Complex Numbers

Allez Cuisine

Entry #5 of 8 for "Journalistic Intentions"  [18+]...

Gado Gado  

The weather forecast for tonight predicts incredibly cold temperatures for the first time this fall. Of course, by "incredibly cold," I mean anything less than about 55F; for some reason, some people like those temperatures. See yesterday's entry about being crazy.

I hate fall. There I said it. I hate it for the temperature (yes, I hate winter more), and for the incessant screaming about the impending holiday season, but also because of the goddamned leaves. I swept my new deck today because it had accumulated leaves. I went inside for ten minutes and came back to find a new blanket of crunchy, dry leaves on the deck.

Having done all the physical exertion I was willing to do for one day, I gave up.

But even I can admit that there are some good things about fall. Oktoberfest (which is long over but the beers remain, which is the important thing); some of the pumpkin beers, which are only offered in the fall; and my beer chili. You sense a theme here? I certainly do.

My beer chili isn't really mine; I got it from a "quick and easy" recipe book many years ago, but over the centuries, I've adapted it for my own tastes, as one does with chili. For instance, the recipe calls for an optional can of chili peppers. Chili peppers aren't spicy enough, especially the canned crap, but I don't consider hot peppers optional in chili, so I use chopped serranos or, if they're not available, jalapenos. I also throw in a few drops of ghost pepper sauce. And I make it with a dark beer for reasons best left to myself.

And yes, my chili includes beans in addition to ground beef. I don't think any Texans reading this know exactly where I live, so I'm probably safe.

All of which is to say that, as I've noted before, when I'm first following a recipe, I follow that fucker to the letter. Which is not as easy as it sounds. A recipe necessarily incorporates some hidden assumptions; it's not a complete set of instructions for cooking something. There's some basic knowledge assumed, in addition to some basics that most of us take for granted: A heat source, usually; access to running water; the existence in one's house of the proper pots, pans, spoons, dishes, etc., and how to decide which one is appropriate.

That said, a recipe that starts with "First, buy or rent a house with a stove" gets real boring real fast, so they apply certain compression algorithms. You don't usually think of them as such, but they exist, just as they exist in all languages.

But I digress. The most important thing for me with eating is taste. A close second, though, is ease of preparation; hence the "quick and easy" bit above. (Nutrition is way down the list.) I've seen chili recipes that start with something like "Buy [pepper that only grows in one obscure Mexican state and has to be harvested during a full moon that falls on the equinox]. Dry the pepper for 40 days and 40 nights, then hand-grind it into powder..."

I'm sure the resulting chili would be out of this world, but mine takes about an hour from start to finish, including cleanup.

Sometimes, as with the chili, I revisit old favorites, but sometimes I like to try new stuff -- again, as long as it's quick. And the recipe in the above link seems to fit the bill: a dish I'd never heard of (there aren't any Indonesian restaurants around here), but with mostly familiar ingredients, and it doesn't seem like it takes all day to prepare.

It seems to be basically vegetables in a peanut sauce, and I've had the Thai and Vietnamese versions of that sort of thing -- at restaurants; anyway. As usual, I have Opinions on some aspects of it.

This is a dish for the veg hating child within all of us.

Yeah, no, turns out I only hated vegetables when my mom cooked them. Sure, I won't eat eggplant (because I don't consider it food at all), but most vegetables suffer from only one drawback: by the time I get them home, they've gone wilty and/or moldy.

I should note, however, that I have an intense dislike for peanuts (which aren't nuts and are only vegetables in the most technical sense, the way wheat is a vegetable). But for some reason I'm okay with peanut butter or Asian peanut sauces. Go figure.

Gado Gado! We love saying the name, we love how colourful it is, we most definitely love eating it, and we REALLY love that how virtuous it makes us feel, scoffing down so many vegetables for dinner!

Ever want to smack an article so hard the writer rubs her face?

Gado Gado is all about the peanut sauce which is a slight variation of Thai Peanut Sauce.

When made from scratch, it’s a bit of a pain, calling for pureeing roasted peanuts (and it’s tough to make it completely smooth), a handful of aromatics like lemongrass, galangal, garlic, South East Asian “umami” from shrimp paste, plus sauces.

Now, see, if I had to do all that crap, I'd end up ordering a pizza. Fortunately, the recipe bypasses such nonsense.

Here's where I point out, if you haven't read the link already, that the target audience seems to be Australians. Which is fine. I mean, people have to eat no matter where they're from. But I doubt that I'd find everything on the list here in the US.

Thai red curry paste – my favourite brand its Maesri. Best most authentic flavour by far – and happens to be the cheapest at ~$1.50 for a little can. Available at large grocery stores in Australia (Coles, Woolworths, Harris Farms) and of course, Asian stores.

Today I learned that Woolworths is a grocery store in Oz. Here in the US, it was a department store, emphasis on the "was."

Natural peanut butter – Natural peanut butter is 100% peanuts and has a stronger peanut flavour than commercial peanut butter which has sugar and other additives.

Look, I'm about as far from being a granola-cruncher as you can get. Like I said above, my main criterion for eating is taste. And, to put it bluntly, commercial peanut butter in the US tastes like slightly sweet plastic. Jippy or Skif or whatever. Not only do the additives negate any potential health benefits of peanut butter, but it just doesn't taste right unless you're like 8 and eating it on a sandwich your mom hastily slapped together in the morning before you left for school.

The downside of "natural" peanut butter is that it generally lacks emulsifiers, so you gotta mix the oil back in when it "naturally" separates out. This is work. It's worth it.

Kecap Manis – dark sweet thick sweet Indonesian soy sauce. Thicker and sweeter than normal soy sauce, with a consistency like syrup. Here in Australia, kecap manis is available in major supermarkets and Asian stores. Easy sub: honey and dark soy sauce.

I've never even seen this, but then, I haven't been looking. Of course Japanese soy sauce is one of my staples, though.

The one ingredient you spy in the above that you mightn’t be familiar with is tempeh. Tempeh is an Indonesian fermented soy bean product that vegetarians are mad for! [precious emoji here]

Smack.

Okay, I don't know much about food availability in Oz (mostly I know you gotta avoid whatever's trying to turn you into food there), but tempeh is definitely a thing here. Confession time: I actually like it. Not as much as I like meat, of course, but I actually find it quite tasty when it's prepared in an appropriate dish.

The original article goes on about preparation technique, and includes a video that I didn't bother with because I cannot cook something from a damn video. Fortunately, there's also the standard recipe format below the video.

In conclusion, while this recipe is more complicated than my chili (and a lot more complicated than UberEats), it seems interesting enough that I might actually try it sometime. And then I can finally say I had Indonesian food.

Sort of.

I know at least some of you reading this have Indonesian ancestry. If you want, I'll share my latkes recipe sometime so we can engage in mutual cultural appropriation.