As I think I may have written here before, I didn’t like living in Singapore much. After all, the country that gave us the merlion as a national symbol can’t really have too much going for it, now can it? And boy, is it humid. All the time.

In fact, apart from a few colleagues, the only thing I really miss about Singapore is the food, which was fantastic. Although I worked a long way out of town, I had an unbelievable choice of things to eat for lunch – from popiah rolls to hainanese chicken rice to sushi and Korean barbecue to Burger King and Subway. And for the most part, it was very, very cheap. In fact, in many cases it was cheaper to eat out than eat in, given the high prices at the local Westerner-friendly Cold Storage supermarket.

So the food came as a bit of a shock when we returned to the UK. But one day, we sniffed out a fantastic supermarket in Manchester’s China Town where we found quite a lot of the things we were missing.

But with my parents moving from the North West and mostly seeing Sam’s parents at their house in France, that particular avenue is a lot less open to us than it used to be. Somehow the things you buy at the mainstream supermarkets in the UK and France never quite seem to be up to the mark, and the Tang Frères Chinese supermarket in the 13th is, frankly, poor.

So what to do?

Fortunately, as so often, the Internet came to the rescue. I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me before to look, but after wasting my time with the Wing Yip site (which is very nice but didn’t have precisely what I was looking for, I found the Asian Home Gourmet site. Asian Home Gourmet make the BEST spice pastes for oriental food, and they’re westerner friendly in that they don’t ask for any additional ingredients you wouldn’t be able to fine in your average supermarket. And they’re cheap, too. Even though it costs a whopping US$13 to post to France (but less for the UK, US and a couple of other places), it still works out at about €2 per meal for the 15 packets we ordered.

So right now I’m looking forward to the green curry, hainanese chicken rice, mee goreng, nasi goreng, rogan josh and Thai fragrant stir-fry currently winging its way toward us from Singapore. I shall report on its tastiness later on (although the green curry is one of my favourites and I recommend it without hesitation).

I have a rumbling tummy now…