Avigayil Damm

Today we went out to Gourmet Garage again in Kemang, as we needed to do some shopping anyway. We tried out some new dishes at their restaurant. My hubby chose the salmon fried rice and I picked the chicken mushroom pasta. Actually, I am not quite sure what the name of my dish was, but basically it had chicken and mushroom with pasta in creamy sauce. If you want to try it out, just look out for the menu description (obviously).

The salmon fried rice was served with some salad and also chilli in soy sauce. My hubby, being a bule with sensitive stomach, he skipped the chilli in soy sauce of course. But I enjoyed it very much although I could only take some two spoons to try out the dish. It tasted like a typical Chinese fried rice actually, which gives this slight smell of burnt rice (in a good way) but does not taste burnt at all. The salmon was a nice touch – it was the first fried rice ever with salmon that I tasted. In fact, it’s the first time I found this type of dish in any restaurant.

As for my dish, it was very tasty as well, but unfortunately since it was served with cream sauce, it was quite heavy. Hence I could not finish the whole dish, but they were kind enough to pack away the rest into a doggy bag. And this time, it was not for Sam, but for my lunch the next day.

Tonight’s dinner recipe was taken from Femina, an Indonesian women’s magazine. Here is the recipe:

Ingredients:

• 100 gr onion, chopped
• 300 gr minced meat
• 8 tbsp breadcrumbs
• salt & pepper to taste
• 1 tsp dry thyme

Mix all ingredients, shape into burger patties and fry on pan. Stack with tomatoes, onion rings or whatever you like to have on your burger. Easy huh?

Unfortunately neither my hubby nor I were quite satisfied with this, honestly. To us, the taste of thyme gave it an unwanted earthy smell. So I guess next time we will skip the thyme altogether.

Have you got any successful burger patty recipe you’d like to share with us?

My friend – who originally lived in Yogyakarta but had moved to Bandung recently for a new job – and I went out for a girls’ day out today. We wanted to just hang out for some coffee and to catch up. So we ended up at La Codefin, and tried out Black Canon Coffee. They had all sorts of coffee in their menu, but I opted for a blended ice chocolate instead. We weren’t really hungry but could eat something for snack and we chose a menu which I forgot the name of. It’s basically green chilli stuffed with minced chicken.

It was something very unique that I have never seen or tried anywhere else. It was not as hot (spicy) as you would think it would be since it seems they have cleaned out the seeds (although not all of them and I did come across some hot parts). I thought it was quite a nice change from the normal snacks that coffee shops usually offer (bitterballen, sandwiches, french fries, chicken wings, etc.) and I think I am going to get myself another portion of that sometime in the future.

For a belated birthday dinner, I took out three friends of mine to Din Tai Fung, a Chinese restaurant famous for its dim sum variety and other dishes as well. We ordered chicken xiao long bao (dim sum filled with chicken – yummy and juicy), fried rice with salty fish (yummy and salty but goooood), mie angsio sapi (noodles with beef – best with additional soy sauce and chilli), kepiting soka abon (crab with floss – no idea how it tasted, I don’t eat crabs), steamed vegetables dumplings (not so impressive but good anyway), and buncis cah sapi (stir-fried haricot beans with minced meat – deliciously crispy).

It has been a long time since I last dined here so I really dug in. We all did. With all the food on the table, at first we thought there was no way we could finish them all, but we were wrong. We even ordered a second double portion of the chicken dumplings because they were so delicious. Of course it goes without saying, that I would definitely come back to this place again soon.

We left a little bit late from the office today and we also needed to stop by at the supermarket for some weekly shopping. Naturally, we didn’t really feel up to cooking when knowing we would be arriving home late, so we stopped by at Burger King in Kemang. I remembered one blog post I once stumbled upon, titled “Fast Food Reality” in which the blog writer compared fast food pictures from ads and the reality. So I decided to take a picture of the cheeseburger I ordered too, just to have fun. Here they are. Picture on left is the ad, and picture on right is – obviously – the actual cheeseburger that I had. Pardon for bite marks since I almost forgot to take a picture of it. Well, not really almost, but I did. Luckily I remembered before it was completely gone.

The picture was taken in the fast food joint, since we were dining in. So it was probably photographed within 10 minutes after it was packed.

Aside to the burger bun being more pale due to the poor lighting and also probably lack of cooking time, I don’t think there is much difference in them, do you? You can see the tomato sauce, the cheese (which has naturally melted since it is squeezed between a hot bun and a hot burger patty), the burger patty (which is slightly paler than the ad picture) and the pickles.

I would think that for the sake of advertisement, during the photo session, the burger bun was cooked a bit longer (to give it a golden colour), and the burger patty was probably also cooked longer (to make it browner) and then sprayed with some oil for shine. Then, all ingredients were probably put together when they were cold, to keep each ingredient’s original shape. If you browse through the links on the left of this page, you will find some websites on food photography and then you’ll see what I mean. Is this called ‘lying to the customers’?

Well, I wouldn’t go that far. It’s simply advertisement. I know a lot of people doing worse, such as touching up their CV to make it look like they are excellent achievers on paper, only to be discovered later (when hired) that they are nothing like they sold themselves to be. At least with these food photography and advertisement, you have the choice of not falling for it (by not frequenting those places), while getting rid of a wrongly hired person would probably not be as simple. (Yeah I know, the two situations are not really comparable but I am in that kind of mood).