Avigayil Damm

Although I love cooking, and don’t really mind spending some extra time in the kitchen if the recipe so calls for it, there also comes a time when I don’t feel like spending too much time in the kitchen. In this case, I turn to my trusty Indofood instant spices collection. Last Saturday was one of those nights, because we came back a little bit late from our monthly grocery shopping.

This time, I used Indofood’s gulai (oriental curry) spice package to cook boneless chicken thighs in. Although the package says it already contains all sorts of spices including coconut milk, I still added some real coconut milk (or as real as UHT processed coconut milk can be). I first fried the chicken to brown them slightly so it does not look too pale, and when it was browned, I added the spice package and stirred it until fragrant. Then, I added some 400 ml of water, really gradually to give some time for the chicken to absorb the spices. When all water was poured and it came to a boil, I added about two tablespoons of the ready made coconut milk and stirred often for a few minutes to prevent it from breaking. In no time, a delicious dinner is served!

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.

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.

I love spending time at home during weekends, winding down and enjoying myself with my hubby. Today’s dinner was baked lemon chicken, which was an easy version of ayam rica-rica (a Manado specialty which actually is more complicated and uses more spices). It’s taken from Periplus Mini Cookbooks’ Indonesian cooking edition of the “Step-by-Step’ series. Here’s how it’s done:

Ingredients:

• 4 whole chicken thighs
• 2 onions, chopped
• 2 red chillies, if you don’t like them hot, remove the seeds
• 2 cloves garlic, crushed
• 1 spring onion, chopped
• 1/4 cup peanut oil
• 1/4 cup lemon juice

Combine onion, chopped chilli, garlic, oil and lemon juice in food processor, blend until smooth and spoon over chicken. Marinade for a few hours, covered, in the fridge.

When ready, place the chicken in a baking dish in a single layer and bake at 180 degrees C for 40 minutes or until cooked and browned.

The taste was not too bad, but what I would do next time is actually fry the chicken because then it would end up crispy.

Later on after dinner and cleaning up in the kitchen, we browsed through the TV channels and found one movie that had just started. The title was Vantage Point and I was thrilled  because I had this on my ‘movies to see’ list as it came with high recommendation from my favourite author, James Patterson. Fortunately for me, before I could get to buy it, it was aired on HBO.

I loved the movie! It had great suspense, and a different way in presenting a story, as if we were watching from different people’s point of view. Although it did not disclose the real motives of the crime that took place (I will not spoil this for you in case you haven’t seen it), but I thought it was still interesting enough, since it seemed to base itself on some sort of a common understanding. It also had a fast story telling style similar to that of ‘24’.

Dennis Quaid was surprisingly decent for an action movie character, and Forest Whitaker was sympathetic as usual. A lot of other good actors that I don’t remember having seen in other movies. Definitely a good enough movie for our lazy Sunday.