Thursday, July 15, 2010

Food

written on July 11, 2010

This is a very important topic. I think I spend at least half my time talking about food with people. It's either the project or food.

People eat a lot of rice here. It's always white rice but not really the kind that I'm used to. I think my family usually get jasmine rice from Thailand. Here the serve a shorter grain that's puffier and not as sticky. All of my housemates find it ridiculous that Indonesians would eat rice three times a day. Their meals consists of mostly rice with small pieces of meat and chili sauce.

When you go to a restaurant, they will get a plate with rice and you can pick out what you want from their selection of dishes that they've already cooked. Most things are swimming in chili sauce. There are usually a few kinds of fried fish, chicken, beef cooked in sauce, and vegetables. Vegetables are free. More like garnish than anything. After you eat, you go up to the register and tell them what you've eaten. This part was the most difficult part of eating but it's been getting easier. You can also ask for “Padang style” where they will bring all the dishes in small plates and you just take and pay for what you want to eat. They tend to charge you more than you eat this way though so we don't do this very often.

We've been buying bread lately for breakfast. They call bread “roti” which I think is a borrow word from India. Their bread (and everything else) tends to be sweet. They're like what you get at Chinese bakeries. They're not hard like western bread. I really think I prefer this soft, sweet stuff more than the western kind. Westerners don't see this real bread though.

Speaking of sweetness, everything here is either super spicy or super sweet. You can get fruit juice almost anywhere. They would first put chocolate syrup at the bottom (mostly for decoration), fill the cup half way with sweetened condensed milk, squeeze some juice, and then dump in sugar. Tea is served with a ton of sweetened condensed milk as well. I really like sweetened condensed milk but this is really too much! Sometimes I feel like I'm just drinking sugar. I wonder if they put sugar into sugarcane juice too.... I heard that this is a regional thing though. Some parts of Indonesia, no sugar is the default.

1 comment:

yalu said...

roti is very good! we used to order for dinner but you have to eat it hot, or else it tastes just like paper..