Dans notre nouvelle maison

We have arrived safely with Mojo in our new house!



It will take a few weeks for our furniture and other stuff currently on a boat to join us, but the first part of the move (humans and animals) happened without trouble. The first few days were filled with errands to run in a precise order, but now we are getting settled in our neighborhood. The challenge for the next few days is to furnish our new house: we are getting tired of camping in a big empty house and to sit on the floor all the time. But besides this technical detail, everything is going very well for us!

We had planned to buy a wok because our stove has a big central burner specially designed for this purpose, which allowed us to start cooking quickly with our basic equipment. After a trip to the Asian market and the big market in the center of town we were ready to do vegetable stir-fries and tasty Indonesian food.

I am now honored to announce a new feature of ChezMojo: a partnership with 2 Takes, the food blog of my old coworker Margaret and her Mom, M-C. They share their culinary adventures while one lives in Boston and the other in Seattle, and have common projects exploring cookbooks (M-C is writing one). I had asked her for recommendations on a good Indonesian cookbook (lots of ingredients from there available in Holland), and they chose an Indonesian book for their book of the month in April! So I’m delighted to present my first recipe a bit early: Tempeh Rendang.

Rendang is a dish (of meat in general), where the main substance is cooked in a coconut milk sauce until the sauce is very thick and impregnated in the flesh. The book said that you could also do this with tempeh, a kind of soy beans cake originally from Indonesia which is now very common in health food stores. I gathered all the ingredients for this dish, including some roots and leaves that I had never used before.

I started by chopping all the ingredients for the sauce: shallots, chilis, garlic, ginger, galangal and turmeric root.



I patiently crushed everything together in my new mortar -- it’s good for wrist muscles.



Then I heated all that in our new wok with plenty of coconut milk, a lemongrass stem, a salam leaf, and let it simmer for a while, stirring occasionally.



I had some math problems to dose the coconut milk, so I don’t know if I reached the normal result. The recipe called for 10 cups of coconut milk but I got confused in the store and only got 6 cups, but the coconut milk from the cans was extra-thick so I figured it would compensate.

And how was it? The smells that came out of the wok during the simmering were unbelievable, but in the end this dish was extremely rich and lost a bit of the flavors during the hour of simmering. Because of the enormous amount of coconut milk I would only serve a little bit of this Rendang at a time, together with vegetables and rice rather than as a main dish with pre-cooked noodles like we had it. However this mix of spices and roots that I crushed in the mortar had a lot of potential, and I will probably try to reuse this preparation for vegetable curries with a more reasonable amount of coconut milk.

In any case it was very interesting to start discovering Indonesian cooking! Until we get our stuff we are still very limited in our possibilities (no rice without a pot or rice-cooker, for example), but there are a few other recipes that we can try with our limited equipment. Yum!