Living and Working in Paradise: Cooking for Fun

Monday, November 3, 2014

Cooking for Fun

As well as working hard it's obviously important to play equally hard. Plus when you're not starting until later in the morning it's surprisingly easy to let those hours slip away from you. Some people I know are studying for extra qualifications, others have a gymn membership, me? I like cooking.

Actually both Yohana and I like to cook and we devote a certain amount of time each weekend to this mutual hobby. It may be that only one of us is cooking but we'll both get involved in the preparation. This way we get to see each other's technique and learn more about the cultural side of cooking. What eventually arrives from the oven or the pan is often a fusion of Eastern and Western styles and flavours.

I'm very much of the school that you use your experience to build a dish, referring only to recipes if you're trying something new or if the recipe calls for very specific measurements. Yorkshire puddings, or pancake batter for instance I judge ingredients from experience and any sauce is often done from splashes of this, that and the other with a 'finger taste' to check. Yohana is very much the same when cooking Indonesian food. Her experience allows her to casually throw stuff in and of course it comes together perectly.

The difficulty for me living here, and for Yohana to adapt recipes, is that many of the ingredients are subtly different if not completely unavailable whatsoever. So some trial and error is to be expected. For instance, spicing up a Shepherd's Pie with chillies took a bit of balancing as well as for the Indonesian equivalent of Worcester sauce, called saus Inggris or Kecap Inggris, which is a little sweeter than Lea and Perrin's. Also flour where for a long time I was having to add baking powder to regular flour to get self raising flour whereas back home we'd just buy it as is. (Self raising flour is now readily available in most supermarkets in a pink box.)

Ingredients and shopping for stuff is an adventure. Sure you can go to the supermarkets and find most of what you need but scouring the traditional markets for bargains and haggling with the stall holders turns up some interesting discoveries. For instance, you could buy frozen filo pastry to make spring rolls, but the sheets that they sell in our local pasar don't stick, are bigger, are way cheaper and taste better!

As for equipment, well for the first few years here I saw no need to have anything more than a two ring gas burner and a small electric toaster oven and it was surprising what you could actually get from those. But recently we have upgraded to a free-standing, 4 burner hob and oven affair. I'm not convinced the gas marks on it are too precise, but we've done everything from casseroles and roasts to scones, cookies and crumbles, so it can't be that bad. A pestle and mortar is a good investment but again, if you don't want to have the hard work of breaking down all of the ingredients the local market stalls will sell you the sauce ingredients already broken down. We recently invested in an electric hand whisk and at some point a food processor will be useful but we're certainly not restricted by the lack of one.

We've made some damn fine marmalades and jams over the last year as the varieties of fruit available here stretches your imagination away from the regular UK options of strawberry or raspberry jam. So much so in fact that our first attempts were making kiwi and lime marmalade, mangosteen jam and some pretty awesome satsuma marmalade too. I want to experiment a bit with dragon fruit and papayas next.

We're also at home for Christmas this year so I guess we'll have a go at roasting a turkey and if it doesn't work out we'll just make satay for the barbecue!