Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Indonesians and Corn

    We have no idea why this is, but Indonesians have a very weird relationship with corn.  If you’re anything like us, you would never have thought that they would eat corn in Indonesia.  I mean, in Asia, the starchy grain of choice is rice, right?  In Indonesia, at least, they also eat a surprising amount of corn.  We believe this is because some parts of eastern Indonesia are too dry to grow rice.  The terrain resembles Australia, not lush tropical jungles.

    At any rate, it’s not just that they have corn fritters (like latkes made out of corn) and corn starch and corn oil.  They also use corn as a regular snack.  In the mall near our house, there is–we kid you not–a stand called "Cup of Corn" that sells cups of corn.  That’s it.  Like, you could just go up and get a cup of corn.  In fact, you can’t get anything else, just a cup of corn.  You know, just like Green Giant corn kernels.  This causes us no small amount of puzzlement.

    Then there’s our most recent discovery.  Walking by the Pizza Hut in our local mall, we saw an advertisement for a topping called "Beeforn."  Beef + Corn.  Regular Pizza Hut pizza, but with little beef hot dogs and corn kernels as the topping.  This accompanies the other unique topping, "Beetato," which is (yes) beef hot dogs and potatoes.  This also looked like it had corn in it.

    Maybe we’re just being silly Americans unwilling to accept foreign cultures as being different from us, but we find this corn obsession to be totally bizarre.

    NB: For all of you who noticed the giant earthquake (7.2) in East Timor, don’t worry, we are thousands of miles away, quite a bit inland, and hence not underwater from any tidal waves.  We hope all the people traveling home for Idul Fitri are going to make it OK.

  • A Ten Day Long Party

    First off, sorry for a quick post yesterday.  We had to run out quick and catch a taxi before yesterday’s thunderstorm rolled through Jakarta.  We are fortunate that we found one.  On our ride home, the streets were so wet that there were motorcycles abandoned everywhere and cars were unable to use some of the lanes of traffic.

    Idul Fitri is upon us, officially beginning sometime in the next couple of days, we think Saturday.  It doesn’t matter exactly when, because Indonesia Inc. is shutting its doors for a much-deserved vacation.  Idul Fitri, you’ll recall, is the festival that celebrates the end of Ramadhan.  That means that people can smoke, eat, drink non-alcoholic beverages, and sin between sun-up and sun-down again.  People get very excited at this prospect, and have a big party to celebrate it.  There’s also probably some sort of religious significance.  Starting tomorrow, the Freedom Institute will also be closed until November 21st.  Officially, tomorrow (Friday) is an institutional holiday, Monday and Tuesday are the official national holidays for Idul Fitri, and the following Wednesday through Friday are bonus days off because everyone will still be traveling.  We are not quite sure what to expect.  We have heard that the massive exodus of people who pulang ke kampung (go home to their village) leave the city relatively empty.  Perhaps this means that there will be no traffic (good), but also that everything will be closed and it will be hard to get a taxi (bad).  As we mentioned earlier, this would be a great time to travel in theory, but in reality all forms of transportation will be nightmarish.  Only in Indonesia can the country shut down for ten days.

    Since internet will no longer be free-and-always-on when the Freedom Institute is closed, we may not be posting as often as we have been lately.  We’ll be sure to keep you all up-to-date on any interesting happenings.  We also have made significant progress on two classic Indonesian dishes–potato croquettes and deep fried things–but have yet to perfect them.  When we do, we’ll put the recipes up.