This weekend wasn’t filled with our usual adventuring, because I finally decided that it was time to create a useable kitchen.  This meant two trips:  one to the baking store (for pans and flour and extracts) and another to the Mustafa Center (for spices and a grater and a mortar & pestle and about ten other things).  Here’s my spice haul — should be enough to at least get the cooking started.

The Mustafa Center (that’s the single store cum maze that takes up multiple floors over multiple city blocks) remains a good reminder that it is, in fact, possible to buy a lot of stuff at reasonable prices in Singapore.  You just have to be willing to suffer for your purchases, because going to Mustafa is like venturing into an extremely inefficient, narrowly-spaced, maddeningly unorganized Walmart.  But if you need spices, well, aside from dried ancho and chipotle chiles (those remain on my to-find list, along with kosher salt), Mustafa is the place to go.