Rice Made Fantastic!

Being Asian in this region, rice is normally our staple food.

Personally the younger and modern Singaporeans are already westernized. Me included to a certain degree.

My family and I are fortunate enough to be born and live in Singapore that is clean and modern, continually progressing, but more importantly, peaceful above everything else!

Getting back to rice, I wrote something in my Sunday post Shop For Sunday that prompted me to actually show what a western food joint had to do, to blend into the Asian psyche.

Comes the Rice-Made-Fantastic! promo of a Beef or Chicken Fantastic Rice Burger from MacDonald's.

I tried it once and it was great with the first few bites, but felt full and had difficulty finishing the whole burger.

It is not my favourite burger, nor my son's, but Wify loves the chicken version of it. Thus the little incident last Sunday. Kudos to MacDonald's for their service standard!

Amid much not-so-good publicity of high-cholesterol food that MacDonald's serves, I do not think anything bad about it. It still comes down to personal choices.

But what I am happy about MacDonald's, is the ever evolving zest to top itself every time.

So much so it has become an unofficial benchmark for the rest of the fast food and even retail at large, for its distinctive restaurant environment which is very clean, always-cheerful and up-to-date deco, and especially its service!

Notwithstanding the constant and consistent ads it has in the mass media, these attributes, if I can call them, in my opinion, seem to push up the ante for Singapore's local fast food restaurants and eating places to go with the program.

That is why even my toddler son then, recognised MacDonald's and insisted to eat there when he was still 3 years of age. He is still a MacDonald's fan. So are his friends. Period!

When I say I am somewhat westernized, my son "manifests" it the most.

Firstly, being a Malay, he has a hard time speaking the his mother-tongue language. We speak English at home with a mix of Malay now and then. He speaks English period!

He has to have tuition class for Malay, it is not spoken at all, so it is tough on him. We are to blame somewhat.

He is not alone though, this is the difficulty the children in Singapore at large are facing nowadays. Whether Malay, Chinese or Indian, chances are these children will have extra classes for their mother-tongue.

He is the opposite of me when I was young. I scored "As" for Malay Language anytime. Wify and I will settle for "Bs" for our son's Malay Language tests and exams.

Coming back to our Asian staple food... we must eat rice at least a meal in a day, but he will never touch it. We longed for rice when we were away in the US and Europe for extended periods.

Our son thrives and lives on burgers and pizza, pan cakes and muffins, with the exception of noodles. Oh, not rice noodles, but made of flour.

No rice, even if it is "made-fantastic" in the form of a burger. As far as my son is concern, even MacDonald's cannot disguise rice in a burger.

What my son and I can agree upon is that, both of us will stick to traditional burgers from MacDonald's and Burger King. Rice burgers just tasted... weird.