Hakuna Frittata Means No Worries
January 1, 2012Remember Hakuna Matata, that ridiculous Disney jingle?
Now, remember how long ago it was that you went to a movie theater and saw The Lion King? I was going to stun you with the answer and say it’s been about twelve years, but I just Googled it and now I’m just stunning myself. It’s been seventeen.
Oh, and that millennium change? Now that was twelve years ago (obviously), but in some ways, honestly, doesn’t it feel like yesterday? It does for me. I was with my young family, standing on a bridge on the Yarra River in Melbourne, Australia, gripped in the crush of thousands upon thousands of individuals who had converged there to witness the same momentous milestone.
As the office tower countdown clock ticked backward, every single one of us took our cue and chimed in, marking, with a crescendoing urgency, the final thirty seconds of the twentieth century. When we converged on zero, a lone firework launched like a rocket from the tower’s rooftop and showered us with white light. Then, for the next twenty or thirty minutes, a riot of color exploded across the summer night sky, and all I remember is a feast of color, and pyrotechnic invention, and optimism that brought oohs and aahs to our voices, and tears to my eyes.
Ladies and gentlemen, the preceding corny episode was brought to you by….
So speaking of tears to my eyes, anyone else in Bali find difficulty negotiating a path across their yard amid the firework fog last night? Any suggestions on how to convey the point of fireworks to an island still getting a handle on their charms? It’s to mark midnight on December 31st, not the two weeks leading up to it, people!
There, I said it.
And now that I have, I’m going to make a frittata. Because I always make a frittata when there’s family and leftovers and I want to spend enough time at the stove to share one of my life’s passions with those I love, but not so much that I can’t hang out with them.
So while the little egg concoction takes care of its little old self in the oven… Happy 2012. Means no worries.
Coconut Burns
November 22, 2011You know you’ve arrived in the world of food when you’re getting paid to eat.
The phone call came late on a Monday night. One of the judges for a national cooking contest held in Nusa Dua, Bali had just dropped out, and a sub was needed—in the morning. Who would say no to that? Not me, even if I had just downed a good-sized dinner. I consented, and resolved to get up early, skip breakfast, and go running so I would arrive at the southern tip of the island a few shades shy of ravenous.
My appetite development plan worked. It wouldn’t have mattered what the first people fed me; I was so hungry anything could have garnered high marks. As it happened, Ampian Dadiah, the Sumatran buffalo milk version of burrata that greeted me at the entrance—fermented in the intermode chamber of a fresh bamboo cutting, then draped like a velvet dress over an Indonesian Rice Krispy-ish bowl of sticky rice and drizzled with palm syrup—stood out as one of the most delicious breakfasts I’ve ever eaten. If I hadn’t been contracted to move on, I would have pulled up a chair, downed a few bowls, and called it a day.
Instead, my fellow judges and I—two chefs, a high profile Jakarta restaurateur, and a TV food celeb—roamed the airy makeshift bamboo pavilion for the next two cripplingly hot hours, clipboards in hand, the paparazzi in a swarm. Our instructions were to rank, on a scale of one to ten, at least three savory dishes, one pastry, and one beverage from each of the fourteen competing provinces, so you do the math. The chefs, mostly women ramping up the glamour in polyester versions of their regional dress, jockeyed for favor as we passed through, singing the praises of the flavor of mengkudu leaves and the anti-oxidant properties of heritage shallots.
Sadly, the predictions of one of my co-judges proved true: Heritage cooking is in danger of decline. The further from the capital the province lay, the more the cooks drew sustenance and flavor from their environment and their native plants, and the better they honored their culinary traditions. But by the time we sampled the preparations from West Java, the home of the nation’s capital, we were confronted with banal mayonnaise sauces, garnishes that resembled something off a plate at Denny’s, bottled tomato ketchup, wheat flour, and boxed bread crumbs. It was the reverse of the slow food-locavore movement in the United States, where the urban elite have the means to shop from the greenmarkets, and the overstuffed rural families still live on subsidized, refined, processed foods. In Indonesia’s outer provinces, the country folk prepared sustainable, natural fare. The city folk, in a misguided attempt to add razzle dazzle, sourced off supermarket shelves.
No one garnered lower marks (I’m sorry to say by unanimous opinion) than the team of Bali chefs. How and why they were chosen to represent the Prima Donna of the archipelago I’ll leave up to you to figure out. Whatever the reason, the commercial chicken boiled with spices, the tasteless long beans, and the gratuitous addition of grenadine to a medicinal drink, were an embarrassment.
I could spend the next hour listing alternatives. Bubur Bali—boiled rice porridge with jackfruit stew, vegetables, blackened coconut, fresh lemongrass, hot sambal, and more—would be a good start. Maybe next year.
Foraging Ferns
October 18, 2011I’m told my posts make some readers laugh, but this is not so funny.
My friend, Rio Helmi, a gifted photographer who has documented close to the entire experience of Balinese life, once captured a picture of Balinese schoolboys forming a boisterous procession in Tegallalang, a village to the north of Ubud. It was 1985, my first year on this island, when Rio was my next door neighbor, and his image conveyed the exuberance of Balinese youth, ritual, and community that I was fortunate to witness then.
So you’re probably thinking, this is not funny because the culture has ceded to commercialism and Western values, and the moment frozen in the photo is lost to history.
Not exactly.
Last week, I was quite literally sitting next to a life-size enlargement of the photograph—my friend Ade Wawotuntu found it captivating enough to merit enlarging to life size, and plastering on the wall as backdrop for her restaurant, Cafe Batu Jimbar, in Sanur. While savoring my vegetarian nasi campur there, something new about the old photo struck me: Not one of the boys is overweight. To get a shot like that today, you either call in a casting consultant, or find a village even more remote than Tegallalang.
What happened? I’m no expert, but how about this for a start. . . the twin main intersections of Sanur are now dominated by three American fast-food franchises, and there’s another franchise that peddles pizza right down the road. Don’t like burgers, donuts, or melted mozzarella? Then how about the Singaporean franchise at the mall where you can load up on rich, refined breads and pastries? Or the Indonesian franchise confecting baked facsimiles a few doors down. . . you know, the spot just past the donut house? My very rough estimate of the number of overweight, urbanized Balinese kids, a ratio I can’t help but calculate each time I pass the school near my house, is one in four. Full-blown obesity is not yet prevalent, but it’s definitely on its way.
Except for Ubud, where the perils of prosperity are also worn on the waist, the epidemic recedes as you drive north, and by the time you arrive up in the little mountain town where we run our farm, you’ve time-traveled back to the skinnier days of 1985. But before you brand me a sentimentalist, I’ll admit it. Life is not convenient up here. Just to make a meal, you have to farm, forage, and slaughter, get a wood fire going, and then inhale thick smoke while you cook up your procured bounty. No wonder everyone’s thin. It’s a pain in the ass to eat.
I will tell you this, though. At the end of the day, when we sit with our neighbors and talk about nothing in particular, it seems that everything we need is here. The spirits, the shrines, the company of our community, the animals, the plants, the forest, and the springs, and the stars and heavens that mysteriously envelop and guide it all.
Attention, This is a Special Hurricane Edition
August 28, 2011Where have you been? You’re soaking wet.
I went down to the farmer’s market at Union Square, then City Bakery. Check out this fresh savory, and these buckwheat greens. Oh, and I met Maury Rubin, you know, the chef/owner of City Bakery whose food I’ve been raving about for so many years. The bakery was almost deserted, can you believe it?
And Maury brought my mother and me this Tartine concocotion of caramel on toast with hot pepper, and fresh ricotta, and olive oil. Don’t look at me like that, it was delicious, and so were the weird tofu-bundled-in-wasabi-pea things.
And then, get this, I actually talked a customer in line at the order counter to leave the last whole-wheat croissant for me. Admit it, that is no mean feat in New York City. Why are you looking at me like that?
Are you insane? There’s a hurricane coming.
Relax, everyone’s overreacting. It’s a media circus. All the stores were closed, but I figured that even with the subway shutting down the farmers don’t care, they drive into the city. I asked myself, do I really want to go into this storm without herbs for my aioli, or baby salad greens? Or cantaloupe?
So I bought those few things and I’m making some cauliflower with sardines (seems like a good emergency rations kind of thing to do).
You went all the way downtown in a hurricane for that?
The hurricane’s not hitting until tomorrow, and believe it or not I had a more compelling motive than food. What I really went downtown for was to see New Yorkers in that rare condition that disasters induce, that elusive state of feeling more similar to one another than different.
The mother seeking shelter…
and the rabbi ushering in the faithful…
and the other wet passengers waiting for the bus…
and the bus driver who jammed paper into the pay slot because the MTA decided rides were free…
and the hundreds and thousands and even millions of citizens all drenched in the delightful, giddy, for-better-or-for-worse-we’re-all-in-this-together sense that maybe we DO have the potential to be greater than the sum of our individual parts.
RECIPE Cauliflower with Sardine Crumble and Garlic Herb Aioli
TAGS Vegetable Dishes
COMMENTS 3 comments.
Mother-in-Law Fried Bananas
August 12, 2011
I’ve been trying all week to post the recipe for My Mother-in-Law’s Pisang Goreng (a.k.a Best Fried Bananas Anywhere), and each morning when I’m all gung ho to make them I’ve been stymied…. by the bananas. Rule number one about my Mother-in-Law’s Fried Bananas is the fruit has to be really, really—almost inedibly—ripe.
Which a few mornings ago mine still weren’t, and if I’d listened to my husband, Gusky—as in the son who grew up cooking with the mother-in-law who makes these amazing bananas, and who could tell just in passing they weren’t ripe enough—I wouldn’t have wasted half the bunch on a premature attempt at frying them.
Then again, if he’d listened to me, there wouldn’t be two bananas missing from the center of the otherwise perfect-for-a-blog-photo bunch because he wouldn’t have eaten them.
But speaking of Gusky, now there’s a guy who loves fruit. We met over a glass of pineapple juice, and a few weeks later, when it was eerily clear he was The One, he wooed me with mangosteens outside the royal bathing pool complex in East Bali. I don’t need to add much to the legend of this “queen of fruits” except to say that I was justified in crying when the lady gleefully selling us the mangosteens ran out, and Gusky suggested I follow up with something even better: a durian.
I forgave him, and over the next few weeks, as my adventurous palate became apparent, Gusky decided it was time for late-night motorcycle forays to the food stalls around his neighborhood in Denpasar. We passed on the dog and turtle satay, but the other satays (and noodles, and fried rice, and mixed rice, and and and) put Legian’s and Ubud’s restaurants to shame. If you’re thinking it couldn’t have all been good, you’re right. A certain tin bowl of boiled peanuts floating in a warm ginger-y dessert broth comes to mind… along with a general rule that if you’re slurping something brown and watery under the fluorescent glare of a fetid urban lane, and find yourself having to explain to your girlfriend why it tastes so good… it probably doesn’t.
What did taste really good? Gusky’s mother’s cooking. I know, what a cliché. I’d been both anticipating and dreading our first encounter, as I was warned by literally everyone that her legendary kitchen skills were matched by an equally legendary temper. To Gusky’s and my undying relief, however, she was warm and welcoming, maybe because to her undying relief, I was young, and pretty, and most importantly not the fifty year old statistics professor (fact check: I had been a peer tutor in college) she’d mistakenly conjured up in her mind.
From then on, it was her cooking that put all others to shame. We stopped eating in restaurants, we stopped eating in food stalls. Nobody then and nobody now tops her, from the most complex lawar or smoked duck, to humble rice porridge and even humbler crisp, warm, caramelized fried bananas.