My First Night in Bali
July 17, 2011If you had told me twenty-six years ago that I’d be in Ubud, today, eating black rice pudding off my own menu…
No. Not a chance.
Yet here I am, slinging the stuff I first heard about in a postcard from Brita, the friend whose innocent invitation to stay with her in Bali while she was a Fulbright scholar led to, well, my life.
If we miss each other at the airport, find your way to Murni’s Warung in Ubud and ask Nyoman where I live. And get the black rice pudding and make sure they put coconut milk “santen” on it, not grated coconut. If you don’t tell them coconut milk they’ll serve it to you with grated coconut and it’s not nearly as good.
I couldn’t picture this black rice pudding, and Brita didn’t mention bananas, so for all I knew I was being exhorted by my semi-vegetarian high school friend to seek out a Balinese blood sausage floating in coconut milk.
As it turned out, I didn’t miss her at the airport. Dimly lit and thick with the smoke of clove cigarettes, the entire arrivals area was no bigger than the Starbucks that dominates the airport today. From there, Brita, who despite being from New Jersey feared we might get mugged on the dark and empty By-Pass road that led to Ubud, wound me and my Kelty pack on the back of an aging motorbike through the sandy backstreets of Legian. Our terminus was a mildewy room she had rented for one night, and honestly the mid-Eighties-homestay grunge kinda grossed me out, but being waylayed by the shore for that one night did turn out to have its perks.
First, at a Padang joint on Legian Road, were the crisp-fried shallots sprinkled atop the steamed rice that anchored the dozen or so plates of Sumatran food laid out before us. The savory dishes, which we ate with our hands and paid for based on what we consumed, were sensational in their own right. But those shallots! My God, they were a revelation.
Next? Nasi Campur (Bali’s main rice meal) for lunch the next day at the still-kicking Warung Teges, which at fifty-five cents was slightly less than the emergency motorbike repair—one of many we would fund over the next few months—that we were killing time over.
And finally that black rice pudding I’d been wondering about since Brita’s postcard had landed in my mailbox. How was I supposed to know it was actually a bowl of sweet pudding made with black rice? It wasn’t like I could Google Image it, or consult someone’s blog. Topped with fruity Balinese milk bananas and thick, fresh coconut milk, the confection was sweet, and smokey, and creamy, and rendered all the more scrumptious by my months of anticipation.
It makes me feel sorry for backpackers and adventurers nowadays. How do you go anywhere without knowing? Knowing what it’s going to look like, knowing who’s going to be there and who’s not, knowing what you’re going to eat, the exchange rate, today’s weather, who’s performing where and what. And rarely wondering what your friends or siblings or parents are up to half way across the globe because they just posted it on Facebook. It’s great to be informed and stay in touch. I guess. But how do you find yourself if you never have a chance to get lost?
RECIPE Black Rice Pudding
TAGS Balinese food, Fruit desserts, Gluten-Free, Sweets, Vegan
COMMENTS 6 comments.
Egg Whites, Sugar, Chard
June 18, 2011I’ve been asked to write more about vegetables, so here’s my recipe for Swiss chard.
No that’s not the wrong photo. Hold your horses, I’m getting there. See.
But first, a word about Parisian macarons, because I took that top photo on our last day in the City of Light on the window sill of our little apartment in the Marais, and the cookies are just too darn pretty not to blog about, even if I can offer neither the recipe nor insights into the method. Listen, mes amis, it’s highly unlikely that—no, it’s simply never going to happen that—me, the baker-of scones-that-thud-like-hockey-pucks, is in this lifetime going to even approximate a macaron as imaginative, delicate, and evocative as those from Pierre Hermé on Rue Bonaparte. But since when would this dampen my enthusiasm?
Gusky, our son, Giri, and I had it confirmed by my most trusted sources that Pierre Hermé was indeed the high altar of macarons, worth abandoning Sacre Coeur before we felt replete with its sacred beauty because the cookie seller closes at seven, worth the crowded rush-hour Metro ride across Paris, worth the further ballooning of my nascent muffin top, worth additional stress on my already beleaguered pancreas, worth ditching my qualms about food coloring, worth the vague humiliation of surrendering my free will to consensus as we formed a line outside the door, and yes, worth the hedonistic sticker shock. And I’m not kidding about sticker shock. It was like, hmmm, should I feed a child in Africa for a few months, or purchase two-dozen macaroons?
Duh. And throw in one of those six-euro mini fraise-de-bois pistachio sponge cakes while you’re at it.
Which brings me to Swiss chard, because eighteen hours later, aboard the confines of our flight from Paris to Bangkok, one forlorn lemon meringue remaining in the box (selected, after considerable debate, as the Final Flavor), my bloodstream was racing like a friggin’ greyhound and all I could think about was where on the big Boeing I could dig up some vegetables and SALT.
The leftover Tomme de Savoie with mâche on baguette that I had thrown together before we left for the airport helped a little, as did the Phat Ki Mao at Big Sister Mole Noodle Shop (read my prior post) during our overnight in Bangkok. But the best comedown from our high on egg whites, sugar, and world travel turned out to be a plate of humble greens: earthen, mineral-y, unprocessed, and redolent of the volcanic land in which they’d grown, and to which, we realized, we weren’t really so bummed after all to have returned.
Perignac
May 24, 2011How’s this for timing? Gusky’s and my flights from opposite ends of the globe arrive in Paris half an hour apart, we catch a train two hours later, we arrive on time in Angouleme, our friends are waiting at the station, they whisk us off in a Mercedes to their quaint stone farmhouse in the hills near Perignac, the sun is shining and the air is warm, birds and crickets chirp felicitously, vast swaths of wheat sway in the breeze.
Sound pretty ideal? It is. And it gets better.
We alight from the car and there’s a cherry tree right outside the house, and the fruit are almost ripe. Our hosts have been telling us the English are fretting about the strawberries in the UK—it’s too hot, too early, and the strawberries are too early too, and tradition may topple, Harold if they can’t serve local strawberries and cream next month at Wimbledon—but all this means to two visiting gluttons here in the southwest of France is that cherries in May are just in time for us. (And besides, if there is anyone fretting in France, it’s about DSK from the IMF arrested on the tarmac at JFK.)
What I plan to fret about is whether these cherries will oblige me and hit their peak before we leave next Wednesday? And what a bummer it will be if we miss them by a day or two.
As for tonight, those duck legs (cheaper than chicken? Huh?), red cabbage, and de Puy lentils our hosts are braising must need cherries à la something, and anyone who invites me to stay with them knows I am forthcoming (overbearing? pushy? obnoxious?) when it comes to lending a hand in the kitchen.
We faced a Cherryless-Duck Emergency, but I persevered, and I came to the rescue. Here’s how.
Brooklyn, Years Later
May 13, 2011
Few things suck less than cooking with my friend Luca, with whom I got up to all sorts of no good when we were twelve, and didn’t need Facebook and its almost disorienting re-ranking of friendships past to keep in touch. Let’s be honest. There’s a reason for the attrition of friendships over a lifetime, and as much as we would all love to explore the ones that Mark Zuckerberg has had a hand in rekindling, who has the time?
So I’m sticking to my (new) old ways: Call (Skype) a school friend you still relate to. Catch up. Make a date when and if you’re in the same city. Hang out.
Which in the case of Luca translates to absurd nicknames, mutual verbal abuse (which, trust me, Luca fully deserves), and endless cutting-each-other-no-slack as we trawl Brooklyn Heights for ingredients—Fish Tales for branzini, squid, and its fresh ink; Damascus Bakery for what may be the best homus and pita bread in North America; Heights Chateau for Prosecco (alright, already, I get the point, Manhattan pales by comparison)—schlep all that upstairs, crack open the first bottle of Prosecco, and start chopping.
Meanwhile I’m trying to write a blog here, and Luca not only doesn’t let me measure (which I happen to agree with if it’s just for me, but how the hell am I supposed to explain to you what to do), he refuses to document with anything other than his “five-megapixel” iPhone, even though he has a camera that costs more than a fur coat and is highly trained to use it. He says my lens is a piece of shit and doesn’t even offer to buy me a new one. What kind of a friend is that?
Then he tells his daughter we’re all family. As if.
And then, get this, he has the nerve to wax poetic on the invisibility of ingredients, and how they build a dish rather than overpower it, as though I’m some novice just because I spilled a little too much tomato sauce into the risotto.
At least he listens to me when I tell him to take a picture of the god-damned branzini he stuffed with garlic and fresh thyme from his rooftop before we lose the light.
But it still got worse. He didn’t hide his opinion of the red wine vinegar I made him buy, and would you believe that when I grabbed one of the Sitram skillets to mellow its acidity he rubbed it in my face that he only paid a hundred dollars at the 26th Street flea market for his ten-piece collection, knowing full well I shelled out more than that just for one Sitram rondeau. I showed him though, reducing the vinegar with Prosecco, freshly squeezed grapefruit, and a sprinkle of raw sugar, and whisking in olive oil for an endive salad that he ended up polishing off, not me.
So how was dinner? Late. These Italians, they eat at like eleven. I mean I don’t know why I even bother with Luca. All we share is a city, and an eighth-grade Social Studies teacher with a funny accent, and hours in the school den listening to Sticky Fingers, and long days at the Central Park Bandshell that stretched to longer nights at Studio 54, and stories of college and time in California, and the birth of our children, and our marriages, and the end of his, and my move to an island really far away. I don’t know how to measure all these ingredients, but they sure add up to something.
Holy Basil Mackerel
April 22, 2011Here’s when I knew I’d crossed the Asian Rubicon.
Faced with the breakfast choice of my mother’s recipe for cinnamon-y French toast or crisp fried mackerel with sweet potato rice, I opted for the oily fish… at eight o’clock in the morning. This was about fourteen years ago, and if you don’t think that spawned an identity crisis, imagine how many other trappings of my former self subsequently fell by the wayside thanks to that fateful meal. I was no longer the enchanted observer of Asia. I was officially subsumed.
I know, I know, subsumed by a mackerel? Of all fish to deliver an epiphany. Why not Arctic char? Or halibut? Why the one that reminds me of Morris the Cat and his tins of Nine Lives?
I imagine some of you think you detest mackerel, and you’re not alone, believe me. No matter how savory I’ve made the description and how delicious the recipe, the very word mackerel on a menu pretty much dooms a dish (although it’s a lot better than this doozie: Unripe Mango with Hot Chilies, Shrimp Paste and Boiled Cow’s Nose, which, honest to God, appears on the translated menu at a local eatery on Jalan Sumatra in Denpasar, as if anyone who needs the English menu would ever order it).
But I digress.
Fried oily fish, I discovered early in my marriage, is irresistible. When Gusky and I first lived in San Francisco, he so longed for his beloved pindang—boiled, salty mackerel—that it didn’t take him long to discover an alternative: canned sardines. At the supermarket, it seemed like a good idea to me since sardines were cheap, and we were broke. But what we saved on our food bill we ended up squandering on frying oil and dish detergent, because once back in our kitchen Gusky would whip out the wok at about eleven in the morning and deep-fry the suckers until they could almost snap, splattering grease all over the stove and the wall behind it. I hated the clean up, I hated how the whole fish routine ate a chunk out of our day, I hated the pungent smell pervading our apartment and having to thrust open the windows to the foggy San Francisco air, but damn if those sardines didn’t make for a good lunch.
And now, back in Bali, fried pindang is more often than I should admit the centerpiece of my breakfast. Me and probably 20 million Indonesians, so if that doesn’t convince you of its merit, how about mackerel as a superfood rich in omega-3, cheap and, as fish in our beleaguered oceans go, pretty plentiful.
RECIPE Salted Mackerel with Tomato and Holy Basil
TAGS Balinese food, Fish and Seafood
COMMENTS 4 comments.