Eating Our Way Around The World - Indonesia

Last night we visited Indonesia! 
I made Nasi Goreng (Indonesian Fried Rice) and
Satay Ayam (Grilled Chicken Skewers)
Here are the links to the 2 recipes I used:

https://www.recipetineats.com/nasi-goreng-indonesian-fried-rice/
https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/221322/indonesian-chicken-skewers-with-peanut-sauce-satay-ayam/

INGREDIENTS: (because I like having an ingredient list super handy when I'm meal planning.)
For the Rice:
Your choice cooking oil
5 oz Chicken Breasts, thinly sliced (I used 2 breasts) (Can use whatever protein you want, actually)
Kecap Manis (3 TBSP for this recipe) (Also known as Sweet Soy Sauce, syrupy consistency)
2 tsp shrimp paste (Optional...I'll get to this more later)
2 garlic cloves (Let's be honest. Measure it with your heart. I think I used 6 because they were small)
1 tsp fresh red chili, finely diced
1 white onion, diced
3 cups cooked white rice (a day old. I used long grain white)

Optional Garnishes:
fried over easy eggs
green onion
tomatoes
Asian cucumbers
lime wedges

For the Chicken Skewers:
1 pound Chicken Thighs, cut into skewer-sized chunks
sunflower seed oil
2 TBSP kecap manis (sweet soy sauce, syrupy consistency)
1 TBSP brown sugar
salt
white pepper
2 garlic cloves (again, measure that with your heart. haha)
whatever skewers you have (I used metal. If you use wood, soak them in water)
5 TBSP peanut butter
1 TBSP lime juice

Our first day of this adventure was a success! I do, however, have a few notes. These were both easy dishes to make. With a little prep work in advance yesterday morning, everything came together in half an hour when it was time to actively cook.

There were 3 ingredients that were a little harder to come by. Kecap Manis was one. This one is non negotiable. I got mine off Amazon. It's a huge bottle, but I can see myself using all of it. It's really yummy. The next is Sunflower seed oil. I'm not sure how big of a difference this actually made in the recipe, so you could probably get away with using whatever oil you want. I found mine at Dierbergs. (It wasn't at Schnucks or Aldis). The 3rd is shrimp paste. I wanted to make this dish as authentic as possible, and even though using it was optional, it was the more traditional route. I had to get it on Amazon. Note: The block in the picture below is the shrimp paste. It is in a sealed bag because it smells disgusting. When I opened the package, a waft of fish hatchery smell attacked my nose and won. Our dog, Lizzie was in the next room and after a minute of the package being opened, she came running into the room sniffing the air. This stuff is POTENT. Honestly, local friends, if you want to try this recipe and you want to use some of this paste, come over and I'll give you what you need. I have more than I will ever use and whatever is left after 1 year will be getting tossed. 

I used the full 2 tsp of shrimp paste in the recipe, but in all honesty, it made it a bit too shrimpy in flavor. If you really like those dried shrimp crispies you can get at the Asian market in the snack section, you'll want to use the full amount in your recipe. If you dislike seafood, omit it all together. If I make this again, and I probably will, I would only add 1/4 or 1/3 of the amount the recipe called for. I would also dissolve the paste into a TBSP of hot water before adding it to the rice as the clump of paste was hard to break apart and mix into the rice after I added it to the pan.

I definitely suggest making your rice the day before. Or at the latest, the morning of. After it is cooked, spread it out on a lined sheet and refrigerate until you are ready to add it to your pan. You want your rice cold and dry. This is KEY for frying rice. That along with high heat in your pan. I wasn't sure which kind of rice I wanted to use since the recipe doesn't specify. I cooked up a batch of generic long grain white and a batch of Nishiki Sushi Rice. I wanted to compare consistency once it got cold and dry. I ended up using the long grain. 

Side note: I have been trying to perfect and recreate our favorite restaurant's pork fried rice for years. I'm getting closer to the flavor, but the rice consistency is still a bit off. I'm planning a rice experiment within the next few weeks to figure out what kind of rice this restaurant used. I'll post about it as well. The restaurant has since shut down, but it was a favorite date spot for Jeremy and I when we were dating in the early 2000s. Ocean Sky in Eugene, Oregon. Shout out to you for having the best dang Pork Fried Rice we've ever had!

Definitely have all of your ingredients prepped and ready to toss into your hot pan when making the rice. Since I wanted to devote my attention to the rice, I made the skewers first, and let them sit done while I did the rice. When the rice was done, I reheated the skewers for a minute so that everything would be hot at the same time. 

The skewers were DEFINITELY our favorite. Quick and easy and oh so tasty. And now for the reveal!!!

I have no idea where we will "travel" to next month, but I'll probably be doing a few side missions first. The rice experiment to see the side by side flavor differences of different rices and how the textures compare to hopefully find the best rice for making fried rice. Also, we are really into Bao Sliders lately and I found a great recipe on YouTube, so I will be attempting Bao buns for the first time in a week or so. I just got my bamboo steamer in the mail yesterday, and I'm excited to use it. 

Hopefully this inspires you to branch out and make new foods! Again, local friends, if you want any of my shrimp paste, please come take some! And if you try either of these recipes, let me know on FB or in the comments below! 

Eating Our Way Around the World Intro

My husband and I have always loved food; no surprise there. Our food likes have evolved over the past decade and we have become more adventurous. After our trip to Mexico in 2013, Tex Mex places here in the states just aren't that great and we seek out hole in the wall Taquerias for a more authentic flavor. After moving to Missouri in 2016, we expanded further to middle eastern and African cuisines. Most recently we realized we loved Ethiopian food. It's actually pretty hard to find restaurants that serve authentic foods. I mean, Italy doesn't really do pasta the way we think; Mexico certainly doesn't do crunchy tacos; and why in the world has Asian cuisine been lumped into one single buffet style category when there is a clear difference between Vietnamese and South Korean foods? It's like lumping together American foods as baby back ribs and burgers, when there are such differences between local cuisine in the South with Jambalaya, Nashville hot chicken, and sweet tea vs the North with Poutine, King Crab, and hearty stews. 

We came up with a goal for 2020. We want to research and experience the foods of countries that may not be accurately represented in restaurants here in the states, if represented at all! As an example, Ireland really doesn't do Corned Beef and Cabbage. Gasp, right? They are more into lamb, stews, seafood, and potatoes. This challenge we have given ourselves may prove difficult since the food quality and selection here isn't the greatest. I can't tell you how much I miss the cuisine in Ireland. Black pudding is quite tasty, but if I tried to make my own, I'd have a difficult time gathering the ingredients, not to mention, the quality of food there. Milk is otherworldly good there, and the sausages look and taste nothing like the Jimmy Deans precooked and formed links you get in the frozen section here (blech). Even their bacon is nothing like what we are used to here. It's all WAY  BETTER there. I digress. That's a WHOLE different topic I'm not going to get into. 

If there's any way for me to make decently authentic dishes from countries we don't think about often, I'm going to attempt it...and log it here for your reading - and hopefully inspirational - pleasure. Luckily there are many YouTubers and bloggers who dedicate their time to making traditional recipes easy for Americans to recreate. Aside from asking my friends for their old traditional family recipes, I'll be seeking out these recipes. Once per month we will be experiencing a different country's cuisine. Maybe more than once a month because we have a long list of countries in mind. 

Before we get to the good stuff, I'm humbled you're interested enough to be here reading. Personally, one of my biggest peeves is clicking on a recipe blog and reading the writer's life story before getting to the little printable recipe that isn't even at the bottom because there's 250 comments after the actual recipe, so I'm forced to either read or slowly scroll until I find what I'm actually after. My promise to you is that this foodie journey will NOT be like that. This intro post is the most "fluff" you will see. My plan for every post is to have a couple of sentences as an intro followed directly by the links to the recipes I'm using. Then I'll make some small commentary on tips I found helpful in the making of the meal, pictures of the result, and how we liked it. They will be straightforward quick reads without the fluff, without the stupid pop ups, and without having to click NEXT after every 1.5 sentences. So, thank you for being here, and I hope you enjoy!