Living and Working in Paradise: cooking

Showing posts with label cooking. Show all posts

Monday, June 22, 2015

The house....now 8 months on

There's a scene in the trailer for the upcoming Marvel superhero movie "Ant-Man" where the camera pans back from a dramatic train wreck, presumably involving our hero, to actually show the crash to be a child's 'Thomas the Tank Engine' set. It's very effective and evidently all a matter of perspective.

I had a similar feeling yesterday when Yohana and I went to check on the progress of the house. As those of you who've read the previous blog entries know, we bought the house from viewing plans and a model and it was interesting to get a better perspective.

When we bought the house we knew there was a small piece of land at the back of the house that we would eventually build on. The plans showed it as garden but it really isn't big enough to be that. The length of the house, hell the overall size isn't exactly what we needed, but the location and size of houses that we did want were outside our current budget so this was the compromise. Anyway, we knew that we'd eventually build onto the back but only really on seeing the show house did we truly realise the limited space we'd have to play with, especially in the kitchen area. So it was that Yohana and I started finding prices for the building of a small kitchen extension before the house itself is even finished.

First stop was the developers who are actually building the house and the rest of the cluster. It made sense as for one, they have architects and for two, they're in the middle of building the house! They were really helpful, especially considering that when we first bought the place they told us that small changes to the original design were impossible. Now they were happy to start knocking down walls and adding doors where previously a door couldn't be found. As it was a hypothetical situation we asked about a two story extension that would utilise the spare land at the back of the house. This would give us the extra space in the kitchen, a third upstairs bedroom, bringing the downstairs bedroom into the living room and adding a "maid room". Many families in Indonesia employ maids and whilst we don't have need for this facility ourselves, it would make the house more attractive if it comes to selling it in the future.

The developer came back within a few days to say that it would cost 30% of the original house purchase price. Considering it was giving nowhere near 30% extra size we thanked them for their offer and went away to rethink some stuff.

The culmination of the last few weeks of negotiation have been Yohana meeting with builders to discuss the work and negotiate the prices. The reason for Yohana doing all of this and not involving me in the meetings is trying to avoid 'Harga Bule' which loosely translated means 'westerner price' which sees everyone; contractors, retailers, street hawkers, inflate their prices when they see they're dealing with a westerner. The situation now is the contractor who is building the row of shops on the front of the cluster, as well as the cluster's communal swimming pool, is also building a one level extension to our kitchen and is working alongside the builders of the original developer from whom we bought the house in the first place. The added benefits are that the house will still meet the original December handover date, we won't have to start extending the kitchen after we've moved in, and the cost of the kitchen extension, including all tiling work, is 3% of the original house purchase price.

Pak Haji showing Yohana the kitchen extension while a guy makes what looks like a spear (seriously, it did)

To put the whole 'Harga Bule' thing into some sort of context, this was the first time I've been on-site in two months and while we were there we were offered many additional extras, some of which already come in the agreement! We did agree to a door which will lead to the space where a future maid room may be but which for now will be a small BBQ area and the upstairs above the kitchen extension will have to wait for a bit.

The difference between a house and a home is all about the people, the atmosphere and the decoration so we're now thinking a lot about that side of things (the decor, not the people) and anyone who follows me on Pinterest (www.pinterest.com) can see some ideas of things we like.

Here are some more photos taken yesterday....

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!