on the 3rd floor people are eating, on the 4th floor they are complaining about the bill, on the 5th floor they are hungry again.

Checked out Waraku, the Japanese restaurant at Marina Shopping Centre, close to where Denny's used to be. Amazingly affordable, very satisfactory. Especially liked the soba-in-hot-soup-sashimi-over-shredded-egg-and-rice combo, which is like ordering 2 meals for 1 person. A steaming bowl of soba in soup, with a huge bowl of vinegared rice with sashimi on top, including an ama ebi complete with the head. How good is that?! Yum city. The whole package for S$13.80. Also tried beef tongue in ponzu sauce (chewy, but interesting) and seasoned barbequed cod roe (Lot's wife-salty).

That was just yesterday. Guess where I went for lunch today. Yep. Even had the same waitress.