Hellow!
It has been a while since I am back from holidays in Indo, but I ‘m sure it’s not too late to share with you what I ate back at home. I am not a regular food-photo sharer, but when I see an array of mouth-watering dishes on the table, I said to myself, I could not let them disappear without being documented.
I know many people like to document their gastronomical experiences in photographs that adorn the nooks and crannies of the Instagram world, but what you are about to see is a bit different because, firstly, there will be no filter, no special lighting, nor effects done on the photos. Everything is au naturel, true to the time and place at which one particular shot was taken (what a way to justify poor photo-taking skills haha). Secondly, some of the food was home-cooked, so the palate presentation might not be top-notched. The taste, however, was a totally different matter.
So here’s the first one:
Mie Kangkung
Yes, this is supposed to be a noodle with kangkung and some minced meat, sprinkled with fried onion (I just realized there isn’t any of the vegetable seen in the bowl). May be it was hidden below the noodle, I can’t remember. The soup was very tasty and rich with flavor. The white krupuk that absorbed some of the soup and became half soggy was perfect to accompany the main dish (krupuk makes a good accompaniment to almost all food). This was cooked by the chef at home who I call Ma’e. I did not ask for her permission to post her photo here but I’m sure she wouldn’t mind :p By the way the mie kangkung was her first attempt of making that, and the taste surpassed many other mie kangkungs around. Thumbs up!
Ma’e the chef caught in action
Next we have:
Locupan
I am not really sure how to spell the name of this type of rice-flour noodle (as it is a Chinese or a dialect term), but we phonetically call it as ‘locupan’. It is like noodle with a more slimy and chewy texture and is usually cooked the way people do with other types of noodle. So the one I ate was done like mie ayam (chicken noodle). The locupan was topped by tasty minced chicken meat and served with generous boiled cut vegetable. My grandmother made this one. She is a master chef: her culinary skills are honed through years of experience and equipped with acute tasting sense (my words can’t possibly do justice to her cooking expertise).
Next.
1. White rice 2. Soto Betawi 3. Emping with sweet soy sauce 4. Sambal
Soto betawi is a type of gravy with coconut milk and beef. This is a really tasty dish, the one that can add to your cholesterol level but you can’t help but to drink the soup to the last sip. Some lime juice squeezed into the soup makes the soup a bit sour and serves to heighten appetite. Soto is not complete without the presence of emping (a kind of chips made of melinjo nuts). My family has a soft spot for this chip, and we always eat it with sweet soya sauce. And not to forget, the must-have red sambal. The dinner left my tongue dancing in ecstasy. This was cooked by Ma’e too.
Siomay
As you might have known, siomay is usually items made of fish cake, eaten with peanut sauce. This was the siomay that I bought from a regular siomay peddler around my grandma’s house area. The ingredients seen here are: 1. White tofu, 2. Fish cake, I guess, 3. Bittergourd, 4. Pig skin (this item is rather unusual), 5. Potato, 6. The thick, luscious, nutty, peanut sauce combined with (again) sweet soya sauce. Yum.
So this is another set of dishes we ate for lunch. A simple one, but really delicious too. 1. Sayur asem (literally translated to ‘sour vegetable’). Perhaps it is like the Indonesian version of tom yum, except that it can be made not spicy. 2. Tempe goreng (fried tempe). Tempe is fermented soya bean cake and fried tempe goes along well with sayur asem and fried chicken. 3. Stir-fried vegetable. 4. Stir-fried Taiwanese sausage. 5. Omelette. 6. Left-over spaghetti sauce:D
This is a closer look of the sayur asem. The essential ingredients are corn, long beans, ground nuts, jackfruit, squash. Slurpy.
Heart-shaped dong zhi
I also had some cultural exposure with mum by having a session of making these glutinuous rice balls for winter solstice festival that fell on 21 Dec. I tried to be creative by making other shapes:)
Ta-da
Some colourings were added into the dough and the balls were then boiled in sweet broth. Making this turned out to be pretty easy, even for a cooking noob like me.
‘Over Size Chocolate Chip’
I didn’t bake this but I found it in one of the Christmas goodie bags my family received. The cookie was oversized, just as the title, an was the biggest cookie I’d ever laid my hand on. It was bigger than a regular Subway cookie, but it was harder than that. I ate most of it ha ha…
One day, I went with two of my old friends for lunch at a French restaurant called Cacaote that is located in South Jakarta. After having a hard time deciding what to eat (because almost everything looked good – and expensive lol). I ordered lobster risotto and when it came what struck me first was the seemingly small portion of the food (I eat quite a lot). But we concluded that was because the plate was too gigantic because at the end of lunch we were quite full and did not venture for the French desserts that they had there (eclairs, macarons and whatnots).
Cacaote’s Lobster Risotto with passion fruit tea
The risotto was delicious, but some parts of the burnt lobster got stuck to the sticky rice, and it was hard to separate them from the rice. The passion fruit tea was good and refreshing. My friend ordered chicken tequila and ended up drunk (haha jk!). The other had duck confit (I ‘m not sure what is that).
Another lunch. 1. Papaya leaves cooked with anchovies. 2. Cut up potatoes cooked with sweet soya sauce. 3. Fried tofu. 4. Fried dory fish. This time round everything looked rather dry, as the papaya leave did not have any soup in it. But I don’t mind my food being dry.
This photo was taken at Piscator, a restaurant with seafood buffet. I went there with my family for a new year lunch, and there was a wide range of food served there. They had a seafood station where we could pick we would like to eat and gave it to the staff to either grill, stir-fry, or make soup. The photo above is the example of that. There were 1. Beef. 2. Prawns. 3. Oyster satay (?). 4. Fish, I guess. 5. A variety of clams. 6. Yoghurt. At the other end of the restaurant there was a station with an array of sushis, sashimis and already cooked dishes that we could help ourselves to while our orders were being processed. The desserts were nice too as they had waffles and ice cream, and (of course) yoghurt, among many other.
No, I didn’t buy this sugar, but I included it here as it is interesting and got me into thinking, what did the sugar company expect when they put that cartoon icon on its packaging? Are they targeting a new generation of young moms who will buy this brand just because of the character? By the way the price of this is almost the same as the sugar sold in dull, boring packaging. Seriously, Hello Kitty has invaded every aspect of our lives.
So we went to another mall on another day and my mom caught a glimpse of a restaurant called ‘Miitem’ (literally means black noodle) which sells black noodle (duh) which is made of noodle dough mixed with squid ink. According to her, she saw this unusual delicacy reviewed in one of TV programs and from then on was interested to try (it was just she did not know where to find it). So when she saw this restaurant, she became very excited and made a decisive call to eat dinner there. Number 1 is black aglio olio and I ate that, it was quite good. 2. Fried black noodle. 3. Black cwie mie (something like chicken noodle). 4. It was just the chicken soup that came with the cwie mie, served in a cup. 5. Black ifu mie (crispy noodle). Overall it was quite good, though I guess we preferred eating them with the original type of noodles they were supposed to be. So my mum curiosity has been satisfied since then.
Fried Dory Fish with Salted Egg Paste
So my sister has had a new found hobby of cooking, especially after she moved out of the house and had her own kitchen. So one day when she was back at home, she brought ingredients along with her to cook fried dory fish with salted egg paste. The photo above is the result of what she thought as a rather failed experiment. However, we, as the consumers, enjoyed it very well 🙂
A Cute Ladybird Spongecake
I have to admit that I bought this cake on an impulse because of its cute look (They also had polka dot pattern which I firstly took because I thought ladybird was too childish for me. But my mum advised me to take the ladybird one as she knew that I would like that more). But we were shopping at this famous bakery in Bandung when I saw this so I was not so worried about the taste, it had to be good. What’s so good about it? When I opened the packaging as we got hungry on our journey back to Jakarta, the sweet smell of the sponge cake escaped and teases our nose. The texture was soft, and there was something different about this cake from the normal sponge cake: it had a vanilla filling in the centre… I’ve gotta buy some ladybirds again if I go back there.
This is the last photo of food that I have here. 1. Taiwanese sausage. 2. Tofu and potato cooked in I don’t know how to describe. 3. Stir-fried cabbage. 4. Green chili. 5. Siewmay and all that sorts. 6. Salted fish. Again, very appetising and good.
So that’s all for the food for now (I am getting tired and running out of descriptive words to write). And I hope by doing this I could do my part to promote local dishes, and show appreciation for people who have cooked them:) Ciao.
christy kabul 