Christmas Cooking!!!!

This Christmas I play host to VERY SPECIAL guests: my dear friends Evelyn, Chris, Sophia and Lily. Prior to them visiting me all the way from the eastern part of the US, I asked them if they wanted traditional American-style Christmas dinner with all the trimmings or the Indonesian rice table. They opted for the latter. So here goes.

Figure 1. Clockwise from the top: coconut milk sambal, prawn crackers, soy sauce tofu/tempeh/potatoes, and fried rice noodle sticks surrounding a cup of coconut milk rice

Something different for a change...

Okay... I owe my utmost, deepest apology for not being able to keep up with the blog as much as I wanted to. After all, I was supposed to post a recipe a day. 

Truffles

Happy almost Val's! Val's is all about chocolate, chocolate, and more chocolate. So here's a simple truffle recipe adapted from the book of everything chocolate-ish.

Dimsum day part 1 - easy dimsum

...and there goes my diet. I caved because I'd been working late nights working on the proposal. So today, I treated myself to dimsum. I think I will have to pay dearly for this "excursion". 


But! On to dimsum... It is single-handedly the kind of thing that will make you feel like you've pigged out quite a bit. It's certainly not the kind of thing for single consumption. Plus, because they're all "bite sized", well... if you don't watch it, you may end up overeating...


OK! Now that those dire warnings are out of the way... Below are recipes for simple dimsum, simple meaning all you have to do is to throw everything together in a steamer and call it a day. The dimsum itself isn't a one dish meal. It's actually several dishes. So, you can combine the recipe below with the congee and twice cooked rice recipes and the spring roll recipe (sans chili sauce) for a full dimsum meal.


Alternatively, you can also use this recipe to make some wontons/pot stickers for your noodles, and the pork to accompany your quick stir-fry.


I'll discuss the more "complicated" ones later on (because I'm at a cafe and I don't bring my bible for pao's/steamed buns).

Interruption to your scheduled programming...

I have to say that real life is "calling"... Well, I have things I have to work on since I have due date coming up. Don't worry, I've been compiling recipes and drinking plenty of water and orange juice to keep up with everything life's throwing at me. 


Recipes will come back after I'm finished with my fellowship. It's like the fellowship of the ring except with computer, lots of typing, and words.


Bear with me, y'all...

The ever creative omelets

They are something REALLY simple to make. I love omelets. They're also really versatile in that you can stuff whatever you want in it, vegetables, cheese, smoked meats... They can deliver a ton of flavor too, depending on how you season your omelets. Plus, you can make it as you want it. My mother was the first person who taught me how to make omelets. I got more practice because my cousins like omelets and I was the one in charge of making them.

Below is a recipe for smoked salmon omelets. The idea came from bagel and lox. I'm not sure really what happened when I created this, but I think I wanted to do something with my smoked salmon and I wanted something spicy and sweet and still be something savory at the same time.

Cream of mushroom soup

I created this recipe because I like making things from scratch. One of the things I like is green bean casserole. And I know some of you may think that green bean casserole is something "gross", but it's not so when you make it from scratch. 

So here's my recipe for cream of mushroom soup. I know that it's quite a significant amount of butter, but this recipe will yield about 2.5 quarts of the soup and it's in form of a soup stock (similar to condensed soup), which you can then thin more.

Despite the name, Elsa doesn't eat this. But she's my partner in the kitchen. I work the counter, she works the floor nibbling on carrots, green pepper, and tomatoes...

Crab rangoons

Let's start with a disclaimer: I don't claim to know everything about the Chinese table. Now that we get that out of the way... I've never seen crab rangoon until I arrived in the US. This isn't something we do with our crabs (this sentence doesn't sound right...). Even more surprisingly, I found that the "crab meat" is actually a surimi, a flavored fish meat. It is, however, understandable, considering how cheap this "snack" is. 

Here's my take on crab rangoon. I modified the recipe a little bit because the last time I eat real crab chowder in Indonesia (I will post the recipe later), with real crab meat, corn was added to it. I found that corn somehow highlights the sweetness of crab meat. So that's how I modified this crab rangoon recipe.

Ginger treats for wintry weather

Ginger is great. My mother swears by it. She did this thing once where she took ginger tea for a whole month to cure cold (I was shaking my head for it). She was on a crusade for all natural homeopathic medicine. That was the last time I heard of it though. Nowadays she took medicines like the rest of the world, although she still supplement it with ginger tea. I'm not arguing with her that ginger is great. Just that my life demands quick cure to cold. You can cure cold with ginger, but it'll take twice as long. 


Ginger is quite a versatile ingredient that you can use for both sweet and savory cooking. One of the memories from my childhood involves ginger. Remember how I told you about the highlands? Well, this treat is another ubiquitous treat to be found in the highlands. The street peddlers usually would start around evening time to walk around selling this treat. It's a great one, especially considering that it's cold in the mountains. 


The first treat is what's called "sekoteng" (no English word for this). It's different from the second treat just because it's using a clear ginger stock and milk rather than using brown sugar ginger stock. The second one is originally called "kembang tahu" (literally, "tofu flowers"). Why it's named that way, I never really know. It doesn't have anything to do with flowers. However, the peddlers selling this treat would have a big, chilled drum filled with silken tofu. He'd spoon the tofu using flat metal spatula (similar to scooping ice cream, but he'd take thin slices of the tofu). Then he'd pour the hot ginger soup onto the tofu. My guess is that it's a direct translation of the Chinese name for silken tofu (doufu hua).


Funnily, I used to hate these. But now... What I wouldn't give to sit on that porch again with my family, talking, joking around, while eating this...

Going Dutch!

It's not what you may think. Although, yes, you have to make this yourself, unless you live in my vicinity. Anyways... let's start with a bit of a history lesson... Indonesia was colonized by the Dutch for a good 3.5 centuries. It is this colonization that gave somewhat of a European flair to otherwise "humble" Indonesian cooking. It was the stuff that gave birth to my favorite cookies, "Lidah kucing" (literally, "Cat's tongue") and pineapple pastry and breads and other goodies for the rice table like the rouladen (don't worry, I'll give you my favorite recipe of the rouladen in a bit).

On the flip side, it's also the colonization that made my family shed all its "Chinese" language capability. My grandpa was educated in Dutch school. He spoke better Dutch than he did Chinese. To this day my family is like this: Chinese descendants who couldn't speak Chinese to save their lives, yet live every single day observing a bajillion Chinese traditions and custom and swear by them too. Go figure!

This recipe is suitable for breakfast or brunch. Now I'm not sure what the original Dutch recipe is like, but this recipe is very "famous" in Indonesia. We, of course, eat it with sambal (by now that's a given), but not just sambal, the other kind of sambal, the sauce kind...

A dash of sugar...

The internet in my house is still non-functional since the floor needs to dry. So I'm writing this at a greasy spoon (?) near my place. I haven't been here for too long, but I like this place so far. 

On to the recipe. I need something sweet and I crave for something sweet. This is quite unusual, because I don't really like sweets. There are times, though when I want sweets because I needed it. It's probably my grandmother's thing I'm channeling. 

My grandmother had sweet teeth. She added a dash of sugar here an there. But miraculously, her "dash" of sugar made everything super tasty. Somehow it balanced things out. One of the sweet things I remembered my grandma making was tomato juice. I know it's too simple of a recipe, but hear me out on this. She made the greatest tomato juice ever. Below is her recipe, but I tweaked it to include honey rather than sugar.

Also, when I was in Bandung, West Java, I tried this strawberry milk. No, it's not the chemically flavored one. Turns out that strawberries is better served fresh, with a dash of milk. So my mom made this recipe to approximate what we tasted there (her version is less sweet). 

In Indonesia we also make avocado "milk". Well, there are two versions of it: avocado milk (smoothie consistency) and avocado "ice" (rough consistency, you still have chewable avocado bits). Both are delicious, irrespective of what you may think. So keep a bit of an open mind and try it. I say that because the last time I made this, someone told me, "EW!" just because the only avocado containing dish he knew was... well... guacamole.

Lastly, it's my recipe for orange cream smoothie. I craved it when I was taking my qualifying examination last year. 

... There's no word for today...

The floor at my house is being redone, so Elsa and I evacuated to expedite the process. This way, they can close all the windows, turn up the heat, and Elsa and I won't ever have to inhale that nasty smell.


But, we're not here for my tale of woe (well, Elsa's tale of woe, I usually just run away from it by going to lab). So, let's move along, shall we?


In the next 8 weeks I will have to be mostly on a severe diet. This is to manage my ever-bulging waistline. It really isn't that bad, it just sounds bad (the diet, I mean, not my waistline. My waistline is catastrophic at best). So to commemorate that... let's spice up some lean protein!

Spring rolls in winter?

My mom made the bestest spring roll ever. But it's different. In case you're wondering, spring rolls and egg rolls are two different thing. In Indonesia, I've actually never seen an egg roll. We have mostly spring rolls and there two major types of spring rolls: fresh rolls and fried rolls. One of the cities in Indonesia is pretty famous for spring roll: Semarang, which is in Java. 


Again, as we've discussed, the Javanese style cooking is a bit on the sweeter side which they compensate by serving sambal. Spring roll (called "lumpia" or "lunpia" in Indonesian language) is no different. It can be eaten with sambal or fresh chili pepper (something like bird's eye chili). 


The recipe I have below is for Semarang-style lumpia, however it's been modified in that my mom and I serve it with peanut sambal rather than fresh chili pepper. This is just one of many, of course. When I was little, there were street peddlers selling deep fried snacks (deep fried sweet potatoes, banana, etc.) and one of the snack was lumpia. However, because these were cheap $0.01 snacks (back then, of course, it's probably more expensive now), they put rice noodle as the filling.


Semarang-style lumpia is fancier and bigger than the $0.01 lumpia and it costs about 10 times more too...

Simple stuffs for when I'm lazy

Have you ever been lazy? Like... don't-want-to-do-anything-except-sleep lazy? Ya... I do that. A lot. A gazillion time times a lot. Okay. Fine. All the time. I just want to sleep and I'm too tired to prep anything for food. And I usually get lazy enough to the point where I'd get fast food/restaurant take-outs. Now that I'm struggling with whatever bit of humanity left, before I completely turn into Puffy the Lard Puff, I make simple stir fry that I usually eat with a bowl of rice. But my mom tried these one day and she told me, "I don't think you could ever go on a diet, they all taste good." 

I'm having a hard time to decide whether I should take that as her criticism of me or a compliment of my cooking skill... Oh, bother...!

For those of you who like the idea of 30-minute-meals... Well, here're four less than 15 minutes meals for ya (less than 15 minutes per dish), depending on how good you are with knife skill (if you're really good, you'll be able to make all these in less than 15 minutes). The egg dish was inspired by my dad. He can make fried egg in a microwave within 1 minute (don't ask me how, the last time I put an egg in the microwave it exploded... I prefer frying pan for eggs). So it's not impossible to make these in 15 minutes or less... Have fun trying!

Cluckety, cluckety, cluck, cluck...

I made this for a barbecue last year. It was Elsa's birthday. Although she didn't end up enjoying this, of course, she did have a can of tuna in water courtesy of grandma and grandpa (the human grandparents, of course). 

Let me back track a little. This recipe is something I made up to approximate what I used to have. The real recipe for the spicy version is something called "Bumbu Bali" (literally "Balinese-style seasoning"). For the sweet version, it's my take on "Bumbu Kalasan" (literally, "Kalasan-style seasoning"). 

A little culinary geographical lesson: Balinese cuisine is known for being spicy, whereas Kalasan, which is in Java, is a bit more on the sweeter side but served with spicy sauce. The difference between Balinese style is that the dish is cooked in the sambal, whereas most Javanese style cooking involves cooking the dish in something else then serving it with sambal on the side. They achieve the same spicy end, of course, but that makes for quite distinct flavors in the end. 

"Are all Indonesian food spicy?" Nope. As we go on, you'll see different styles of Indonesian cooking spicy/not spicy. However, I will tell you that I've never had Indonesian food without "sambal" (spicy sauce). 

So, back to the recipes... What's wrong with the real recipe? Nothing, of course, nothing's wrong. These are just my short hand versions of it. I have to warn you though, that these are quite different from the real recipe, so don't expect them to be real Balinese/Kalasan-style chicken.

New Year Post!

HAPPY DRAGON YEAR, everyone! I didn't know it was New Year until I spoke to my parents over GChat (Heaven blesses Google and its techie convenience)... I thought New Year would be in February. I should keep up with traditions more.


When I was little, New Year was always a bustling family powwow. New Year is the equivalent of Christmas here when families and extended families visit each other. For kids, New Year is THE Mecca of sweet indulgence. This is the one time of the year when parents almost always say "Yes" when a kid asks them if it's okay to get another cookie. Not to mention the extra income earned from "hong bao" - red envelopes, containing money, for good luck. When I was little, hong bao was one of the two ways I could earn enough money to support my comic book collection as well as saving for my parents' birthday gifts (the other being my birthday money).


Because people usually expect a number of visitors (especially when you're an elder), there usually about 5-6 different cookies being served in addition to brunch/lunch foods. Depending on how wealthy the families are, there may be even more treats being served. Regardless, it really is a day when diet goes out of the window and kids get their sugar buzz from high calorie itty-bitty bite sized cookies.

Let's talk about rice part 3 - rice as comfort food

Rice can be a comfort food, as everyone knows. I remembered eating the recipes below when I was a bit under the weather. When I was little, it wasn't chicken soup that was our "go-to" sick meal. No, my mother usually prepare porridge and/or twice-cooked steamed rice.


These recipes bring back fond memories of childhood. When I was little, my cousins and I would go on a vacation to the mountains (about 3 hours trip from where I lived) with our parents and grandparents. Around brunch time there were street peddlers walking around the villa peddling porridge. And we'd buy them, and eat them on the porch. Or we'd walk to a playground nearby the villa and buy the porridge there.


Porridge at the time was like chili in the winter.

Baklava: a little history

If I could point to an environmental factor that was responsible for activating my cooking genes, and, thus, making me display my cooking phenotype, it would be a Greek dessert called baklava. Prior to this, I only dabbled in cooking, nothing serious, at least not to the point where I'd compile recipes. 


There was a Middle Eastern restaurant near my undergraduate college that sold these little treats. I still remembered what my first bite was like: crunchy, buttery, milky, sweet... I could eat it forever. However, baklava, at $1.00 per little piece (5 cm long cylindrical piece with the diameter of around 1 cm), was expensive for my student budget. Hence why, I prefer to make it myself.


To this day, I cannot make the same exact baklava that place sells (and they still sell it as I write this). But I'm happy with this version of baklava.

Let's talk about rice part 2 - rice as main dish

Well, this is a post that's originally intended as the third post following up on our first discussion about rice, however there were new things that I cooked in between that I felt was worth posting. Now, on with the long overdue post...

In this post we'll discuss more ways to spice up rice. However, unlike the previous post, these recipes work as a stand alone recipe. Not that I don't recommend eating these rice with other side dishes, it really is a matter of preference. I personally never liked eating fried rice with any other things, I think that a plate of fried rice deserve its own limelight. Mix and match as you will, however, there are times when I ate butter rice with various other things.

Chili for chilly days...

Originally I wanted to post this recipe on Jan 19, while it was still fresh in my mind. However, after "arranging" a surprise party, I ran out of juice. Chili to me is... or, more accurately, something I expected to be spicy. Imagine my disappointment when I dug into my first cup of chili and it was nowhere near Spiciville. But, of course, my first chili was a Wendy's chili, so I shouldn't really complain much.


The next memorable chili I tried was when I traveled to Ohio. It was Skyline chili. I tried only a bit of it, being that I don't eat beef. I loved it and for the first time I wished I could eat beef. It took years until I decided that I would make an exception to my non-beef diet. 


Being me, I couldn't just let it go. If I like something I'd try to recreate it. So this chili recipe is something I created that fits me. It's a little bit on the sweeter side of things, however I find that the combination of sweet and spicy is something more of a marriage made in heaven. The good thing about this recipe is that you can customize it as you like it.

The Black Forest...

...to me is a trip to my childhood. And, yes, sorry for the rain checks. Things are getting hectic since it's nearing my good friend, Cho's birthday. For her birthday this year, she requested a black forest cake. Of course I gladly complied, considering black forest is my family's "tradition" for birthday cakes. Don't get me wrong, we varied our birthday cakes every year, however the black forest always, ALWAYS managed to find a way to sneak back into the line-up. There were times when I hated the black forest out of sheer frequency of seeing the cake on my birthday, and my dad's and my mom's... It's not until I moved to the US did I really appreciate this cake, simply because I've not found the "right" one.

Let's talk about... RICE

Rice is a staple food for Indonesians. I grew up eating rice with various dishes. In fact, some says that eating a meal without rice means you've not eaten at all! Rice to Indonesians is, for the most part, like kimchi to Koreans: it's present at every meal.


Now, my mother taught me a bit differently. She used a variety of starches to complement our meals back then. So, I get used to eating not only rice, but other starches like potatoes. But I digress. 


Back to our discussion: rice. Since rice is a staple, there's of course a hundred dozens recipe developed to "jazz up" old plain boring white rice. Not that there's anything wrong with white rice, of course. Every once in a while, though, it's nice to add a bit of spice to this ubiquitous starch.

First post - no recipe, it's almost 2:00 am in the morning anyways...

The princess is asleep and... uh... snoring, despite being a princess (do princesses normally snore?). Why do I start a new blog? Because I'm supposed to compile all my recipes yet I'm lazy. Well, unmotivated. I do have a cook book in process, yet there's a restriction to characters. So I figure, perhaps if I write one recipe per day, I will be able to compile this in the end? Not sure how this'll work...


No, I'm not going to die soon, however my memory is getting weaker day by day. I need to be able to consult something when I cook. I suppose it's to be expected considering I do grow older unlike Benjamin Button.


Cooking for me is almost sacred. Funnily enough, I wasn't born this way. Or, one would argue I was, just that I've not been displaying the phenotype until later on in life. I disliked cooking at first and argued with my mother teeth and nails about having to be able to cook. I still argue with my mom teeth, nails, and horns (over the years I grow bigger horns), but we rarely argue about cooking anymore. Most of the recipes in this blog will require quite an extensive preparation. I will try to provide some shortcut where it's available. 


As I said before, cooking is almost sacred to me since through cooking I partake in a person's life. A person who provides food holds the key to manipulating a person's life. Through cooking, someone can convey their intentions. Hence why I believe that to cook properly, one must "care" about the person one cooks for. This is simple for me nowadays considering the princess is always with me. I always remember that there's a chance that the princess will eat my cooking. So I have to do my best. 


Every recipe is a recollection of my memories from childhood, adulthood, and many other -hoods (except Robin Hood, I'm not British, you see...). These recipes create a "story". Not that I want people to "understand" me. No, I'm actually free of teen angst, but perhaps... take a journey with me. This is, after all, my life. Laugh with me, reminisce with me, and, maybe, when you have the chance, share a meal with me and pray that we'll remain friends.


Have fun! (There are fishies to play with!)


How to use the recipes:
Just one thing... Please pay attention to the notes. The recipes themselves are simple, and I can guarantee you that there are many, many other similar recipes that you can use. The difference between mine and others is simply because I've cooked it, so I know what can/not be substituted, things that I've tried and not/worked, and things that are crucial to the recipe.