I have switched to free-range chicks!

On the telly recently, to much controversial discussion, was a free-range bird movement, jointly supported by Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall, Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay. Particularly by the former two, through two broadcast mini-series on the life of a broiler hen, Hugh's Chicken Run and Jamie's Fowl Dinners put a stark contrast to the lives of battery hens and free-range birds.

I met Hugh's Chicken Run with a bit of scepticism, but follow up Chicken Run with Jamie's Fowl Dinners, and it almost became too much. I've switched, to eating only free-range chickens and now, my next step, buying free-range and organic eggs from the Farmer's Market, up from the Tesco's Value Eggs.

And surprisingly, like the song goes, "It's no sacrifice... no sacrifice. It's no sacrifice at all!" Admittedly, free-range costs more than value chicken. But it's not twice the price, it's two quid more for 4 chicken breasts (and they are larger). The main difference would probably be in the eggs, 1.10 for 6 large eggs, compared to 0.79 for 6 unevenly sized ones. Slightly almost twice the price, but my bet in quality is on the free-range, organic variety.

So while the three chefs are trying to change Britain's eating habits from fast to freedom, I thought about how affordable the luxury of eating conscience is here, compared to the organic awareness back in Singapore.

Despite the various food/health awareness campaigns going on, Singapore hasn't quite adopted the free-range, organic movement quite as readily as consumers have in European countries. The sensitivity factor is price. Unlike a small step up in price which still falls within my buying power, organic and free-range costs exhorbitant amounts compared to the usual standard-of-living fare that we're used to, and while the brown-rice stigma is fading, a shadow still lingers over many products.

Can money buy conscience? Can we honestly grow to believe that our dollar can save the world, prevent global warming, help chickens lead a better life and make us lose weight and gain back taste and experience?

Perhaps. But in the meantime, tune in to 3 meals for a chicken recipes proudly sponsored on Hugh's River Cottage site:

3 Meals from one bird

Meal one: Roast chicken
Serve this with nothing more than a green salad to mop up all the herby, buttery juices.
Serves 4–5

1 plump free range chicken, weighing 1.5-2kg
25g soft butter
a couple of generous handfuls of fresh herbs, such as parsley, chives and marjoram, roughly chopped
1 garlic clove, crushed
1/2 glass of white wine
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Preheat the oven to 220C/gas 7. Remove the bird from the fridge at least an hour before cooking it. Take off any trussing from the chicken and remove the giblets if they’re inside (keep them in the fridge and use them for the stock, see below). Put the bird in a roasting tin and spread out its legs from the body. Enlarge the opening of the cavity with your fingers, so hot air can circulate inside the bird.

Put the butter in a bowl, throw in the herbs and the garlic and season well with salt and pepper. Mix together with your fingers, then smear all over the chicken, outside and in. Place in the centre of the hot oven and leave for 25-30 minutes.

Then baste the chicken, turn the oven down to 180°C/gas 4, pour the wine into the tin (not over the bird) and roast the bird for another 40–60 minutes, depending on its size. You can tell when it’s done by poking a knife into the part of the bird where the thigh joins the breast; the juices released should run clear.

Open the oven door, turn the oven off and leave the bird for 15–20 minutes to rest before carving. Carve the bird in the tin, as untidily as you like, letting the slices fall into the buttery juices, then take the whole thing to the table so people can help themselves.

Chicken stock
After eating your roast, let the chicken go cold then slice, pick and tease every last scrap of remaining meat from the bones. Set this aside.

The carcass that’s left can now be used to make a rich, savoury stock – a potential base for any number of soups, stews, risottos or gravies. Makes 1-1.5 litres

1 cooked chicken carcass
the neck and giblets from the chicken, if you have them, but not the liver
1-2 onions, roughly chopped
1-2 large carrots, roughly chopped
2 bay leaves
a few black peppercorns
3-4 celery sticks, roughly chopped
½ a large leek, roughly chopped
a few chunks of peeled celeriac or parsnip (optional)
1 sprig of thyme (optional)
a few parsley stalks (optional)

Tear the carcass into fairly small pieces and cram them, along with any skin, bones, fat, jelly or burnt bits from the roasting tin, into a saucepan that will take them snugly. If you have the fresh giblets, add these too (minus the liver, which can make the stock bitter – save it for sautéing).

Add the vegetables and herbs, packing them in as snugly as you can so that you need no more than 1.5 litres of cold water to just cover everything. Bring the pan to a tremulous simmer and let it cook, uncovered, for at least three hours – up to five. Top up the water once or twice, if necessary. Strain the stock through a fine sieve, leave it to cool, then chill it. A layer of fat will solidify on the top, which you can scrape off – but I don’t usually bother unless it’s excessive.

Meal two: chicken risotto
If you use a good, tasty chicken stock to make a risotto, you need very few other ingredients to make a meal of it.
Serves 6

1.5 litres chicken stock
80g butter
1 small onion, very finely diced
400g risotto rice
1 glass white wine
grated parmesan cheese and a little more butter, to finish
salt and freshly ground pepper

Other ingredients: choose fromabout 200g peas or petits pois (defrosted if frozen)
about 200g sweetcorn kernels
about 300g mushrooms (fresh, dried or a mixture)
100-150g bacon, cut into little scraps
anything else that takes your fancy – including chopped, leftover chicken

Bring the stock to a simmer in a pan, and keep it simmering while you cook the rice. Heat the butter in a large pan and add the onion (if you want to use bacon, add this along with the onion). Cook gently for 10 minutes or so until soft but not coloured.

Add the rice and cook for just a minute, stirring well to coat it in the butter. Add the wine and cook for a few minutes until it has been absorbed by the rice. Now start adding the hot stock, a ladleful at a time, stirring now and then and adding a fresh ladleful of stock once the last has been absorbed.

The rice should be cooked (tender but still just slightly al dente), and the risotto at the right soft, moist consistency after about 18 minutes. If you’re adding peas or sweetcorn, do so after the rice has been cooking for about 10 minutes. If you want to add mushrooms, sauté them in separate pan and add, with any juices, when the rice has almost finished cooking. Leftover chicken can go in just before the end too – just make sure it gets thoroughly reheated.

When the risotto is cooked, turn off the heat, dot a little butter all over the surface, and sprinkle with a little parmesan. Cover and leave for 2-3 minutes, then stir the melted butter and cheese into the rice. Season to taste then serve, in warmed dishes, with more parmesan.

Meal three: the leftovers
Here are just three of the ways you can use up the cold meat cut from the carcass after roasting. And if none of these take your fancy, never forget that a good chicken sandwich – with fresh bread, crisp salad and mayonnaise – is a thing of joy.

The "customary" birthday blog post

Oh, and a poem as a special surprise.

On and around the time of my birthday this year, I took a walk around Chinatown and other places. The theme of this year seemed to be "Reminiscence", and I'd had a nice spa massage (courtesy of Citibank and other faces), had a booking at the Yamaha studio where I'd had an hour of piano playing (or attempts at piano playing) to myself, a fabulous dinner with family and a planned day of times (not dates), wandering, reminiscing, getting back in touch with myself.

This is important. Partly because who you are is defined in parts by who you have been, which defines also who you will become. There is a train of thought that one can never truly know who you are until you look back, revere, and finally accept who you have been, that the mirror only shows you images of the past, light reflected on glass into your eyes split seconds after you have become who you are being.

This is also important because as I move in the semi-nomadic life that I lead, travelling and living from places to places, cities to cities, it is easy to lose track of where I have come from, and lose memories of the place where I was born, and gain new, artificial, reminiscent memories of the place I grew up in. So I treked back memory lane, so to speak.

It was quite an adventure.

I'd discovered a poet, whose father was a great Singaporean photographer, once awarded the Photographer of the Century by the Photographic Society in New York. This is apparently great, a century is a long time, and Andrew Yip now spends his time raising awareness of his father's work - antique photographs of Singapore. One photo in particular struck me, a piece called "Singapore River", which shows the mouth of the Singapore river circa 1900's (I think), still chock a block with bum boats and trading houses. The photograph leads the eye along the line of shophouses at Boat Quay, which still remains today, obviously in a different form. The photo must have been taken from a building whose vantage point is lost today, somewhere near the top of where the Merlion now stands I gauge.

Anyway, I looked at it again today, and a poem came to mind. I suppose it captured what I had noticed of the picture when I saw it, from the time I'd set my eyes on it to the experience of having bought the print. [I shall scan a copy and post it on this post for curiosity.]

On 'Singapore River'

The boats are gone now
Carried away in tides of cliche
Policy sifted the river, its waters swelling now
Not with trade but pride, a tourist lure
In twinkling lights along the quay.

The boat house at the corner stands still
A colonial restaurant today,
A mockery of days
Gone by, almost forgotten, except
For this single, astute eye.

"This one very popular, nearly
All of Australia has a copy somewhere."
In that moment then, you reminded me
Of torrential rain, euphemistic showers
In distant faces at distant hours.

The High Costs of Living

I was chatting in a pub yesterday with a bunch of German colleagues while in Munich, and the topic came up about mortgages. We were gossiping about another colleague of ours who has a large property and expensive living standards (not the vice kind) in Seattle, and it befell one of the guys at the table to remark that they would never love to live as dangerously as that.

That being an interesting comment, I obviously asked what she meant. And she said that in Germany, she could pay off her mortgage without really thinking about it, even if she had lost her job. She felt that it was a dangerous way of living to have a mortgage that was so high to upkeep, that you have to keep on working and be more and more ambitious (ie. aim for compensation increases, promotions etc.) just to support the way you live.

Today again, over lunch, we were chatting about the costs of having a wedding, and I shocked the table with the estimate that it would cost on average around £150-£300 per head, I mean table, [Ed: I think the more discerning readers would have picked this up already] for a wedding dinner in Singapore. And that 120 guests at a wedding was pretty small in Singapore standards, and pretty huge in Europe.

Cultural diversities aside, it did make me think that in comparison to Europe, it is a fallacy in Singapore that prices are low, things are cheap and living is easy. And vice versa in contrast, with the British pound at an approximate 1 to 3 conversion rate, and the Euro at 1 to 2, prices are exhorbitant, costs are prohibitive and you live like plebes in Europe.

I suppose it all boils down to the basket of goods we're talking about here. What do we compare our prices against? A can of Coke? A pint of beer? A glass of wine, or a house, a car, a wedding? It honestly shocked me that one could live, work, and be able to have a mortgage on a place to live that doesn't cost the earth or your whole lifetime to repay.

Let's say the average price of an apartment or HDB flat in Singapore is about $450,000. For a two income household earning averagely $3,000 per month or $36,000 a year, on standard interest rates, it would take about 58 years to repay the mortgage if it is 20% of income, 39 years if it's 30%, 29 at 40% and 23 years if it's 50% of income. No wonder average loan terms are 25 years or so, which implies that most people's housing costs take about half their monthly salaries. And that's not counting the CPF of 20% which goes towards it monthly and contributes to a house.

At those terms that I'm used to, how was it imaginable that one's mortgage could be a mere nothing that one could afford to repay without a thought if one suddenly lost a job? With about half of income paying towards the bricks and windows and roofs over our heads, losing a job is not an option in Singapore.

Sure, the hawker food, clothes, and other superficials are cheaper and more readily available in Singapore. But when it comes down to the basics, the house, the car, the doctor's fees and job security, the costs of living start stacking up higher in Singapore. Perhaps we are surrounded by these things we take for granted each day that they start turning invisible - we assume we'll always have a job (because the government says the unemployment rate is low), we assume we'll always have a place to stay (because HDB flats are subsidized), we take public transport (because tickets are cheaper than in Europe).

But we work 10 hour work days and Saturdays to stay ahead. We stay in, eat out, try to keep healthy. Essentially we try to make up for the basics by filling as much superficials as possible. I guess at the end of the day, the cost of living doesn't depend so much on where you are, but what you value, what your basket of goods are. What you want depend on what you value. Apparently, what you pay for depends on what you value, but I think part of that goes the other way round as well.

I believe we can condition ourselves to think that we must pay high prices for certain things which other cultures have the luxury of taking for granted. We pay high prices to live in that little island we call home - they pay high prices to take holidays to go to that little island we cram high prices on.

Small questions why

Now I have to say that after wondering why plates are round (answers to question welcome in comments), this very idiosyncratically Singaporean, absolutely true, very funny question put a huge smile to my face.

There is something that’s been bothering me all day. Back in April 1963, Television Singapura launched Channel 5, the channel we have all become so familiar with. My question is, why was it Channel 5 and not, say, Channel 1, 2, 3 or 4? Despite the best of my internet search abilities, I cannot fathom an answer. To make things more perplexing, Television Singapura launched Channel 8 in November the same year. Did channel 6 and 7 pop up in this span of time, or did Television Singapura arbitrarily think those other numbers were just not cool enough?

Initially, I was thinking that the reason behind this might have been our merger with Malaysia back in the day - when Singapore became part of Malaysia, Television Singapura was renamed Television Malaysia (Singapura). As we know, Malaysia had RTM 1 and 2. Perhaps this explained us calling our channel number 5. That being said, RTM 1 was launched in December 963, AFTER channel 5. RTM 2 only began in 1969. Why the hell would we thus give two non-existing television stations precendence? Also, this doesn’t explain why we didn’t pick the numbers 3 or 4. Malaysia’s TV3, I believe, was only launched in 1983. What gives?

I suppose this could be some sort of channel naming convention - 5 could be related to some technical detail, like the frequency it was broadcasting at. That being said, I don’t understand why we couldn’t make like our northern neighbours and go for channel 1 and 2 - wouldn’t that have been much easier? Perhaps someone just liked the number 5, and 8, as well. Does anyone care to enlighten me? I have been wondering about this all bloody day.