This year’s Singapore Food Festival is officially upon us today, again, like it dutifully had been since its inception ten over years ago. Yeah, like we need a flag-off routine each year to begin another day of joyous and mindless feasting. But, I guess, like every year, it’s really about the celebration of mastication. They string together usual suspects and line up of events and activities and lay it out in the open, for all and sun-dry to tear into, participate in and devour. And like any good old spoilt Singaporean foodie, we want more, we want it all and now!! Well, use your stressed and stifled imagination folks.

The opening of Singapore Food Festival at Lau Pa Sat.

If the gluttony fairy had her way, she’ll turn it into a Singapore Food Fantasy. She’ll quietly conduct classes to teach you how to cook this and eat that, and while I wasn’t noticing, project me into huge platter of grilled moist sambal seafood, then make me swim and manoeuvre through a tub of laksa, laden with bloody raw cockles as I cling onto a huge towgay (bean sprout) for life, and in blink, I was forced to jump off a plane and fall onto a giant bed of two storey high soft chempedak muffins and bounce over through a cordon of kaya and durian doughnuts and then finally, she set me upon a pool of frothy teh tarek. Rest a bit for a breather. Next I would be at the mouth of a volcano fire of marinated Brazillian chicken wings only to be saved by a cool, tall, lanky and golden blonde mug of beer. In that excitement and drunken stupor, I fell asleep.

Next thing, I woke up, hot and sweaty, and the vanilla marshmallow sky above was snowing ice kachang on my food forest. Upon it, immediately grew trees of vermilion, green, yellow and blossomed little blue shrubs that bore honeyed red beans, shiny sweet diamond attap chee which you can adorn as fashion accessories, and had luminous green chendol bullets for leaves. You can only water it with milk. Before I could rub my eyes and pinch myself for a reality check, what looked like a dust storm was blowing. I ran for cover but it was really a crushed peanut hurricane speeding towards my ice kachang forest. Oh, nuts! What am I to do. I flew to the nearest well-stocked HDB bomb shelter, stacked high with the now banned cans of China stewed trotters and Maling brand luncheon meat. I was anticipating frying the trotters with beehoon and topping it with crispy shards of luncheon meat as I sat the nutty hurricane out.

Then I heard shouts of joy and delight. At the tenth floor common corridor of block want-to-eat (128), the Teh Tarek Wizard was dousing a fire below. He sprayed a concoction of his multiple tea leaves infused brew with condensed milk through a hose connected to a tea tap beside. As the tea fell ten floors down, it turned into a lake of Teh Tarek, flooding the ginger plantation and created a huge froth and bubbles in its wake. I squinted for a closer look and behold, three bubbles had people dancing and singing inside. It was the Dim Sum Dollies, floating, bobbing about inside and weightless (imagine lah!), cheerfully performing with glowing skin that the anti-oxidants in the tea provided and radiating in a tea bronzed tan that made Mariah Carey cower in defeat. The ginger teh tarek lake grew and grew and finally exploded skywards. 120 of the bubbles shot upwards and turned into hawker centre asteroids. Each carrying a one hundred Street Food Masters all ready to please, then cease and desist (as nobody knew where they came from nor if they had a handover succession plan). It landed back down on tiny Singapore and the folks were ecstatic. They devoured in each hawker centre with relish and swam in the laksa, jumped on durian muffins, crawl through moist sambal sotong and waxed lyrical over Brazillian chicken wings. Then suddenly, the sky turned grey and dark. The sinister Dark Angel of Food preceded over the gloom and noted that too many people were hogging the hawker centre chairs. It was jamming up the smooth flow of digestion. So, with one wag of his powerful magic finger, an ERP gantry was hung on each hawker centre. Because, he reasoned that if you want to Eat and Relish, you must Pay for that privilege. I shot back with a, not pre-calculated, “then I don’t sit and eat lah, I just stand around to eat as if I’m not relishing it and dabao, won’t cause jam one. Can don’t pay ERP or not.”. He glared and slowly lifted that same powerful finger at me…

Next, I woke up again in cold sweat because my companion ribbed me with his finger. I was sleeping at a masterclass on how teh tarek is made. Will someone wake me again?