Rockin’ Around The Supermarket

For the Nanz Inc team, Christmas is a big deal. We love to cook up a storm and have a great celebration with our nearest and dearest. And every great Christmas feast starts with the shopping, so we head down to FairPrice Finest at Thomson Plaza.

[MEDIA not found]
December is our favourite time of the year. It always feels like the culmination of a year well-spent, a celebration of the triumphs of the past year, a time to dream for the year to come.

This year we plan to get everyone together for a Christmas feast, with the works: turkey, roast, and seafood for those who aren’t big on meat!

What sparked this shopping spree off was someone mentioning she saw Alaskan King Crab legs being sold at Finest. It’s not every day we get to eat Alaskan King Crabs, and Christmas is the best excuse we can think of.

We make a beeline for Finest at Thomson Plaza (#03-07/08). The store is huge, and stocked with just about anything we can think of. Finest is the best of both worlds, in that for regular items (like say, Fishermen’s Friends), we still pay less than at other supermarkets, which is a policy FairPrice has made its name on.

But at the same time, Finest brings in items that are rarely seen elsewhere, gourmet items that previously, we might have had to beg friends living in temperate countries to ship to us. Like Alaskan King Crab legs.

We find our treasure in the seafood section — $62 per kg. Each pack (about 800-900g in weight) contains about three nice-sized legs, pre-thawed and ready to cook. While we’re there we discover the fresh airflown New Zealand oysters. They are huge and definitely a temptation at $1.95 each.

The frozen section has some nice offerings too that you don’t find everyday: lobster tails, hotate (Japanese scallops) and big fat boiled tako (octopus) segments that would be perfect baked in a béarnaise sauce, topped with mozzarella…

Now meats. Finest sells Culina’s cuts at its deli — we pick a nice-looking ready-to-roast wagyu tenderloin. Next, we need a turkey — Butterball, of course, ($8.60 per kg, that’s a 6kg one for all of us plus families), and we grab some stuffing to go along. We discover Finest now carries some herbs and spices that are so very hard to find in Singapore — Whittingtons from Australia, with more flavours of mustard than we’d ever seen. And for our fries, a nice tub of Tetsuya truffle salt would give our potatoes a classy dressup. Mm. Hungry.

Dessert was a tossup — half the team love fruit cakes and log cakes, and the other half think we’re all going to be too stuffed to eat cake. So some fruit might be nice. So we check out the huge display that says “Fruits from Japan”. Rows upon rows of perfect apples, persimmons, pears, plums in lovely packaging with Japanese print at the top. The Japanese fruit section is the largest we’ve ever seen, and according to the store manager Donavan Er, very popular. Looks like the staff have fun with the Japanese fruit — Er shares that they would procure unusual “display fruit” for the counter, such as a pyramid watermelon which they recently had, which cost $300!

Next to this display is a charming fruit promoter who eggs us into trying her Japanese mikan (mandarins, $5.80 per bag), which are truly sweeter and less fibrous than your average mandarin. We put a bag in our trolley.

Finally, we decide we must toast to 2009 — the year Nanz Inc was born! We push our trolley (now squeaking under the weight) to the cellar. This is a gem: a cold room for bubbly and other top-range wines. We pick up a bottle of Veuve, and a nice French red, with some ice wine to end dinner off with. It’s a nice selection, all ready to drink.

Finally, after an hour, we’re all set for our party — but starving from all that rigorous shopping. With no time left to eat, we each grab a Lazy Gourmet pack of food ($4.95-$14.95). We just drop the packs into hot water for a few minutes, cut, pour out into bowls and we’re having a Les Amis gourmet lunch right there in our office.

Now that is the way to do your Christmas grocery shopping!

The Nanz Inc Team

BROUGHT TO YOU BY FAIRPRICE

Related Posts:

• One Stop Shop for Christmas Treats
• Obama For Yo Mama?
• Why I Love My VAIO
• Are You Beautiful… And Broke?
• Learn To Ask For Help

blog comments powered by Disqus

Posted in BLOG