Singapore Noodles Planner 2021
Behind the Scenes!
If you have not heard, Singapore Noodles is releasing a planner for the new year! The main “theme” of the planner is seasons in Singapore - the observances and festivals throughout the year that influence the way that we eat in Singapore. To be honest, deciding to release a planner happened pretty spontaneously.
The idea came from a real frustration of mine. Being abroad, I always struggle with knowing when to make what… it’s only when I start seeing bakzhang or tangyuan on my Instagram feed that I realize that it’s the season of making those things. It frustrated me that there wasn’t a consolidated calendar, unique to Singaporeans, telling me which are the culturally significant days in our year, beyond our extremely short list of public holidays. Neither was there a guide that shares about the specific foods that Singaporeans eat on those days.
I met Qin Yi when I was back for the launch of Wet Market to Table in August 2019 and she was one of the illustrators working at Epigram.
We became friends and one day I saw Qin Yi’s illustrations of a recipe that she posted on Instagram and commented suggesting a possible collaboration in the future and she was like LET’S DO IT NOW. Being an ideas-kind of person, it really helps when those I interact with are like the LET’S DO IT/ “Why not you do it?” kind of people. (That was how my cookbook even came to fruition in the first place - when I was randomly dreaming about how nice it would be to read a cookbook on wet market produce, Wex told me to stop waiting for someone else to write that book for me.)
Close to four months later and the Singapore Noodles 2021 planner is sloooowly but surely shaping up! It’s been such an intense project - Qin Yi told us that usually this kind of project takes an entire team but it’s just us two working on it. Qin Yi does the designs, illustrations, layouts and liaising with the printer guys and I work on the recipes, the copy, research and liaising with the contributors. Once in awhile we check on each other and have long video calls that fry both our brains.
Sometimes it gets really frustrating because there’s a lot of uncertainty that we are grappling with - especially with the whole printing process and me potentially not being able to be in Singapore to help with the mailing and packaging due to COVID-19. Given that it’s a planner, the timeframe is so short and there really isn’t much time for us to take things slow or make mistakes. That’s why it really sucks to have days when recipes flop or the final product doesn’t taste good enough to make it into the planner.
Working on this process so far, though, has been incredibly rewarding. There’s so much that I’m learning. We have a few contributors who are generously sharing their recipes and stories with us. Each time I receive a story in my inbox and read it, I feel like I’ve learnt so much more about that particular culture that I never knew growing up in Singapore most of my life! Azfar wrote a brilliant story on the tradition of slaughtering animals on Hari Raya Haji and how it gave him a perspective of respecting and eating the whole animal. My friend Maxine’s mom wrote about how her Eurasian family starts preparing for the Christmas feast around Easter-time, with drying and preparing achar! I am contributing a story, as well, on durian season and just writing it brought back memories of cracking durians open at my grandmother’s place when I was younger.
Some of you have already started asking me about how to pre-order - we are planning to open pre-orders in September, orders to be fulfilled in October. Only 700-1000 copies will be printed (exact quantity depends on how risk adverse we are feeling haha). I can’t wait to hold the final printed planner in my hands and share it with all of you - it’s going to be really special, I can feel it! 🌸🍃