Update: This has closed and is replaced by a Thai food stall.
I was chit-chatting with the yong tau foo stall owner at the wet market near my home couple of days ago who told me the new tenant 2 units away would be selling chilled and frozen vegetarian food products. Yay! I’m already looking forward to it opening. I’m a big fan of vegetarian ham. It was something I ate (in the form of a sandwich) almost every day for recess when I was in secondary school, lol and I never grew tired of it. Besides that, vegetarian fried bee hoon with lots of fried crispy ‘goose’ was probably the only next vegetarian thing I’d eat.
I’m quite surprised with myself these days that I like vegetarian meals so much more than before. Not so much about trying to be healthy because many vegetarian food especially those that are fried are equally greasy and high in calories. But ever since A brought me to Fo You Yuan at Kitchener Road some years back, I was just impressed with the variety of dishes that the chef could conjure up with seemingly ‘unexciting’ fake ingredients. They were so good, I didn’t miss meat at all.
For our Sunday lunch, I told the husband I wanted to eat vegetarian before doing our grocery shopping at Ang Mo Kio. We dropped by S11 and found this stall that served up yong tau foo, tze char and mixed rice. The dishes for mixed rice looked pretty decent and fresh so we decided to go for it.
This was the husband’s order of brown rice with stir fried tau kwa & celery, long beans and black pepper ‘chicken’. While the vegetables were nicely cooked and crisp, it was the savoury black pepper sauce that really gave the kick. Very robust flavour. The mock chicken that was made of soy had a chewy bite which I liked a lot.
As for me, I’d never give brinjal a miss if I see it. Soft, tender, melting-in-the-mouth. The spinach wasn’t greasy and the sweet sour ‘pork’ equally rocked. The same type of mock meat was used and the sauce was a good balance of sweet and sour. Tasted as good as the original version from the usual mixed rice stall.
The only snag to this meal was that the rice was too soft. Other than it, I felt the respective dishes were perfectly executed, not overly greasy, simple yet tasty. The husband still preferred the real deal but I was very contented with this. Will be back to try its tze char one day.
Xing Hua Vegetarian
Blk 711 Ang Mo Kio Ave 8
S11 Food Court