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Archive for April, 2006

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Bali Spice: A Balinese Dinner

Friday, April 14th, 2006

In Bali it’s common to cook up food early in the day and continue snacking on it throughout—this may contravene any known food hygiene legislation but is a boon for preparing dinner parties in advance 😉

The vegetable dish, Sayur Urab, tastes great luke-warm, but for tonight I will microwave it and hope that the flavours stand up to the heat. The Balinese chicken curry we sampled during the cookery demonstraton at ‘Bumbu Bali’ in Ubud was hot, so I’ll serve this dinner re-heated.

The menu: Sayur Urab (vegetable mix); Opor Ayam (curried chicken, Bali-style); rice and fruit salad
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Babi Kecap

Sunday, April 9th, 2006

I promised some Balinese recipes, but haven’t gotten around to blogging them yet.

Babi kecap is popular and easy to make, once you have ground your pastes! It does, however, use almost ½ bottle of kecap manis (sweet soy sauce) which you’ll have to bring with you from Indonesia. I use less (I don’t like my food too sweet) and made the spice mixture while preparing the basic paste, which made cooking this dish very quick and easy.

Before I go on, if you want to explore Balinese food for yourself, this site has a great collection of recipes, including spice mixtures, dips and sauces.
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Yahoo email hassles

Friday, April 7th, 2006

That’s it. I can’t even send emails from my own account to my personal contacts without having to fill out a character recognition field for every message I compose. In an effort to limit spam, yahoo has decreed me a potential spammer.

Trouble is, not only is this offensive, but I can’t make out the damn characters in the field!

Have the guys ever thought about that?

Time for a new email provider. I’m likely to circulate my new address ASAP.

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Bali Spice: Nose to the Grindstone

Thursday, April 6th, 2006

‘Bumbu’ means spice (or flavour). ‘Bumbu Bali’ is, of course, the name of Heinz von Holzen’s famous restaurant in Tanjung Benoa (Nusa Dua). However, it is also the name of a restaurant in Ubud—and in addition to their name, they both have in common that they serve authentic Bali cuisine and run cookery classes presided over by an enthusiastic chef.

Spices, or rather spice-pastes, are at the heart of Balinese cooking and give the dishes their distinct flavour—more refined than in other parts of Indonesia and many of them remniscent of Thai cuisine with their delicate balance of flavour and fragrance.

Unsurprisingly, the first thing we learned during the class was how to prepare a universal spice paste which can be used for most Balinese dishes: base gede, from ‘base’ (sauce) and ‘gede’ (complete) which has no fewer than 17 ingredients.
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