New Tastes for a New Year

 

Are you looking to eat healthier for the new year, but you’re not sure where to start? Instead of throwing yourself into eating super clean meals off the bat, it helps to start small and expand your diet and your palate.

What most people tend to overlook when they start a new diet is whether they’ll enjoy the experience. If we jump into a new diet when we’ve never tried out health foods like quinoa or cauliflower rice, we might get turned off dieting entirely if we try to force ourselves to enjoy the experience.

Moreover, when you work on accustoming yourself to different dishes, you can enjoy new culinary delights at every meal. Most of us love sticking to the food that we’re used to because it brings us comfort and we enjoy eating it. However, variety is the spice of life, and constantly eating the same few foods can lead to fatigue and boredom.

With all the new food fads in Singapore nowadays, it’s the best time to try out all the different types of food. You might find your next favourite dish, or it could inspire you to try out new ways of cooking for your family at home. Plus, you get to talk about and share your food experience with your friends and family too. After all, food is a universal language that everyone understands.

And just like learning a foreign language, it’s important to start small and take it one step at a time. It’s not wise to dive headfirst into an entirely exotic culinary experience if you’re not used to it. Because developing a taste for different foods takes time and experience to figure out, you can’t exactly become a food connoisseur overnight by simply patronising fine dining restaurants.

In fact, seeking out a new food experience doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to visit a high-end eatery or force yourself to eat an exotic dish. It can simply mean expanding your tastes to understand what constitutes a great dish. In 2019, out of 58 entries to Michelin’s Bib Gourmet List (which lists affordable dishes below $45), over 33 of them were hawker stalls and 6 of them were street food establishments. With such a large variety of readily available affordable and flavourful food to try, you’ll be literally spoilt for choice in your foodie journey!

Then, once you’ve bought your dish, remove all distractions such as your phone (or TV, if you’re eating at home) and focus on describing your food experience. Here, it helps to either go with a foodie friend who’s more experienced, or you can look into reading food reviews in your spare time. Mostly, you’ll be describing your food as being sweet, salty, savoury, etc. When you’ve built up a long list of food experiences, you can start comparing to the dishes that you’ve eaten before. In Singapore, with at least twenty different stores specialising in one type of food, you can also compare how different dialect groups and cultures cook and prepare their meals. Thus, you can gain cultural knowledge along the way too.

When you feel more confident, you can be more adventurous in moving on to more exotic foods that you don’t often include in your diets, such as kale and zucchini noodles. With how easy it is to search up a 5-minute recipe online, you can save on costs and experiment with flavours at home too.

For an affordable option that allows you to try out many different dishes at home, you can look into tingkat services in Singapore. They deliver homecooked meals to your home during the weekdays for both lunch and dinner, so you can enjoy fuss-free meals for those days when you’re busy. From healthy and affordable Asian delights by Select Catering and Le Xin Catering, to Yassin Kampung’s spicy dishes if you’re looking to increase your chilli tolerance, there’s a wide variety of dishes that you can try. Moreover, there are also options to eat clean with YOLO, or weight loss options by Yeyeah Delights if you’re still looking to eat healthy for the new year!

Each tingkat caterer has their own tingkat menu, and usually serves a different dish for every single meal. There are also Halal tingkat delivery services such as Rasa Rasa Catering and Sofnade too! You can even sign up for tingkat trial at each one to find out what are the dishes that you like and enjoy, and to try out as many different styles of dishes as possible. If you live in a condo, it’s best to check if the caterer you’re planning to order from offers tingkat delivery to condo or to your area.

In short, learning how to expand your palate can help you to enjoy a wider variety of food, and to help you prepare for any dietary changes that you’re looking to make in the new year. When you view dieting as going on another culinary adventure instead of seeing it as a chore, you’ll be able to enjoy the dieting experience as much as possible. By improving your palate in the long term, you get to establish healthy eating habits to help you cultivate a healthy lifestyle for the new year and be the next food connoisseur among your friends!