Food update

I have discovered a new type of food, and have been eating it whenever I get the opportunity; it’s called Peranakan or Nonya and is a mix of Malay, Chinese and Indonesian cuisines, and it is delicious. My favourite dish is laksa, a noodley soup that can have coconut milk in, can sometimes be very sour, and is filled with things like chicken, prawns, tofu or egg, depending on where you buy it. It’s always tasty, and comes with a big dollop of sambal floating on top to spice it up. Also available in these restaurants is a nice bread called roti chanai, which is the same as the parathas you can buy in the Indian restaurants in the UK. They're cooked to order and can be stuffed with a variety of fillings, I recently one full of sardines which was wonderful. 

A more traditional Indonesian food I have been eating recently is bakso, the meatball soup / noodle dish. Previously I didn’t really enjoy it, finding them a little bland. I have now discovered that if I mix in loads of kecup manis (sweet soy sauce), saus (a red gloopy sauce of some description) and sambal then it becomes very tasty and addictive. If I do this in front of Indonesians they seem a little confused, and shake their heads in amusement; apparently kecup manis does not belong in bakso.

I have recently bought the Jakarta good food guide. It is full of restaurant reviews from all over the city, of many different cuisines, and from 5 star hotels to 50p a meal kaki limas. It’s very inspiring, and I’m looking forward to working my way through it. One of the places I’ve been to is a western/Japanese food place in flashy South Jakarta. I had a wagyu steak burger. I’d not had wagyu steak before, as it’s freakishly expensive, so thought this would be a good way to try it (burgers = cheaper, Jakarta = cheaper, by UK standards anyway). It was really nice, but I was still slightly underwhelmed considering the fuss that is made about it. Also I ordered it medium rare, which is a mistake for a burger as I couldn’t bite through it; I had to take the burger out of the bun and cut it up with a knife, kind of defeating the object of ordering a burger in the first place.

My cooking of Indonesian food in still decidedly average. My pastes are getting better, or smelling better anyway, and they now have a much better, smoother texture because I’ve bought a big flat Indonesian style pestle and mortar. I think the problem is I am using UHT coconut milk. Next time I cook something I will try to make the coconut milk myself, but it does seem like a massive hassle. I don’t really fancy smashing a coconut open and then grating it, there are just too many ways for that to go wrong.