Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Supermarket Woes

    We just have not had much luck at the supermarket lately.  There are two big chains in Jakarta where all of the nouveau riche and the not-so-rich expats shop: Hero Pasar Swalayan and Carrefour Hypermarket. We normally go to the Hero in the basement of an old Jakarta mall near our office.  (Most of the malls here have a grocery store in the basement.) This Saturday we went tried out the Carrefour in the basement of a mall near our house, Mall Ambassador.

    The Carrefour that we checked out was gigantic. It was the closest thing that we have seen to a Target–sort of high class mass consumption items, everything from groceries to bicycles to rice cookers to widescreen TVs.  It was like a Costco where you could buy normal sized items.  Anyhoo, this place had everything, except for what we needed.  A friend of ours turned 30 this Saturday, and we had the idea of making a special Indonesian treat to bring over to his party.  We have these very often at catered events: they are like little glutinous rice flour cakes with coconut sauce and sometimes a sweet filling, wrapped and steamed in a banana leaf.  Seems pretty straightforward, huh?  Well, the Carrefour was out of banana leaves and shaved coconut.  Huh?  That’s like a store in the United States being out of milk and eggs.  You can’t get a meal in a restaurant without both of these ingredients, and almost every recipe in Indonesian language cookbooks marketed for domestic consumption requires one or the other.  Totally exasperating.

    So that was disappointing.  More surprising, when we visited our regular grocery store yesterday, we learned that not only were they out of banana leaves, but they don’t even sell them.  I mean, you can get Vegemite and Marmite, but no banana leaves?   Maybe people just go outside and grab them off the trees when they need them.  And then, we couldn’t find NUTMEG.  The whole damn achipelago was colonized for the specific purpose of harvesting nutmeg, and we can’t find any?  It’s like America being out of corn.

    OK, so we’re being a little fussy, and we shouldn’t get too mad.  It’s just that we had a string of rotten luck in shopping lately.  Even we have to admit that it’s kind of funny; you have to recognize the humor in a situation like this.  At any rate, this is the reason for our deliquence lately in posting recipes.  We have several that we want to post: one for little fried tempe, one for rendang daging, one for coconut chicken curry, one for Central Javanese beef soup, and hopefully someday one for little steamed banana leaf packets.

  • Sorry we missed you yesterday

    Sorry we didn’t post yesterday.  During lunch at the Freedom Institute, a circuit breaker seems to have exploded.  According to the secretary Anisa, the electricity would have been out for "mungkin agak lama," which literally means "maybe rather long," but really means "probably for a long time, maybe until Monday."

    You know how you hear these stories about people from other countries who watch American movies and TV, and think that everybody drives SUVs and carries AK-47s, or at least has a horse and a ranch?  Well, we watch a lot of international TV, and here’s what we have decided about the following countries.

    All Koreans must play basketball, and a suspiciously large number of them are actually African Americans.  Either that, or they always protest the plight of rice farmers.  All Indians sing and dance all the time, or they are giving lessons about chemistry and differential calculus.  Australians are all employed at rescuing besieged homeowners who have snakes in their backyards and alligators in their pools.  All Japanese participate in humiliating gameshows that leave them very messy.  Finally, the most common activity for Indonesian women is standing still and crying, with a horrified expression on their face because either (1) their father will not let them marry someone of a different ethnic background/social class or (2) there is a ghost in the school.  Alternatively, they may be singing on a show that is designed to make them famous.  Indonesian men also tend to stand still with a horrified expression on their face, or they may be in a band that suspiciously resembles Linkin Park.

    Remember all, we kid because we love.

    One last tidbit on the Linkin Park theme.  There is one band in particular that is very popular here, and everything about this band is just sort of like Bizarro Linkin Park.  First, the band name: "Saint Loco." Their big song right now is called "Microphone Anthem," off of their breakthrough album, "Rock Upon a Time".  (unfortunately for jm, tp loves this song and has gotten one line stuck in his head which he sings over and over)  Hey, be quiet JM, that’s a relatively good song.  Anyway, the band’s video makes them look precisely like Linkin Park, and their sound is the same, right down to the one "rapper" who alternates with the mid-tenor "vocalist."  (ok tp, now I ask, how can this possibly make a good song?)  It’s not a "good" song, JM.  In fact, seeing as I hate Linkin Park and everything that they stand for, the fact that this is a better song than anything that Linkin Park ever wrote does not mean much.  Sing it with me: JUST ME REPRESENTING MY MICROPHONE!  ME, MYSELF, AND MY MICROPHONE!  (jm: BLAH!)