Avigayil Damm

It is my sister’s birthday today so my hubby and I wanted to take her and our parents out for lunch. We originally wanted to go to Cafe Wien, an Austrian cafe located in Plaza Semanggi because my sis wanted to have apfel strudel. Unfortunately it turned out that they have closed and now in replacement of it stands the fast food joint Burger King.

So we walked around a little looking for an alternative, but since we didn’t want to risk choosing a restaurant that we had no idea about, we ended up in Solaria restaurant which is almost always reliable to have decent tasting food.

My dad and hubby opted for chicken cordon bleu while my sister opted for chicken mozzarella. I chose a more Asian taste, and picked chicken katsu with noodles in teriyaki sauce. Mine turned out to be the best choices, because apparently the two other chicken menu did not taste much. The chicken was well-seasoned, and then of course the noodles took on the taste of the teriyaki sauce. It was served with a small bowl of broth.

Of course since it was an Indonesian restaurant, they did not serve any apfel strudel so my sis will just have to wait for the next opportunity.

Tonight I was originally going to meet up with a friend of mine to collect a cd of my pictures, but it turned out that she could not make it so we rescheduled our meeting. My hubby was originally supposed to go shopping to Gourmet Garage in Kemang to prepare dinner tomorrow for our guests from Denmark. But since my appointment was cancelled, I ended up going with him and we ended up going to Gourmet Garage together.

Gourmet Garage is a new supermarket specializing in imported food items, and it’s the only place in Jakarta (so far that we found) which sells really good steak meat, including the expensive and tender Wagyu beef. It also has a restaurant upstairs, which has three different menus: Japanese food, western food, and deserts. Since we didn’t have any dinner planned we thought we might as well eat there.

My hubby ordered a crispy chicken burger while I went for the chicken mushroom pie (since I already had a big lunch). My pie was nice although a little bit too dry and there was just too much crust compared to the filling. The chicken burger was as promised: crispy. It was served with some salad and french fries. I particularly like their fries, because it is seasoned with some spices. The chicken burger although nice and crispy was just ok, nothing special. After all it’s fried chicken between two burger buns, what else do you expect other than the usual burger taste? I thought KFC’s chicken burger tastes good too, and this was just the gourmet version – which makes it taste slightly better and much more expensive

Here is my hubby, waiting for me to finish my new routine: take picture first, eat later – which is a routine we both are still getting used to.

One of the easy to cook recipes that I tried and was popular with my sole customer (i.e. my hubby) was chicken mushroom soup, something that was similar to the Indonesian street kitchen ‘mie ayam’. It was one of the easy meals to cook which does not take more than 30 minutes to prepare.

It consisted of finely chopped spring onions, stir-fried together with some chicken (I used chicken breast fillet, cut into small pieces), added with sliced button mushroom, then let boiled in chicken stock. Finally, some sweet soya sauce is added to taste (I also added some salty soya sauce). This time I used semi-instant egg noodles (last time I used instant noodles such as Indomie). It turns out that the one package egg noodles (200 gr) was too much for us, and two packages of Indomie (each about 75 gr) was more of our size. It tasted decent – well I actually really liked it because it’s fast and easy and tastes good too – but I still think that the ‘mie ayam kampung’ is the best.

Weet-Bix, strawberries and blueberries in plain yoghurt topped with honey.

Eat with your eyes. Need I say more? Next to it, my usual breakfast (untoasted muesli with dried fruits and assorted nuts with chocolate milk) seemed so un-appealing. But I finished it anyway.

As one of my new year’s resolution is to drop cook proper food (as opposed to dining out or calling in), last Friday I went through my recipes collection again to put together a one week meal plan. I was reminded of this delicious meatball recipe and decided to cook it again since it was so successful last time.

We went for shopping (for a whole week food stock) at Hero in Kemang, which had almost everything I needed. I actually cooked this on Sunday, because then I had more leisure time on my hands. I divided them in two boxes and stored them in the freezer for consumption during this week.

Today we attacked this mouth-watering menu right after we arrived home from work. The meatballs are made of minced beef mixed with some bread crumbs, dried oregano, eggs, salt and pepper, whereas the sauce is made of beef stock, sliced onions and capsicum, paprika powder, caraway seeds, some all-purpose flour (to thicken the sauce), tomato puree and tomato paste. Just before serving, some sour cream is stirred in. I served it with spaghetti, although my hubby claims it would also be good with mashed potatoes. Maybe I will try that next time.

The end result taste actually reminds me of goulash soup, although it has a slightly more sour hint (because of the tomatoes and sour cream). But one thing’s for sure: it’s definitely a keeper.