Sue Veade and the Smoked Paprikas
February 17, 2011
I was going to tell you about my search around Denpasar for a certain Indonesian sweet that seems to have been supplanted by mediocre croissants and donuts, and then I was going to give you the recipe so you could just make it yourselves. But instead I got overwhelmed by helping plan and sell tickets to this progressive-dinner school fundraiser we hold in Ubud every few years, and before I knew it it was Tuesday and it was looking like all one hundred and sixty tickets would sell out and that’s when I had my holy shit moment and remembered I had signed on to feed these one hundred and sixty people their main, and hadn’t put a stitch of thought into what I was going to put on their plates.
So thank God for that jar of Spanish smoked paprika I tucked into my suitcase my last trip over from New York. Forgot to pack one? Since you’re online, stop reading now, email the next friend you know arriving to Bali, and tell them you’ve changed your mind, they can’t stay with you, unless of course they agree to hand over a four-ounce jar of this brick-red powder. (You should see the spices and stuff I’ve amassed over the years, by the way, pulling this number on my incoming houseguests.)
Oh, and while they’re at it, ask them to grab you some authentic, double-zipper Ziplocks too, both quart and gallon size, so you can fudge the sous-vide fish dish the way I ended up doing for the benefit dinner by jury rigging some natural suction, a candy thermometer, and a big stainless pot of manually swirled 55-degree (celcius, folks) water. For the price of the real sous-vide equipment, which effortlessly controls the temperature and gently swirls vacuum-packed whatever-it-is-you-are-sous-vide-ing around for even heating, I could have cancelled the fundraiser and just donated the money we hoped to raise for the school. But then I’d be broke, and there’d be no story.
Why should you go to any of this trouble? Because don’t you hate it when you have friends over for dinner and they’re having a fine time away from the heat, getting sauced, while you’re doing your solo act in the kitchen? Sue Veade, as I am coining her, is the patron saint of easy entertaining. She allows you to really gently cook a protein (or veggie) in advance, and then razzle dazzle your guests with flavor and tenderness that mystifyingly requires only a one-minute sear on each side. Been wondering lately why in good restaurants that grilled chicken breast is so flavorsome and succulent? They didn’t invent a new breed of bird. They just called in Sue Veade.
So pucker up your lips for suction and prepare for a very small fuss with a Ziplock. I’ll tell you about the Indonesian sweet green pancakes next time. Deal?
Chai to Warm your Bones
January 29, 2011In response to news from The North and in service to those enduring it–record cold, record snow–I’d like to help you keep warm… the tropical way.
Say what? Keep warm? Aren’t you warm all the time in Bali? Sure you’re warm the day you land. Make that hot, actually, swelteringly so. But that’ll change. Stay long enough at eight degrees south of the equator and the next thing you know you’re layering at night, avoiding fans like they’re the breath of Durga, and ordering lukewarm tea instead of iced to go with the goat satay you’re told will restore your flagging energy.
But I don’t eat goat. You do now. Haven’t you noticed how it restores your blood pressure in this heat, which has plummeted in an effort to acclimate you? And besides, the Kali Mas satay joint is near a cheap lighting store in Denpasar where you’re on your way to pick up a dozen light sockets to install in your closets and cupboards, part of an ongoing campaign to halt a proliferation of mildew on your belts and shoes. The persistent fuzz is so abundant it has inspired you to verse. (Okay, Ode to a Fungus won’t get you short-listed as the poet-laureate, but at least you amused yourself writing it.) And about that mildew on your pots and pans, it’s such a repudiation of everything they taught you about spores that you have elected to leave alone that freaky science experiment conducting itself in your kitchen.
So what about chai? You said you were blogging about chai. I was just getting to that. Nice sandals, by the way. I see you’ve learned what a chill you can get from going barefoot on floor tiles. It goes right to your bones, doesn’t it? Ginger’s a good antidote to that.
And that’s why you want me to make chai? Yes, you’re learning. That’s one reason I want you to make chai.
It also happens to be delicious.
Happiness is Someone to Make a Tart For
January 19, 2011I suck at baking, especially in Bali. You might be too if you lived here. Flour and sugar just don’t behave in the tropics the way cookbooks assume they will. Or maybe it’s me, my aversion to rules, and my tendency to tinker with recipes because I think I’m smarter than the author, who’s clearly competent enough to have gotten published on the subject, but whom I still think I can outdo.
Even so, then there’s baking’s tiny margin for error, regardless of where you are. Once whatever-it-is is in the oven, forget it. It’s too late to renege on a bad decision to reduce the sugar, or to fold in the melted butter you just noticed you left on the counter, the way I recently did when making one of Julia Child’s Cinq Gateaux. The cake was light, but boy was is dry.
There’s one pastry that hasn’t gotten the best of me, however: galettes. These are free-form tarts with a flaky, buttery crust snuggling a mound of fruit so generous it justifies eating them for breakfast. And wait there’s more. Their beauty lies in their imperfect surface and rustic edges so having clumsy hands like mine is almost an asset.
I happen to have a long history with pate brisée, the dough for these tarts. When I was an eleven-year-old with a weird home life, we rented a weekend house in Pine Plains, New York with a tangled apple tree that canopied the kitchen. I never bothered to find out what variety it was, but the fruits were the size of softballs and too tart to munch on, so one autumn afternoon, with time alone and my mother’s dog-eared copy of the James Beard Cookbook at my disposal, I made an apple pie. I was virtuous in following the maestro’s directions for the pastry, and took the time to peel, core, and neatly layer slices of the fourteen apples (hey, he didn’t make it clear to use fewer if they were huge) with cinnamon, nutmeg, brown and white sugar, and butter.
My first pie emerged from the oven—well—flawless, the flaky pastry ascending four inches above the rim of the pie plate, yet still clinging to the stack of apples underneath that, thanks to my compulsive layering, had barely shrunk down. It was devilishly delicious too, redolent of butter, spice, and a sparkling zest you only get from apples that just came off a tree.
The cast of characters that came and went through that farmhouse—“freaks” they called themselves, with counter-culture values and permanent cases of the munchies—goaded me on to cook more and I obliged them, baking more pies, then cookies, then savory pies and Seventies-style casseroles. I cooked so much that year I handwrote and illustrated a cook book, a body of work I recently dug up at my mother’s apartment that, despite an over-reliance on Ragu Brown Sauce, isn’t half bad considering a pre-pubescent authored it.
So by twelve I was honing a skill my mother had seeded in me since I could hold a measuring cup, but here’s what I think I really got a taste of: approval. Maybe that’s why I cook. Maybe that’s why a lot of people cook.
Ubud Wedding
December 9, 2010Here’s a tale of nice things happening to nice people. If you had been betting the odds, you would have wagered that Nick and Venessa’s Galungan-day, rainy-season wedding in Ubud yesterday would be a fiasco. Bad hair thanks to the humidity, soaked shoes and sandals trudging through the waters running down Suweta Street, and thunder so loud you couldn’t hear their vows.
Those were my first thoughts when they emailed from Beijing last August and asked us to host their December wedding banquet at Terazo, which would follow a small ceremony in my friend Lloyd’s guesthouse just up the street. That the affair was scheduled on a major Balinese holiday, mid-week (a Wednesday), a few weeks before Christmas—a tricky time for invited guests to get time off and jet to Bali for a wedding—didn’t brighten their prospects for wedding bliss.
But the Galungan gods didn’t see it that way. I did not mention in my post yesterday that Galungan is not just a day of the ancestors, it’s a day that reveres the triumph of good over evil, and in the afterglow of the last night’s love fest, I’m seriously wondering this morning if those gods didn’t glimpse into the souls of this couple and see a reason to manifest, well, some goodness. A reward for being nice. Like Santa.
This celestial plan required a little manipulation, however, because we’re deep in the wet season now, and Ubud sits about halfway between ancient volcanoes to the north and the beaches to the south, a hilly bump on a massive sloping plain that’s striped with river gullies and verdant gorges. When the rains come down, they can’t be diverted around Ubud just because it’s paved. The north-south streets perpendicular to the town’s main drag behave exactly the way their underlying nature intended: they’re rivers.
So the gods sent the rains the day before the nuptials instead, wringing so much water from the clouds that Suweta Street, down which Venessa and Nick’s processional was planned, was gushing six inches deep. And not just for an hour or two. The torrent went on all night. These gods weren’t just after Galungan sunshine. They were cooking up a gentle breeze, and low humidity, and good hair.
And that’s exactly what Nick and Venessa got for their wedding day, and more. It was serendipity that Suweta Street’s famous penjor poles (they draw photographers to our street every Galungan) festooned the approach to Lloyd’s house, forming a resplendent canopy for the entourage. After the exchange of vows, Lloyd and I watched the amber afternoon light dapple his garden like fairy dust while the guests embraced, and celebrated, and nibbled on canapés. Befitting a prince and princess, Nick and Vanessa climbed to the second-storey balcony to express thanks to their closest friends and family assembled below, more of whom had turned up in Bali than they could have wished for.
It grew dark quickly, as it does near the equator, and suddenly it was time to conclude the garden party and head for supper. The gods had one more treat in store, however. A troupe of Balinese children that happened to be making their Galungan rounds, bearing gongs and drums and garbed in mythical masks, obliged us by waiting for the merry group to emerge back onto the street, where they would usher Nick and Venessa to the wedding banquet, and to the new life that would follow it.
Disney couldn’t have staged it better.
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Making Lawar
December 8, 2010It’s Galungan today, Bali’s equivalence-in-importance to Christmas in the West, and my husband Gusky’s ancestors are paying a visit to our family temple, the one in the northeast corner of our property, nearest Mount Agung. I like knowing they are going to hang around for a few days, to check up on us, remind us where we came from, and grab some virtual grub while they’re at it. In their honor, we’re loading the temple shrine with offerings of flowers, fruits, fronds, fried chickens with sambal, rice cakes, steamed cupcakes, and salted eggs, and then we’re going to burn some incense and send up sincere thanks for helping us make it through another Balinese year. I say thanks in English because I assume once you become a wise ancestor you can speak any language, even if your earthly tongue was Balinese.
Not being very nimble-fingered when it comes to making delicate Balinese offerings, my way of contributing is to help cook the Galungan holiday meal at my mother-in-law’s compound near Ubud. You always do the cooking the day before, on a day we call Penampahan, because you don’t want to be hot and smelly on the actual holiday, when you get to put on a nice sarong for prayers, and prepare to receive guests.
So, as in every Balinese household, our day started with preparing lawar. It’s a pre-holiday ritual that reminds me of making a big turkey dinner on Christmas Eve, only you eat the meat at nine in the morning. Actually, to be specific, you eat pork lawar in the morning, and then you eat an array of pork—pork stews, pork dumplings, frittered pork rinds—all day and the next. Lawar goes off really quickly, like potato salad at a picnic, so you have to eat it as soon as it’s ready, and that’s usually pretty early.
We actually had to make three lawars, because to be honest, I keep away from most pork. I used to be the lone duck-lawar eater in the family, but my brother-in-law consumed so much spit-roasted pig in the Philippines last month that he returned home with gout and he’s off red meat for a while. And then there’s my mother-in-law, who underwent a mewinten ceremony a few years ago that involved a vow to abstain from all meat. It wouldn’t surprise me if ours was the only household on the island that makes duck and vegetarian versions too.
It happens that my husband and I have to do double duty on Penampahan because it falls on the day the spirit in our guardian shrine (that’s the one in the northwest corner of our garden) has permanently scheduled the honoring of its tireless service to our safety. Like the ancestors that are visiting today, the major domo guardian spirit resides in our cardinal family compound in Denpasar, the island’s capital, so our house is like a branch office. I don’t mind. I like knowing this guard is here too. The shrine is right off our bedroom and it makes me feel safe at night.
There’s another spirit that hangs around in the southwest corner. I can’t see her, but my friend René from Hong Kong did and said she’s very short, old, and kinda spooky. She’s here by independent choice, and has our best interests at heart, but she got cranky a few years ago and scared off our daughter’s male friends who were hanging around in her room until what the ancient one must have considered too late in the evening. She demanded a lot more from the animal kingdom than just fried chicken to quiet down after that, but we obliged her, and she’s been almost silent ever since.
TAGS Balinese food
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