Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Tempe and Tofu

    Here’s something that we’ve been thinking about a lot lately.  In the US, we don’t eat a ton of meat.  Probably two to three times a week, and that includes tuna.  In fact, unless we are making a special dinner or having our customary fish on Friday, we almost never cook meat for ourselves. 

    We eat meat at restaurants.  We almost never get vegetarian meals at restaurants.  Here’s why.  Have you ever noticed that there are very limited vegetarian options at restaurants?  Normally there’s some sort of pasta with eggplant or mushrooms in it, a grilled vegetable platter, or the "vegetarian version of a meat dish" option.  While pasta with eggplant or mushrooms is fine, that’s what we eat at home.  Grilled vegetables are fine, but usually not particularly exciting.  It’s the "vegetarian version of a meat dish" option that really bugs us.  Who wants vegetarian chicken cacciatore?  Who wants vegetarian chicken stirfry?  The whole strategy of taking a tried-and-true meat dish and simply replacing the meat with tofu or black beans or tempe is wrong from the get go.  Tried-and-true recipes are tried and true because they were based around meaty flavors, not neutral soy or beans.

    There are interminable examples of this in college towns.  There’s a restaurant in New Haven in particular that frustrates us.  They serve ready made pastas and rice dishes that are just oily and bland, not excitingly vegetarian.  We’ll never forget the Vegetarian Moroccan Tangine or the Tempe Pasta Carbonara.  Blech.  Oftentimes restaurants like this will try to fool you with salt, olives, garlic/ginger, herbs, or extra olive oil.  It doesn’t work.

    How does this relate to Indonesia and Malaysia?  Well, this is a part of the world where people developed dishes from scratch around tempe and tofu, accentuating their particular tastes and textures, rather than trying to back into vegetarianism by ruining meat dishes.  To be totally honest, we had never had really good tofu or tempe until we got to Jakarta.  But when you try mendoan tempe or sambal goreng kering tempe or tahu isi, or even just a perfectly fried piece of super-fresh tofu at a Sundanese restaurant, you realize that this is how vegetarian food is supposed to be.  In other words, not designed to be vegetarian, but designed to be tasty.

    We know what many of you meat eaters are thinking.  "Yeah, I guess tempe and tofu is OK, but it just doesn’t taste that good.  Why not just eat meat?"  We are sure that we can’t convince you for real, but trust us.  We have been hooked.

    As a final note: There is an exception to our rule that we never get vegetarian meals in the US.  The first is Indian food.  We’ve never felt undernourished with a meal of saag paneer, channa masala, and vegetarian korma.  At the same time, we don’t avoid meat at Indian restaurants either.  We should also note that conceivably, American vegetarian restaurants could do what many Chinese restaurants do here, which is figure out how to take gluten and yeast and other fungi, and create vegetarian bits that actually taste like meat.  Of course, there’s little sense in recreating authentic meat flavors with fake meat unless you actually are averse to eating meat on principle.  But the point stands. 

  • The Cats of Pantai Panorama

    Pantai Panorama is our apartment complex, and there are a bunch of cats who live here.  It’s not like Indonesia, where there was one dominant cat (Tika Splotch) whom we regularly saw and that’s it.  For some reason, while we occasionally saw other cats there, we didn’t see any cats regularly enough to name them.  Here, things are different.

    So, because we are sort of lunatics when it comes to cats, here we go.

    • Teddy Bear  Teddy Bear is the alpha male at Pantai Panorama, and the first one with whom we made our acquaintance.  He gets his name because he has a funny shaped head that is reminiscent of Abyssinian cats, which kind of reminds us of a teddy bear. He’s also big and burly like a teddy bear.  Teddy Bear is always prowing around the complex, putting his scent on things as only an un-neutered cat can do.  He is perfectly willing to stare us down when we fuss at him, because after all, he’s in charge.
    • Fraidy Cat  Our realtor lives just across the hall from us and has a big fat orange cat who is terrified of people.  He always bolts away when he sees us, but we often hear him wailing outside of our neighbor’s door.  Our other neighbor once scolded the owner while we were all in the elevator together for "getting in my door and eating all my potatoes".
    • One Eye  One Eye gets her name because she’s blind in one eye.  You can tell because it’s all cloudy and stuff.  She’s rather talkative and lives right at the exit of our building, often sitting under cars to escape the heat of the day.  Sometimes she lets us pet her.
    • Father and Daughter  Father and daughter seem to be just that: a medium sized male cat who is always being trailed five yards behind by a smaller female kitten.  These two are just big babies, though.  Every time we see them they run over and meow at us, but they don’t like to be petted.
    • Two Tone  This cat gets her name from her totally weird coloring.  She is stripey like many cats, but for some reason the base tones of her stripes are splotchy, half black with gray stripes and half orange with white stripes.  We’ve never seen anything like it in a cat before–splotchy cats like calicos normally aren’t tiger striped, but Two Tone is.  Two Tone is unfortunately not very nice.  Sometimes we’ll be walking to the pool and we hear an annoying yowl from under a tree.  That’s always Two Tone, who says that she does not want to play right now.
    • Preggers  As you might imagine, Preggers is always pregnant.  When we first arrived, there was a white and black cat at the base of the hill to our complex who was pregnant.  After a couple weeks she disappeared, and about a month ago a very similar looking cat appeared, also very pregnant.  Sometimes she has a hanger-on, a little kitten, maybe from the last batch.  Just today she ran up to me (TP) and meowed and rubbed against my leg looking for food.  I petted her stomach trying to feel the babies, but I couldn’t feel anything because she was purring too loud.
    • Guard Cat  Guard cat lives at the guard post at the entrance to Pantai Panorama, and he wins the prize for laziest cat in the history of cats.  When you walk past him and make noise, he won’t even open his eyes, he’s so lazy.  He must be very used to the guards down there, even though we’ve never seen them pay any attention to him.  He’s like the alpha male at the bottom of the hill, but we assume that he gets handouts from the guards so he’s not as manly at Teddy Bear who fends for himself.
    • Dirty Kitty  Dirty Kitty lives way at the bottom of the hill under the cars near the train station.  We actually don’t know his gender, so we are just using "he" in the gender-neutral sense.  He doesn’t like people very much, but he’s big and fat because he lives amid a whole bunch of food stalls.  We call him Dirty Kitty because he looks like a white Siamese who rolled around in mud too much, but he has pretty eyes and a cute black nose.
    • Sasquatch  Sasquatch is the great unknown of our neighborhood.  In case you don’t know what a sasquatch is, he’s the giant, hairy, mythical ape-beast who lives in the Pacific Northwest.  We’ve only seen him twice, but he is definitely gigantic, the biggest cat we’ve ever seen.  We are positive that he is not a dog, but he seems to be about the size of a large poodle or small pit bull (for this reason, I object to tp’s name for this critter; I like to call him Dog Cat -jm).  We are not even kidding, he’s immense.