Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Our sentiments exactly! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 2015.

I don't know about you, but my brain did not see Brown Snow as anything good. The description below helped somewhat,"Icy snow creamy porridge, serve with sweet red bean in chocolate sauce.".

Since the last post...

Since my last post I've been busy "crafting." For one thing, I've been practicing with my sewing machine.  I created a pattern from a ready-to-wear pajamas and have created new pajamas from the pattern. Of course, I didn't want them exactly as the original. I wanted to add pintucking on the front. The fabric is very light weight cotton and should be perfect for this climate. They hadn't had their final pressing when I took the photo.

I attended a Parade of Homes last week. Holiday decor and food were the focus. There were 4 homes and they were all decorated for the holidays. Because it is difficult to find a lot of Christmas items here, friends donate/loan items from their collections to pump up the holiday decor in these homes. There are always last minute purchases from the new stock shipped in but the variety isn't great. As a result people do a lot of crafting to create their "look."  Paintings on walls are "gift-wrapped."  Things decorated with glitter. One hostess had painted/decorated 18" canvas rounds in a Christmas theme. They took up a large wall space and really added to the seasonal mood. The hostesses said they encourage taking photos so I did just that. Later I realized I could crop and print my photos of her "ornaments" and have 2-D 6" versions to hang on my wall.  She created the striped ball ornament using sparkly duct tape stripes. the snowman ornament was taken from a photo I took from a holiday pillow.  These are a nice addition to the holiday items we'd already collected.

I decided I had to create a pair of snowflake earrings after seeing a pretty pair on someone recently. Tons of Swarovski crystals and other cut crystals later and most of a day's effort and I had these earrings. They are about 1 inch in diameter.  They are really sparkly in the right light. I could not get the flash on the camera to cooperate so this is the best I could do.

Our maid/cook Tin cooked a lot last week and one of the dishes was a traditional Indonesian dish called gado-gado. It's served basically room temperature or chilled. The dish prepared Tin's way includes at least these ingredients: watercress, potato, tempeh, firm tofu, Indonesian long beans, bean sprouts,a very bumpy squash vegetable, krupak udang *, cucumber. All of the produce had to be carefully washed and most of these are individually cooked ahead of time then mixed all together with a peanut and chile paste sauce. It can be spicy or not, depending on how you like it. It leans pretty heavy on the green veggies and less so on the proteins but it's a nice meal. I've had it several times here.The krupak udang are these little round very flat things that are immersed in hot oil and they puff up into these crispy puffed things, rhough still pretty flat. They are made with tapioca, shrimp and spices. Some are very fishy some are not fishy at all. I prefer the not fishy variety. but not too many of them. Just a few on top. The dish is usually served with a side of rice. It was time consuming to prepare but it was very good. I won't ask her to make it often. Lots of work. but yum! (Sorry, I forgot to take the picture before I started eating!)

Recently there have been articles about both coffee and chocolate in the newspaper.  Both articles express concern for the future of these much desired items. I'm not much of a coffee drinker but I was naturally upset when I learned of the problems with cacao agriculture around the world. A nasty fungus has hit cacao crops in South America particularly hard. In this country there are 1 million cacao farmers, mostly small shareholders. An investment group here is hoping to raise money to somehow boost production in this country. They want to nearly double production but are held back some degree by aging cacao plants planted mostly in the 1980s.  More power to them. We recently located a new shop in town that sells chocolate manufactured in Indonesia. The chocolate is very good, though the "darkest" the cocoa solid content is 69%. To my taste buds, this is still on the edge of semi-sweet rather than dark chocolate, but still good. The article did not mention, however, the tiny midge insects responsible for pollinating the cacao trees. Hmmm. Hope they're doing ok. Without them, no chocolate!

We are getting close to the holidays so postings may take a little hiatus. Happy Holidays!

Another sky discussion and Go Bucks!

Yesterday after a brief rain as sunset was approaching we were gazing at the pretty sky and all of the sudden we saw part of a rainbow. We raced out onto the balcony and one of us slipped in water that wasn't visible on the marble flooring (don't worry, the slipping individual caught the railing and did not fall down).

It was not just a rainbow, but a complete rainbow arc. Next was a mad scramble for cameras and a switch of balcony locations to capture the moment as the lighting quickly changed. It was pretty.

About the second topic I need to say again, "Go Bucks!" It was a great game. We were not able to stream video for this game (boo hoo) but we were able to stream live audio from the OSU radio station. Sorry, Wisconsin.  OSU 59: Wisconsin 0

I saw the ocean

Even though it is rainy season, it's not raining every day. Yesterday I noticed I could see further than I usually can. There was less haze on the horizon. I dug out our binoculars and surprise, I could actually see the ocean off in the distance. I managed to capture a couple of decent wide angle shots off the balcony but close up shots to share the ocean were very difficult to get. I even got out B's impressive camera but the largest zoom we brought was a 300. The sky was getting cloudier and cloudier quickly as I tried to get good photos. Here's a wide angle shot. Focus in on the white building with a dark roof off in the distance in about the middle of the photo.

Here's the best of the zoomed in shots of the area around that building.

Now, here's the hard part. You have to look closely but you can see the horizon line is ocean. And in between a couple of the buildings you can see what appears to be an island offshore.

I mentioned it is rainy season, right? This is the view when it's raining really hard. Notice that the photographer is not out on the balcony taking photos but safely behind closed doors shooting through the protective glass doors.  When we have really, really, really heavy rain I wonder, "Will I be able to see anything?"

A miscellaneous comment ( nothing to do with the weather):
We bought an Indonesian-English dictionary. While looking something up I came across the following entry

I don't know about the aloes wood or camphor tree, but the two of us combined being a fried cookie made of wheat flour sounds OK. I am now on the hunt for a package of something with that label.

On Thanksgiving

We've had some questions about what we did for Thanksgiving. We ordered our meal from a catering company run by an American expat. The company caters to expats of all types. I placed the order and was told delivery would be 1 pm on November 27. It arrived promptly at 1:00 ( probably carried in a box on the back of a scooter) still hot. Payment was cash on delivery. When the delivery man arrived, the apartment reception called and announced him. I went downstairs with Tin (our maid) in case it was too much to carry. In fact, it was too much to carry because he didn't have it in a bag. Each item was in it's own white cardboard box with a lid. He opened each box quickly so I could confirm everything was there. I paid him and we carried everything back upstairs and put it in the refrigerator. I snapped a couple of photos as Tin opened all of the boxes and planned the big "reheat."

The gravy and cranberry sauce didn't come in a box. The items didn't come with directions so I Googled a place my mom has used in the past and they had a very nice .pdf file of directions for reheating their Thanksgiving dinners. We used that plan.

All of the aluminum pans were labeled, the rolls, pie, cranberry sauce and gravy were not labeled.

Everything reheated and ready to serve.

We have had several meals from the leftovers so it worked out nicely. Most of it was very well prepared. The exception was the apple pie. The filling was heavily seasoned with too much clove and allspice for my taste and the crust was not flaky and tender at all. Difficult to even cut.

Lengkeng, bangkoang and umbrellas

What are those topics?  Today's main topic is related to food as it often is.I decided to make jicama sticks with a cilantro and sour cream dip for tomorrow's mahjong potluck. At the store, I had been under the impression that jicama is called jicama in Indonesia just like it is in the US. I was wrong. In Indonesia it is called bengkoang (or bangkoang, bangkuang or bengkuang). When we asked for jicama at the store, they didn't know what we were talking about. My phone had no signal at the time so I couldn't put jicama into Google Translate to find out the Indonesian word. Finally I found something labeled bengkoang and it looked just like jicama so we bought 2 and took them home. Once home, research revealed that in fact jicama is bengkoang. I haven't made the sour cream and cilantro dip yet but unless you hate cilantro ( I know a few people who do) it sounds yummy.

Now what about lengkeng bangkok? Lengkeng bangkok is known as longan in English.  It's closely related to a lychee but slightly smaller and has a smooth skin. The taste is also different. I read that the longan has a drier sweetness and that the lychee's taste is slightly sour but juicier. All I know is that they taste good, sort of like a grape but better and much easier to peel-- see below.  They are used fresh, in sweets, desserts and even some sweet and sour type savory dishes. Longans are supposed to be good for skin and hearth health among other things. They contain a variety of trace vitamins and minerals but are a good source of Vitamin C. This member of the soapberry family is the fruit of a tropical evergreen tree from mainland SE Asia. It is grown some in southern Florida. So here is a freshly washed basket of lengkeng.

How does one eat a lengkeng?  You squeeze it a little until it starts to open. You peel off that piece and then squeeze from the side opposite the opening and the fruit pops right out. There is a large pit which gives the fruit it's nickname of " dragon eyes." You do not want to eat the pit. These are yummy especially when cold. Don't seem to have the same flavor when room temperature.

On to the topic of umbrellas. We wanted to buy an umbrella yesterday. Sounds simple enough, right? Went to the Metro store across the street. Asked about the price of some umbrellas near a cashier. We learned that in order to purchase one of the umbrellas, you first have to spend 125,000 IDR on something else in the store, then you are allowed to buy an umbrella for 50,000 IDR. Off we went to look at shirts on sale for B and we found one so we ended up buying the umbrella after all.