Nasi Tumpeng
My first nasi tumpeng: a feast of gratitude, thanksgiving and celebration of success.
Tumpeng is a cone-shaped rice dish like mountain with its side dishes (vegetables and meat). Traditionally featured in the slamatan ceremony, the cone shape of rice is made by using cone-shaped weaved bamboo container. The rice itself could be plain steam rice, uduk rice (cooked with coconut milk), or yellow rice (uduk rice colored with kunyit (turmeric)).
The cone shaped rice erected on tampah (rounded woven bamboo container) covered with banana leaf, and surrounded by assorted of Indonesian dishes.
People in Java, Bali and Madura usually make Tumpeng to celebrate important event. However, all Indonesians are familiar with Tumpeng. The philosophy of Tumpeng is related to the geographical condition of Indonesia, especially Java as fertile island with numerous mountains and volcanos. Tumpeng dated back to ancient Indonesian tradition that revered mountains as the abode of ancestors and gods. The cone-shaped rice meant to mimics the holy mountain. The feast served as somekind of thanks giving for the abundance of harvest or any other blessings.
In gratitude ceremony (syukuran or slametan), after the people pray, the top of tumpeng is cut and delivered to the most important person. He or she may be the group leader, the oldest person, or the beloved one. Then, all people in the ceremony enjoy the tumpeng together. With tumpeng, people express the gratitude to God and appreciate togetherness and harmony (Source: from wikipedia).
Thank you Bandung!
Travelling to Sabah? Try salted fish, bambangan and tuhau.
Special dish (especially when you ran out of LPG and you only have oven and salted fish): Oven baked salted fish with bambangan + tuhau.
Salted fish mixed with a bit of cooking oil or butter, add white chillies, onions, ginger and garlic. Those go into the oven for 30 minutes at 230degC. Add some lemon, bambangan and tuhau — This one really tastes like home. Try it for yourself.
[notes]
tuhau – a type of herbs from the ginger family, commonly found in the rainforest of Borneo
bambangan – fermented flesh of a fruit from the mango family of mangifera pajang.
Hobung do Poring @Tambunan
These are actually fresh bamboo shoots: yes — obtained from bamboo grass – these are young bamboo shoots at about 3 – 4 weeks old. The shoots have tough, layered skins but after peeling them off, you will have tender inner cores shown in the photos. These can then be sliced into smaller strips, boiled in water for about 30 minutes before deep-fried with meat. Super delicious!
Dim Sum breakfast, Puchong
Dim sum!
Well, it’s not really a breakfast but a late breakfast cum lunch at 1pm.
After picking up Sarah’s CRV from Honda Service Station (she finally got the scratched on the fender repainted), we went to Yuen Garden Dim Sum House, at Bandar Puchong Jaya.
Spaghetti Bosou Bolognese
This weekend is my last day in Doha… and this weekend is spent just to have a delicious spaghetti, with bosou. yes!! Bosou in middle east, with spaghetti!
Ingredients
1 packet of spaghetti bolognese (boiled with salt to taste)
500 gm minced meat
1 can mushroom with black pepper
ample fish bosou (fried)
salt to taste
Blended Ingredients
2 pcs red onions
3 small onions
7 pcs of dried chilli
Method (For Sauce)
- Fry the minced meat for 5 minutes until tender, and put aside
- Fry blended ingredients until you can smell the aroma
- Add in the mushrooms
- Finally, add in the minced meat and let is boil for a short while. This can then be poured onto the spaghetti.
- Pour in the fried fish bosou amounts to your liking
- serve while hot
The final result?
ketam village seafood @ikano
flickr photo by zenoed
ketam village seafood | Added 14 Jan ’08, 6.19pm MYT PST | view our flickr gallery
It’s that moment again – we’ve probably caught the steamboat crave on weekends! This time, after a short detour at IKEA for some curtains, we saw this new spacious steamboat place located at the ground floor of ikano powercentre: called The Steamboat – Ketam Village.
One immediate thing we noticed is that everybody gets their own steamboat pot — a neat move especially appreciated by those that do not really want to share other ppl chopsticks (yes, after being constantly licked and dipped in the pot). Initially we only wanted to try the tomyam soup, yet we ended up ordering the clearsoup as well. The menu seems to have a lot of items to pick but nothing much that we see different from other steamboat places that we have been; so we just ordered the prawns & fish + beef slices with those typical greens.
Both of us didnt really like the clearsoup — it is just to sweet for us. The red and green chilli paste are very plain and just okay. The tomyam soup did provide some challenges to the tongue and tastier. Other than that — we think this place is just a normal steamboat place with a predictable taste.
Food: Okay lah, nothing really special.
Soup: Tomyam is better than the clearsoup (it is just too sweet for us).
Price: You could certainly find a better value for money elsewhere
Plus point: Individual steamboat pot!
We found a great write up on the same steamboat restaurant by masak-masak. You can go straight to the article here
ps: Upon reading masak2 article, we found out that there is in fact, a special curry steamboat that the restaurant carrier — we didnt try this so no comment for now. could be the special one.
lok lok STREET steamboat
this is on the first row of shophouses, on the opposite ends of CIMB, Citibank and OCBC lots in bandar puteria. this is our first time here, thus this place got its special place in this mobilephotos (pic below is snapped on n95).
again, like the typical makan (eat) place in malaysia, lok lok is a great example of communal dining – this place has clear chicken soup and tomyam soup; and they offer a wide range of fresh foods such as prawns, meat, cockles, quail eggs and others — skewed and arranged on a large stainless steel plate that resemble the back of a lorry — cool enough, it has a real lorry head on its other end!
if you like masak-masak, then lok lok is a great do-it-yourself makan place.
btw, we noticed there are 3 or 4 more steamboat places close to this one: competitions and everyone — just like us, all cari makan!
Food & price: great — will come back again!
Lok Lok Street Steamboat
No 9 Jalan Puteri 1/4,
Bandar Puteri, 47100 Puchong
Tel: +603-8061 3959
boredworkers.com has done quite a good review of this restaurant — they have more pictures too, including pictures of the lorry head and the plates.
you should go ahead and view them here: http://www.boredworkers.com/2006/06/19/lok-lok-street-steamboat/
Updated Entry: we went back here again yesterday (Oct 6th 2007) — this time we tried the herbal chicken soup and the food was excellent, as expected.
The only drawback (quite a disappointment) was that one of the skewered cockles was not fresh, making us to discard the two sticks we grabbed. The shop was so apologetic and had taken these two sticks out from the bill.
This was a great experience and how honest we felt when the manager came over to apologize — good food, good service, friendly staf … we would definitely come back!
Giant crab for dinner
I was told that this is a Sri Lankan crab (but i think this is a fresh mud crab).
Location: Long Beach, Marina South
Steam Crab with Wine
Ingredients:
1 crab
2 egg whites (egg whites from two eggs0
Seasoning:
1/4 of an egg yolk
1 can of fine stock (chicken stock soup)
1/2 tsp of salt
1/2 tsp of sugar
1/3 cup of Shaoxing/Hua Diao wine (sold in Chinese supermarkets)
Procedure:
- Discard crab guts and organs, rinse well and chop into pieces. Arrange
on plate and steam for 8 minutes. - Whisk egg white. Drain off liquid from steamed crab, mix well with
egg white and seasoning. Pour mixtures over crab and steam for 4 minutes. - Pre-heat the wine, pour over steamed crab and serve.
