Indonesian Sweet Pancake ~ Martabak Terang Bulan

This used to be my favorite "snack" when I was still in Jakarta. One of Indonesian most popular street food. It's basically a pancake with yeast, so a lot thicker than the regular pancake, and also a lot sweeter, with all the additional fillings. It comes with many different filling combination of chocolate sprinkles, cheese, peanut, and durian.

Chicken Satay (Sate Ayam)

Chicken Satay is well-known as one of the most popular dishes from Indonesia. It's a dish of seasoned - marinated - skewered - grilled chicken, dipped in peanut sauce.

Indonesian food recipe usually involves many steps and many ingredients. But not for Chicken Satay. It's quite simple to make, yet it is so irresistible.

Grilled Chicken with Spicy Sauce (Ayam Panggang Bumbu Rujak)

This is one of our favorite Indonesian cuisine. It's sweet, spicy, and tasty. My mom used to make this at home. While I was in college, I lived far from home, so I had to go look for this dishes in certain places. Now that I can make it by myself, I wouldn't need to go look for this anymore :)

Ingredients:

5 chicken drumsticks 

Juice from 1 lime

1/2 can coconut milk

2 tbsp vegetable oil

2 bay leaves

1/2 tsp ground galangal

3 lime leaves

3 lemon grass, cut into 2 inches long

5 tbsp red onion, processed

5 tbsp red fresno chilli, processed

3 tsp garlic powder

1/2 tsp ground ginger

1/2 tsp ground turmeric

1/2 tsp shrimp paste (terasi)

salt to taste

3 tbsp brown sugar

Directions:

Marinate chicken with lime juice. After 15 minutes, rinse the chicken and put aside.

Fry all the other ingredients (except coconut milk) with vegetable oil until fragrant. Then, pour chicken and coconut milk, stir until incorporated with all the ingredients. In medium heat, let the chicken be tendered and sauce be caramelized. During the process, stir the chicken for every couple minutes, to avoid the coconut milk from cracking. Once done, broil the chicken in the oven for 5-10 minutes. Ready to serve.

Fried Pastel - Indonesian Pastry (Pastel Goreng)

I'm curious to try something different today. Pastel is one of my favorite indonesian pastries. It's basically just a crispy pie filled with chicken, carrot, and rice vermicelli filling. The only thing that I would do differently from this first attempt is to roll the dough more so it's thinner. The filling was good, though. I had some left overs of the filling and I gladly added it to my lunch menu. 

The recipe

For the filling:

1 cup ground chicken

1 cup square-chopped carrot

25 gr of rice vermicelli, soak in hot water

3 eggs, boiled and square-chopped

3 tsp minced garlic

6 onion cloves

2 tbsp soy sauce

1 tsp pepper

1 tsp sugar

2 tbsp butter

1/2 tsp salt or to taste

Add butter, garlic, and onion in medium heated wok until fragrant

Add chicken and carrot

Reduce the heat to low, add salt, soy sauce, pepper, sugar

Add rice vermicelli

For the dough:

2 Cups All-purpose flour

1 Egg

3 Tbsp butter, melted

1/2 tsp salt

1/3 cup water

Beat egg and melted butter

Add flour and water, slowly until it comes together

Roll the dough to the desired thickness, use a glass or bowl to make a circle

Cut the circles, fill half part of each circle with the filling, cover that part with the other part of the circles. Use the fork to make the pattern on the sides, as shown in below pictures

Fry in medium to high heat

Serve with chilli

Tempeh

In Indonesia, you can buy tempe for 1000 rupiah (+/- 1 cent USD) per pack. But in US, you don't get that kind of luxury - it is around 2,5 dollars per pack. And the taste is not that good. Maybe it's the result of being refrigerated too long.


So our friends, Iday and Olive, told us that they had successfully made home-made tempeh, and they generously shared some of their tempe starter (ragi tempe) to us. Good thing they did, because now my husband and I get to eat our fresh home-made tempeh!


Ingredients:
- 1/2 cup whole dry soybeans
- 1/2 teaspoon tempeh starter (ragi tempe)
- 1 plastic bag quartz size
- water for soaking and boiling the soybean


Soak the soybeans for 1 day. If you use whole soybeans you should split them by squeezing them with a kneading motion. Stir gently causing the hulls to rise to the surface, then pour off water and hulls into a strainer. Add fresh water and repeat until most hulls are removed. Don't worry if a few hulls remain attached.


Put the beans in a cooking pot and add enough water to cover them. Cook for 30 min. Drain off the water and dry the soybeans by continue heating them in the pot on medium heat for a few minutes and until the beans are dry. Allow the soybeans to cool down to below 35°C.


Sprinkle the soybeans with tempeh starter. Mix with a clean spoon for about 1 minute to distribute the tempeh starter evenly. It's very important to mix the tempeh starter very well: it reduces the risk for spoilage and the fermentation will be faster.


Take 1 plastic bag quartz size and perforate them with holes at a distance of about 1 cm by a skewer. This will allow the mould to breathe.


Put the soybean into the plastic bag. Press them flat, making sure that the total thickness of the beans is max 3 cm. Place the packed beans at a warm place for about 36- 48 hours during which the tempeh fermentation takes place. Then the container should be filled completely with white mycelium and the entire contents can be lifted out as a whole piece.

Roti Kukus (Indonesian Steamed Cake)

1st attempt - use reusable silicon bake cup

2nd attempt - use paper bake cup

Roti kukus is a traditional steamed cake originally comes from Indonesia.
Kids love roti kukus. I remember when I was a kid, my mom used to came home from 'arisan' (wiki: monthly social gathering between friends who chip in money to be won in turns through a lucky draw) and brought one box with 2 or 3 snacks in it. And I was so happy when one of them was roti kukus. It was always be the first to grab.


Yesterday, out of the blue, my husband said that it would be really great if he could eat roti kukus, remember the moist texture and the sweet flavour and the cute colors..  So I was thinking, hmm.. maybe I could find some good recipe from the internet. And I found one. 


This recipe is adapted from here with a little modification:


3 egg yolks
1 egg white
180 gr granulated sugar (3/4 cup = 170 gr, 1/4 cup = 55 gr)
180 gr plain (all-purpose) flour (180 gr = 1,44 cup)
100 ml sprite
1 tbsp cocoa powder


1. Prepare steamer for about 15 minutes. Make sure it is heated enough.
2. Line roti kukus moulds with parchment paper
Many people recommend to use special mould for roti kukus. But I used paper/silicon bake cup and it was doing fine. 
3. Beat egg yolks, egg white, and caster sugar until thick and pale.
4. Fold in 1/3 of the flour, then 1/2 of the sprite. Gently mix. Repeat with remaining flour and sprite, ending with flour. Mix thoroughly until there is, no lumps in the batter.
5. Divide 1/3 of the batter into a small bowl and add cocoa powder. Whisk until thoroughly combined.
6. Spoon white batter into moulds. Swirl a little of the chocolate batter. Steam for 15-20 minutes on high heat. 
I would really recommend putting small amount of batter in each mould/bake cup. Just to make sure that roti kukus will bloom and look a little cuter ;)
And you may put paper towel before closing the steamer, to avoid the water from dropping into the cake. 
Last but not least, do not open the steamer for the first 15 minutes.
7. Open the steamer and you'll be glad to see they're bloooomingggg.. 

Beef Rendang

Everytime I'm craving for rendang, I would just grab Indofood rendang instant seasoning from my kitchen drawer :) It's simple. The result is really good. And I still have quite many packs left. Maybe that's the reason I never had any urge to search for the recipe.

But then after 4 packs, I had enough, and I really wanted to cook it from scratch. 

So I combined some recipes from the internet. I figured out that the recipe is actually simple, but cooking rendang may need quite some time - 1 1/2 hour or so only to cook the meat until it's tender.

So here it is.

1 tbsp olive oil

2 lb beef, diced

1 pack of coconut powder

1/2 tsp galangal

1/2 big red onion

3 tsp minced garlic

1/2 tsp turmeric

1/2 tsp ginger

1 tsp salt

5 fresno red pepper

3 lime leaves

Chop red onion, garlic, and red pepper with food processor. Add galangal, turmeric, ginger, salt and process until smooth.

Pour olive oil into large saucepan and heat it over medium-high heat. Add the mixture from food processor into the pan, stir constantly until it's fragrant.

Add meat, 2 glasses of water, coconut powder, lime leaves, and lemongrass into the saucepan. Stir all the ingredients, bring into boil. 

Reduce the heat into medium-low and cover the saucepan until the beef is tender and the sauce is gravy, stir ocassionally. You may put extra water if needed. This may take 1 1/2 hour.

Serve over rice.