3 December 2006

Two days ago, I cooked dinner for four new friends who I met recently at Asia House in London. Three of them were Indonesians, like myself, and the fourth was an Englishman - they were two married couples, in fact. It was a very enjoyable and very busy evening, and we went on eating and talking until quite late. I took a couple of pictures of the dishes when all the food was laid out on the table, ready for everyone to help themselves. (This is how we always do dinner parties and feasts: there are no courses, the guests just keep coming back for more.)

Now, this is not the best way to do food photography, but I can name the dishes and quickly describe each so you can get an idea of what an Indonesian meal for guests looks like. Starting at the top: the white chunks are lontong, rice which has been boiled for 75 minutes or so in a bag so that the grains are pressed into a solid mass which is left to cool, then cut into cubes. Next, in the square white dish, there are cubes of cooked beancurd or tofu (tahu in Indonesian). Middle row: on the left, tempe goreng - a 'cake' of fermented soy beans, cut up, marinaded in tamarind water with garlic and shallots, and fried. In the large square dish: beef rendang, one of the Indonesian and Malaysian classics. The big round bowl near it contains peanut sauce, which we call sambal kacang or bumbu sate - in this case, intended to go with the slices of stuffed chicken on the large oval platter. On the left of the chicken, a glass dish of bitter melons, cut into thick slices and stuffed. Bitter melons (paria) are expensive in London because they have to be flown from Thailand, but bitter tastes are essential for any Southeast Asian meal, to balance the hot, salty, and sweet tastes of other dishes - I'll say more about this balance of tastes on my Recipe page soon.

Here, you can see the satay sauce on the left. To the right of it,  top, is an oval plate of a cooked salad of bean sprouts, with a few lightly-boiled green beans and julienned carrot to give it some colour. Right of that, a blue bowl with fried krupuk or prawn crackers, which are like the 'shrimp slices' you get in Chinese restaurants, but larger, pinker, and more tasty. Bottom row: another cooked salad of sliced green sweet peppers, more bitter melon, and green beans. Nearest the camera, a big bowl of plain boiled rice (Thai jasmine: this is the nearest I can find in England to the Sumatran and Javanese rices that I was brought up on).

You can see now that it might take six hungry people quite a while to get through that lot, especially as we were all talking the whole time! And what about dessert? you ask. Well, one of my Indonesian guests brought with her a huge dish of tiramisu, and that made us very happy. Tiramisu is popular, I think, all over Asia, and especially in Japan - indeed, some (non-Japanese) people think 'tiramisu' is a Japanese word. In fact, of course, it's Italian - for me, further proof that Italy and Indonesia have much in common, foodwise anyway - and it goes beyond pasta and noodles.

I remind you that you can find the peanut sauce recipe in my Recipes section. I'll be adding recipes for more of these dishes quite soon.