Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Crazy Jakarta Traffic

    We don’t understand much about Jakarta, and one thing that we have really come to realize is that we completely don’t understand Jakarta traffic.  Traffic is usually better on the weekends, which kind of makes sense.  The other thing that we can count on is that it’s hard to find a taxi when it’s raining.  Other than that, we’re clueless–and we’ve had some experience with strange traffic patterns around New York, LA, and Boston.  Sometimes there will be dozens upon dozens of taxis waiting outside of our apartment to catch fares.  Sometimes there aren’t.  This morning, for no reason at all, the first 10 taxis we saw didn’t want to pick us up.  They just drove right past us, and then stopped and waited for something.  Just now, TP took a taxi across town that took forever for no discernable reason.  This morning, SBY (the president) drove past us, so we had lots of traffic then.  Sometimes there will be cops around "directing traffic," and sometimes at the same intersection there won’t be, and in either situation the traffic is the same: bad.  Sometimes our commute home is worse early in the afternoon than during rush hour.  Some morning at 8:20 the Catholic/Chinese school near us is full of parents dropping off kids, sometimes it isn’t.  We almost always travel the exact same route here and back every day, and it never takes a predictable amount of time.  We’ve had 8 minutes, we’ve had 45.

    In other travel-related news, we’ve been stressing out for the past two weeks trying to figure out how to change our plane tickets from February 18 to February 15.  This is hard: the tickets are from Jakarta to Singapore on Thai Airways, then from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur on Malaysian Airlines.  Both of the tickets are parts of round-trip tickets, and both of them are paper tickets, and we bought them both in Madison, WI, and we bought them through a travel agent, a student ticket service for which our cards have now, conveniently, expired.  Not an easy process.  Then yesterday JM looked at the tickets–it turns out that we forgot that the tickets already fly on February 15.  D’oh.

  • Sop Buntut

    This is a great soup for a cold winter’s day, which makes it even weirder that it’s from Indonesia.  Nevertheless, it’s an Indonesian classic, and we’ve had it in several restaurants and seen it for sale on the street.  Note that the features vegetables that are all winter root vegetables, except for the tomatoes and scallions, and that we would think of the spices as Christmas cookie spices.  Oh well.  It’s good though.  You might translate it as "Spice Islands Oxtail Soup," as it is sort of like oxtail soup, but it includes the three greatest money-earners for the Dutch in Indonesia: nutmeg, cloves, and pepper.

    2 lbs. oxtail
    3 inches of ginger, unpeeled but smashed
    3 nutmeg seeds, roughly broken
    20 cloves
    1 teaspoon ground black pepper
    salt to taste
    3 carrots, halved and chopped into 1 inch chunks
    2 leeks, chopped into 1 inch chunks
    1 scallion, chopped into 1 inch chunks
    2 medium all-purpose potatoes, chopped into 8 chunks each
    2 tomatoes, cut into wedges
    1 cup chopped celery, with leaves.
    fried shallots
    1 Tbsp butter or vegetable oil

    Fill a large pot with enough water to cover the oxtail generously and add the ginger.  Bring the water to a boil, add the oxtail, and boil for three minutes.  Pour out the water and discard the ginger.  Refill the pot (still with the oxtail) with cold water and bring to a boil.  Add the cloves and nutmeg, and simmer, covered, for 1 1/2 hours until the meat is tender.  Remove from heat, cool completely, and refridgerate overnight.  Skim the congealed fat from the surface.

    Bring the soup back to a simmer.  Heat butter/oil in a pan over medium heat, add carrot, leek, and scallion and saute for 3 minutes, then add to the soup along with the potatoes, pepper, and salt to taste.  Cover and simmer for twenty minutes, or until the potatoes are tender.  Ladle into bowls and garnish with celery, tomato slices, and fried shallots.

    The recipe would probably be even tastier if, before you started, you rubbed the meat lightly with vegetable oil and roasted it for an hour or so at 425 degrees, then deglazed the pan with water, used that for the soup base, and skipped the initial boil-and-dump phase.  We can’t do that though because we don’t have an oven.  If you do this, it’s important to use water–wine would ruin the taste.