PNB INDO ADVENTURES: Food and more Food!

There is a Dutch restaurant nearby. It's name says it all- The Dutch. It's sort of a Dutch pubfood type of place so they serve bitterballen. We had bitterballen on our first trip to Amsterdam and really liked it. The snack sized bitterballen are served with mustard for dipping. These are very hard to explain but yummy.

We had homemade sloppy joes! Mom sent a copy of her recipe and we could get the ingredients except for horseradish. I have since learned that we can get fresh horseradish here and grate it up ourselves but Mom's solution was quite a bit easier. Wasabi is everywhere here and it was easy to swap out the prepared horseradish for wasabi. Really yummy! We had not had sloppy joes in years. We purchased some coleslaw to go on top and even found some nice seeded buns.

A while ago the American Women's Association held a cupcake competition of sorts in conjunction with a general membership meeting. They were not getting very many entrants so I decided to bring some cupcakes to add to the mix. There were 6 or 7 different entries including a birthday cake cupcake and a "healthy" muffin. My mango curd filled cupcake with a lemon swiss meringue took the prize. On top was some homemade yellow-colored sugar sprinkles.

I had trouble with the meringue in this heat but finally it came together. This is a really delicious "frosting". My prize was a voucher for about $15 US and a free cooking class at Pantry Magic. Pantry Magic is a kitchen store located not too far from here. They have lots of things to drool over- it's sort of a mini Williams Sonoma store. Much more limited in terms of items they sell, but the quality is top of the line. With my voucher I bought some 100% cotton kitchen dish cloths. Yeah, really exciting. It's a set of 3 but they are nice.

Oh, by the way, why mango curd? I had made another batch of mango curd recently due to the gift we received of 24 mangoes at the start of the big mango season. These were top of the line mangoes. They make a really delicious curd. My sewing friends always get excited when I bring a bag or 2 of mangoes to give away. Ibu Tin and Pak Oky each got some mangoes but I was still left with too many to eat quickly. What to do? Mango curd plus some were cut up and went into the freezer, some were eaten fresh. It really is a lot of mango to deal with at one time.

One of the times I hosted the sewing group I made some peach pie cookies. Very pretty.

Many of you know I do not care for mushrooms. However, there are so many kinds of mushrooms available here I just had to share a photo of the mushroom section at the grocery where I do most of my shopping. So many choices for mushroom lovers.

One day B wasn't feeling well and he really wanted hot and sour soup from our favorite Sunday lunch restaurant so I stopped on my way home to get him some. I walked into the restaurant and ordered some hot and sour soup to go ("takeaway" as it's called here). The very nice hostess had me take a seat at a table and while I waited she brought me some Chinese hot tea. This is a Chinese restaurant, yes, but everyone here loves heat in the food. Notice the size of the hot oil packet in relation to the size of the bowl of soup.

Along with 2 friends, I took an Indonesian cooking class. This class showed us how to make dry and wet traditional Javanese noodles. The wet noodles have a broth and are more like a soup. The dry noodles have little liquid. We also made a sauteed veggie dish and tamarind pan-grilled chicken. The basis of all of these dishes is a paste created using a mortar and pestle. Ingredients include candlenuts, shallots, garlic and a whole lot more. The tamarind chicken is marinated before cooking in a liquid made of tamarind and dates pulverized together with water. The lady teaching the class does not use very much oil at all, in contrast with a lot of traditional cooking here, but she really uses a lot of salt. Way too much as far as I'm concerned. We were given a little bundle of the basic ingredients she used so we could make the recipes at home. I have made the dry noodles at home and greatly reduced the amount of salt. The next question is, can I buy candlenuts in the US? I don't know. The substitute would be pine nuts because you want a nut that has little flavor of its own. After the class we got to eat everything we watched being prepared.