EatingAsia

The Daily Grind

Other than a knife and chopping block, this basalt stone mortar and pestle is the single most important tool of the Indonesian kitchen. The mortar, called cobek in Indonesian and penyan tokan in Balinese, is wide, shallow, and heavy, with a rough surface that makes quick work of reducing ingredients to a paste. Balinese call the pestle anak, which also means 'child'. The anak is short and right-angled with a flattish round base of sizeable diameter.

Most other mortar and pestle dictate a lot of pounding. Think of the hollow 'tok-tok' sound that rises from the mortar of a Thai somtam vendor. A penyan tokan, by contrast, is all about grinding: placing your feet flat on the floor, standing a bit back from the counter, weight on the right (or left, if you're a lefty) arm, and gently rocking back and forth as you move the anak away from your body to the front of the mortar, bring it around the rim to gather ingredients to its center, and then push it forward again. Though I favor mortar and pestle for many preparations I generally don't enjoy it. Pounding is hard and tedious, and it shakes the kitchen counters. The noise sends my cats up the wall and drives the dogs to distraction.

Scraping an anak across the surface of a penyan tokan, on the other hand, is richly satisfying. Garlic cloves, shallots, fingers of turmeric, chilies, lemongrass stalks, and even whole nutmeg give way effortlessly under the pressure of an anak. Back and forth and around, back and forth and around - it's almost hypnotizing.

Penyan tokan and anak are not confined to the home kitchen. They're useful tools at market and street stalls as well. In Sumatran markets whole sections are populated by (usually female) chili grinders, and they're not using machines, just heavy-duty mortar and pestle like this one (or larger, rectangular models) to reduce chilies to mush. At Bali's Sererit Market I watched my sirat (rice pancake) vendor prepare serving after serving of pecelan (vegetable salad with a dressing that might, according to the customer's taste, include peanuts, chilies, and shallots) using a penyan tokan. Putting anak to the mortar's stone surface, she pulled an order together in a minute and half flat.

From behind a table in the open alley downstairs this vendor made pecelan dressed with a more complex sauce, consisting of pre-made bumbu (spice paste - look for the half-covered white pot in the second photo) ground with chopped peanuts, chilies, kecap manis, and kalamansi juice.

The salad included pressed rice cakes, cucumber, bean sprouts, and blanched snake beans. After mixing the pecelan she scooped it onto nature's disposable dinnerware (a banana leaf) and sprinkled it with crunchy deep-fried peanuts and soy beans.

The result was an intense, lively collage of the flavors I've come to associate with Balinese cooking, especially turmeric, nutmeg, and galangal - and, as per our request, plenty of chili heat. It left our lips tingling and our bellies wishing for more.

When we returned from Bali last month I decided to reintroduce to my kitchen the penyan tokan and its 'child' that I bought in Bali about five years ago. Watching those market ladies whip up fantastic dishes in a matter of minutes inspired me to make use of these tools I'd shamefully left to languish in the cupboard. I seasoned the stone by grinding wet rice, garlic, turmeric, and chilies, letting the paste almost dry on the mortar and pestle, and then washing (with water only) and repeating. After just a few days the stone surface was sealed and ready for a test drive.

Last night I made a brilliant pecelan with the simplest dressing of peanuts, kecap manis, chilies, shallots, and kalamansi juice, thinned with a little water. This light salad is about as far from the thick, gloppy, overly sweet gado-gado served in many a Stateside Indonesian restaurant as you can get. Best of all, with a mortar and pestle like this (or a mini-chopper) the dressing literally takes 3 minutes to make. The only other labor involved is chopping and blanching the vegetables and steaming some rice to serve alongside.

Next week: a more complex pecelan with a dressing that incorporates some of that bumbu (spice paste).

Pecelan (Balinese Vegetable Salad With Peanut and Chili Dressing)

Use a stone mortar and pestle to make the dressing (Indonesian or Malaysian, or a Mexican molcajete), or chop the ingredients finely and finish in a Thai ceramic mortar, or do it all in blender (though you may have to add water to get the ingredients to blend).

I've deliberately left amounts (other than peanuts) out, because this dressing is all about personal taste. I think, in fact, that it's impossible to screw this dressing up, because you can always counter an off taste with more of the other ingredients. Want more salt? Up the kecap manis. Like a lot of sour (though this should not be Thai sweet-sour)? More lime juice. If you don't have kecap manis (Indonesian sweet soy sauce) use regular soy and pound in some palm sugar or brown sugar or maple sugar. You could also add a garlic clove and/or some lemongrass, or leave out the chilies altogether if you don't like hot. You could also thin with coconut milk instead of water, for a richer dressing.

You can use as few as one vegetable here or as many as you have time to chop and blanch. Replace the tofu with tempeh or pressed rice cakes. Or leave the protein out altogether.

This sauce made with a handful of peanuts should dress enough salad for two big eaters. Great eaten with steamed rice or barbecued fish. 

Dressing

A big handful of roasted, unsalted peanuts (I used peanuts roasted in the shell and left the skins on - not a problem)

Fiery small chilies (optional)

Kecap manis (or soy sauce + dark brown sugar or palm sugar or maple sugar)

A couple shallots

Kalamansi or limes

If you're using a stone mortar then everything can be left whole. Start by grinding the peanuts, then add shallots and chilies. Dribble in some kecap manis and just a squeeze of kalamansi or lime juice. Taste for seasoning and adjust to your liking BEFORE adding enough water to thin the dressing somewhat. Remember that some of your salad ingredients will probably have water on them from blanching/washing, so don't thin the dressing too much.

If you're using a blender first chop the ingredients as finely as possible, then blend using a dribble of kecap manis, some lime juice, and water. Taste for salt, sour, heat, and add ingredients accordlingly.

Salad

Amounts are malleable but - as a general guide, if you're including all the vegetables, you might start with 2 handfuls of soy beans, 4 snake beans, half a small cabbage, and a small bunch of sturdy greens.

1 block firm tofu, cut in half horizontally, wrapped in a kitchen towel, and placed under a cookie sheet or other pan weighted with cans, and left for about an hour

snake beans or green beans

green round cabbage

bean sprouts

A sturdy green, such as daun ubi (cassava leaves), the leaves of large bok choy, chard, kale, etc. You could also use spinach

a long (English) cucumber or several pickling cucumbers

a handful of raw peanuts and/or soy beans

vegetable oil

For serving (optional): kalamansi halves or lime wedges and cilantro leaves

1. Cut the tofu into small squares. Slice the snake beans into small pieces. Shred the cabbage (not too thinly).
2. Blanch the bean sprouts (quickly - they should still be crunchy), greens, snake beans, and cabbage and drain. When the greens are cool squeeze them dry and chop, then shake the leaves to separate them. When all the vegetables are well-drained (squeeze lightly between kitchen or paper towels if necessary) place them in a mixing bowl.
3. Split the cucumber(s) lengthwise and remove the seeds with a spoon. Cut them into small wedges and add to the bowl.
4. Heat about a quarter inch of oil in a small pan over medium high heat. Add the peanuts and/or soy beans and fry until browned and crunchy. Remove with a slotted spoon and drain on paper towel.
5. Add the dressing to the salad and mix carefully - try not to break up the tofu squares. Spoon onto a plate and top with the peanuts/soy beans and cilantro leaves, if using. Serve with lime wedges or kalamansi halves (if using). 

The Forest and the Trees

Markets are wonderful places. Markets with second-floor perches especially so.

This market in Sererit, a town on Bali's northern coast, was already buzzing when we arrived before dawn. It consists of a hulking square building bordered by alleys of varying width. In the early morning alleys to the sides and front of the markets are crowded with vendors who sell fruits, vegetables, and materials for religious offerings from plastic tarps laid on the pavement.

At sunrise these vendors are packing up, and by 7am they're gone, leaving in their wake the detritus of wet market commerce: pineapple tops, stray scallion leaves, snakefruit skins, the odd clove of garlic or finger of fresh turmeric crushed under foot. 

Meanwhile, the 'back alley' - the lane tracing the length of the market building's rear wall - has come alive. This is where the fish vendors head. From 8 o'clock on this space becomes increasingly claustrophobic. It's exhilerating, alternately standing amidst the whirl of activity and gamely dodging rapidly moving loads of rambutan and sloshing buckets of seafood. We like the confusion - where did that guy with the load of turmeric-marinated tuna go? Did you see that elderly woman's spectacular sarong? She's over there, bargaining for flowers - whoops, no, she's gone.

And then, sometimes, it's just exhausting. Sometimes we see only the forest, when we want to see the trees. Which is why a market with a second, open story that overlooks a particularly frenetic selling area is a fantastic thing.

From up here we see that several vendors, whom I've passed at street level a few time already, are selling krill. I know how Filipinos eat krill, but I wonder what Balinese do with it? And we notice that though these ladies are trading in seafood, they're also hawking the makings for the offerings that Balinese make to ancestors and spirits several times everyday: flowers and green bananas, betel nuts and dried leaf garlands to be hung on altars, even altars themselves.

From up here what seemed, down there, to be utter chaos assumes a certain order. Deliveries are made. Sales are negotiated. Greetings are exchanged. The pace seems -almost - leisurely.

And from up here we have space from which to pick out details: the offerings made by every vendor before the business day starts;

the ingenious way bean sprout sellers 'air' their wares to keep the sprouts on the bottom of the tray free of damaging moisture;

the beauty of something as everyday as a coconut grater.

It's up here, too, that we can explore local a.m. treats, like sirat, the thinnest, flattest possible rice flour 'pancakes', sprinkled with coconut and liberally lashed with liquid gula aren, dark and smoky sugar made from aren palm sap.

A cup of sweetened Balinese coffee on the side, and we're good to go back down below, into the crush.

DIY Coconut Oil

Coconut oil is made from ...

... coconuts.

Not exactly breaking news, I know, but we don't often think about where the most basic of our kitchen staples come from. By now olives harvested from trees and pressed into oil is a well-trod story. But what is vegetable oil made from, exactly? How do you get oil from corn? And what is canola, anyway?

All worthy musings, but today it's the humble coconut to which we turn our attention. On Bali we spent a couple days watching, cooking with, and photographing two local cooks. Ibu Nengah and her husband are renowned for their kitchen prowess; they're hired by folks in the area to prepare feasts for weddings, birthdays, and other festive occasions. One morning they showed us how to make coconut oil. Ibu Nengah says that, time allowing, they prefer to make their own oil because what they can purchase at the store just can't match the homemade version for flavor and fragrance.

The coconut oil-making process is relatively simple, if time-consuming. It starts, unsurprisingly, with coconut meat, here grated by hand with a nifty tool that consists of a board sprouting rows of nails. Actually this homemade grater reduces fresh coconut into fine shreds much more quickly and efficiently than a Western-style metal grater.

Hot water is added to the grated coconut, and the mixture is stirred until it cools, at which point the coconut is squeezed - hard! - to get it to release as much 'milk' as possible.

This is the first pressing; more hot water is added to the squeezed coconut meat and the process is repeated. Three coconuts produce about 1.5 liters of coconut milk.

The coconut milk is put over a good-sized fire and is left to boil briskly. Two coins of turmeric are added (and removed about an hour later). The turmeric colors the oil, and Ibu Nengah says it keeps it 'fresh'. It probably adds a bit of flavoring as well, which doesn't much matter because just about every Balinese dish that coconut oil might be used in includes turmeric as an ingredient.

After about an hour foam forms on the liquid's surface yellowish fat starts appearing around its edges of its surface. Ibu Nengah's husband sprinkles water on the coconut milk's surface - to further draw out the oil, he says.

By the time the coconut milk is pulled from the heat (about one and a half hours) it's been reduced in volume by about one half, the foam has dissipated, and its surface is covered with a thin cap of golden oil.

The milk-oil is poured through a mesh strainer to capture foam and any bits of stray coconut meat,

and then returned to the pan and left aside to allow the coconut milk solids to settle. (If you've ever clarified butter these steps will sound familiar.) After about five minutes Ibu Nengha and her husband use small bowls to skim the oil from the surface of the pan.

and transfer it to a smaller, heavier cast-iron wok (above left). What's leftover in the big pan after skimming is set aside.

The smaller pan is placed on the fire for about fifteen minutes. It's removed from the heat spitting and gurgling,

but after just a few minutes the bubbles fade away to reveal nearly clear oil.

Now Ibu Nengha places a plastic mesh cloth over a woven basket, sprinkles it with a bit of grated coconut meat (to create a finer sieve), and scrapes in the mush left in the black pan after the oil's been poured off (above). To this she adds any further oil that's surfaced after the first boiling (below), transferring it to the sieve with a small bowl.

Then she scrapes and presses the mixture with a spoon to retrieve every last drop of oil.

What's left in the basket/mesh sieve is a wickedly unctuous coconut-flavored, slightly nutty sludge. It will be eaten as a sweet snack, just a spoonful  at a time (it's delicious but so rich that more than a spoonful is out of the question), or stirred into rice to eat with other dishes.

All that effort and time, and 1.5 liters of coconut milk, yields one small bottle of oil.

But it's by far the best coconut oil we've ever sampled, and the scent that fills the kitchen when I heat it in a pan makes us think of Ibu Nengah and her husband, their tranquil outdoor kitchen, and the clove and coffee tree-swathed hills of northern Bali.

Guest Post: The Big BM on Bali Babi

After our 'Bali Bound' post went up I received an email from a pork-loving reader asking me to write about the babi guling (roast pig) in Ubud. On this trip we were nowhere near Ubud, and while we did sample a very nice plate of pork on our way from the airport to our accommodations in the northern hills, that was about it. But fortunately for reader Ying, while on Bali we met up with Brett Martin, a Brooklyn-based writer who's as crazy for pig as we are for chilies. After Dave and I returned home to KL Brett and his partner in crime J headed to Ubud, where Brett found porky heaven at Ibu Oka. Below, he rates Bali's babi. (Brett also pays occasional homage to all things porcine on his blog, where you can view a few cool Bali videos. And no, we did not pay him to write that first sentence.)

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Regular readers of this site will notice that this guest post lacks both Robyn's encyclopedic, insightful knowledge and Dave's beautiful pictures. What it does have is pork - really, really good pork. Pork so good, that it currently ranks in my rolling register of Top 5 Pork Meals, a list than also includes, in no particular order: roasted pork belly from Wong Kee, in Kuala Lumpur; spare ribs cooked by Bill Milroy and his Texas Rib Rangers competition barbecue team; the slices of cottechino that come with a bollito misto at Bologna's Restaurant Diana; and the bacon at Brooklyn's Peter Luger Steakhouse. This last, it's worth noting, is nothing more than thick-cut Boar's Head bacon, albeit charred beautifully over Luger's well-seasoned broilers. It just goes to show that sometimes context is the best sauce.

Which brings us back to the babi guling or roast suckling pig at Ibu Oka, in Ubud, Bali. I was there in early March, soon after Nyepi, Balinese New Year. In order to accommodate the holiday's proliferation of religious rituals, Ibu Oka's usual digs at the center of town had been temporarily commandeered and the restaurant relocated to the owner's sprawling family compound. In Bali, 'family' means something closer to 'clan' and the Agung home includes many buildings, set around multiple courtyards. Most of the property had been transformed into makeshift dining facilities filled with lucky eaters: Ibu Oka roasts only five pigs per day, closing whenever they run out of meat. The doors rarely stay open past 2pm. (The place's popularity has apparently been stoked by some guy named Bourdain who put it on his TV show; haven't heard of him myself.)

Mid-meal, a cook went by, bearing a whole, golden brown pig. When I went in search of the piggy source, I was waved along past the kitchen building where huge pots of rice were cooking, past the family temple and a teenager's equally reverent shrine to Guns N' Roses, past a yard filled with fighting cocks housed n woven rattan cages and another kitchen where cooks were chopping baskets of green chilies, finally to a set of concrete pits where, instead of beautifully roasted pigs on spits, I was greeted by five very-much-alive pigs, awaiting their turn the next day.

That this sight hardly diminished my appetite says something about just how good Ibu Oka's babi guling is. Every morning, starting before 6am, the young pigs are killed, cleaned, and stuffed with a rough, savory hash of shallots, garlic, galangal, lemongrass, and chilies. 

They're bathed in coconut oil and then attentively turned by hand beside a scorching pyre of coffee branches.

A few hours later, each resulting portion is like an object lesson in using every part of an animal : chunks of moist rib and shoulder meat; a glistening square of toffee-colored skin; a length of freshly prepared blood sausage; and a crispy scattering of fried offal and crackling - all topped with a sauce made, in part, from the stuffing.

It's enough to make me consider naming my first born Bobby Guling Martin.

What Bali Taught Me

There are many things I love about living in this part of the world: that I can buy coconut grated to order. That Dave and I can easily and quickly hop from country to country and culture to culture. That, as each year passes, it becomes ever more obvious that no matter how much I learn about this region and its foods I'll never, ever know it all.

Salak, or snakefruit, are wildly popular in Malaysia and Thailand. I'd seen them displayed for sale in bundles but never knew that that's how they grow, bunched together around a single stem. Nor did I know they're the fruit of a type of palm tree (for some reason I pictured them hanging from tree branches) and that they grow nestled in fronds covered with dangerously sharp spines. Harvesting salak is no easy task.

In the hills of northern Bali male and female salak trees are planted side-by-side to delineate agricultural property boundaries. Dave took these photos in a small village a terrifying fifteen-minute motorbike ride from the nearest road, soon after the trees' owner had graciously wrestled a couple of bunches free for us to try.

I learned something else: all salak are not created equal.

Named for their tough scaly skin, snakefruit have long sat low on my list of beloved Asian tropical fruits. I've eaten them in Thailand, Malaysia, on Sumatra (Indonesia), and in the Philippines, and have always found them off-puttingly pungent, their flesh dry, juiceless, oddly chewy, and more likely than not to leave the inside of my mouth feeling as if it's covered with fuzz. In short, an utter waste of jaw power. 

Balinese salak are a whole other animal, their flesh moist if not quite juicy, giving if not exactly tender. What's more, they're far from stinky, with a flavor that's a pleasant tropical punch-y mix of banana, pineapple, and the tiniest hint of mango. I may have shunned salak in the past but on Bali I couldn't get enough of them.

Another thing I've learned in Southeast Asia: if at first you're not convinced, taste taste again. Malaysian durian converted me to the King of Fruits (native Balinese durian, by the way, give the Malaysian varieties a real run for their money). And Balinese salak did the same for the ugly snakefruit.

Bali Bound

We're headed to Bali's clove and coffee country, where we'll be meeting friends old and new, invading some home kitchens, doing a bit of marketing, eating lots of good food (of course!), and observing Nyepi Day in perfect silence.

Back in a week or so.

Simply Soto

We've walked by this place at least fifty times.

Padang is a smallish town, easily done on foot. Soto Simpang Karya sits at one corner of the roughly triangular route we trod several times a day from guesthouse to market to seaside and back again. Open morning to late at night, it's always fronted by a solid row of motorcycles, doing a steady business. When we pass the place we slow a bit, and Dave says, 'We gotta try that place.' I say, 'That must be some tasty soto.' And we keep walking.

It's hard to get excited about soto, a brothy meat dish found, in a variety of incarnations, all over Indonesia. We're in the home of the mind-boggling buffet that is nasi Padang, after all. Around every corner there's a stick or five of spicy Padang-style sate with our names on it. A noodle to end all noodles is up the street (it comes with a nice sunset view), and a magical bubur is served just around the corner - with a side of strong coffee to boot.

But this morning the oppressive heat is lightened by a breeze, and as we pass Simpang Karya it shifts direction ever so slightly, carrying the scent of soto right to our nostrils. The market can wait. It's time for breakfast.

The staff is busy, no time for chitchat. As soon as we sit, it's 'Beef or lamb?' The customer across the table answers for us: 'Daging enak.' ('The beef is great.')

And so it is. Chunks of tender, smoky beef carved off a knobby hunk. A dash of vinegar, a splodge of chili sauce, a drizzle of kecap manis. Rice vermicelli and bits of pergedel, a chewy fried cake of rice and corn that absorbs the deep meaty broth, fragrant with all those spices usually associated with Indonesia - nutmeg, cloves, cinammon - and then some, that's ladeled over all.

Served with a plate of room-temperature rice topped with crunchy rice chips and chopped cilantro, it's a brilliant mix of textures and temperatures. We splash a bit of broth on rice, then transfer a spoonful of rice to broth, then pluck out pieces of beef and beehon to eat with chips, all the while adding dribs and drabs of chili paste (which is, in Sumatran style, nothing but fresh red chilies ground with salt) and a drop or two more vinegar.

We're departing Padang in a few hours, and there'll be no chance of a repeat soto. What idiots we've been.

Before we leave Dave turns his camera on Auggie (that's how it sounds, but probably not how it's spelled), a server who's been watching us intently from a rear corner of the shop. At first he's all supercool and composed, doing his jaded Indonesian teen thing.

Then he starts to loosen up.

Finally, he finds it difficult to take us - or himself - too seriously.

Dave and his camera seem to have this effect on people.

Note: We're wondering how Soto Simpang Karya (and the rest of Padang) weathered the September quake off southern Sumatra. If anyone's been recently, please drop us an email.

Soto Simpang Karya, Jalan Pondok, Padang, Sumatra (Indonesia). Morning to night. No off days.

Kerepek Crazy in West Sumatra

West Sumatra is home to the best crackers (or chips/crisps, if you like) in Southeast Asia. Kerepek are made all over Indonesia (and in Malaysia as well), but by our estimation Sumatra's Minangkabau take the craft of cracker making to giddy heights.

Some varieties, such as peyek ikan (square or round rice flour crackers studded bits of green onions and whole dried fish), are real works of art.

Most every west Sumatran market - big or small, daily or weekly, in town or villages - has numerous stalls dedicated to all foods crunchy and snack-able.

Crisps are displayed hanging in plastic bags

and heaped in gargantuan baskets.

They're sold ready to eat, like these kerepek made with buffalo skin (much tastier than you might imagine),

and dried, awaiting a bath in hot oil to bring out their crunch.

We love peyek ikan, both for its beauty and bracing, fish-forward saltiness that performs a lovely duet with ice-cold beer. But we're especially fond of kerepek sanjai, cassava crisps with a sweet and spicy coating.

About an hour from Bukittingi, on the road to the market town of Payakumboh, two rows of shops specializing in kerepek - kerepek sanjai, in particular - face off across the two-lane blacktop.

In an open room at the end of one row, two local lads are making kerepek. To start, a basket of wafer-thin, 2-inch wide semi sun-dried cassava strips are dumped into bubbling oil.

To insure the chips crisp evenly the kerepek cook repeatedly dips his strainer into the oil,

raises it from the frothing mass, and tosses the kerepek again and again,

creating lots of steam in the process.

After ten minutes the kerepek are removed from the oil and transferred to a smaller wok filled with a sticky sugar-chile sauce. The chip mixer uses his (plastic-protected) hands and a couple of shallow plastic saucers to toss the cassava about in the brick-red goo, working quickly to make sure it coats every nook and cranny of the kerepek while they're still hot.

Once the kerepek have cooled, he transfers them to buckets to await packaging.

Though every shop on the strip is selling kerepek sanjai, not all use this method to prepare their specialty. In one shop, we found a woman seated in front of a heap of cooked cassava chips, using a paint brush to painstakingly stripe both sides of each kerepek with a coating of spicy sweetness (8 photos up, background).

In Padang, kerepek shops cluster near the river, in the town's Chinese section.

 

The proprietress of Natal Jaya (where peyek ikan are called payet mako, after the dried fish that decorate them, and kerepek sanjai are named kripik balado, after a Minang sambal), one of the busier businesses on the street, tells us they sell about three hundred 500-gram bags of kripik balado a day (during Ramadan the number rises to 2000).

Natal Jaya makes its own kripik balado (some of the other shops source theirs elsewhere), in the back of the shop. Here, as at the shops outside Bukittingi, the cassava strips are given a dunk in chile goo after deep-frying, but at Natal Jaya they're not tossed, just lifted out of the stickiness

and allowed to drain. The result is a thickly-coated chip that dictates consumption be accompanied by a wetnap.

'Sticky' and 'saucy' may be words more often associated with buffalo wings than with crisps, but Natal Jaya's kerepek balado evince just the right balance of saltiness, sweetness, and lip tingling-spiciness and - in spite of their gooey-ness, have a hearty crunch that somehow stands the test of time, plastic bag packaging, and humidity.

Happily, Natal Jaya will pack a carry-on luggage sized box of bags to go. Sadly, our stash ran out several months back.

Tiga Tumpuk

The words 'Southeast Asian wet market' bring to mind images of bounty - heaps of gorgeous fresh vegetables, showy mounds of extravagantly colored fruit, the glint of sun off the scales of dozens of varieties of fish.

We find the opposite at this weekly market in western Sumatra, about thirty kilometers south of the Aceh border. Though it's lively in the way that once-a-week markets are, the selection of produce is limited. Stall after stall of dried fish is a testament to the local standard of living. Fresh fish and vegetables are expensive, dried fish can stretch a meal among family members and over days.

This woman sells cabe, or chilies. Tiga tumpuk - three piles - of cabe, to be exact (the chilies in the basket are another vendor's and she's selling the stink beans in front of her chilies for a neighbor). Each tumpuk sells for 2,000 rupiah (foreigner's price?), or less than 25 cents. She grows them in her garden and makes the trek to this market every week to sell her 'harvest', rarely more than five tumpuk in total.

'They're good chilies! Very hot,' she assures us. And agrees to pose with her produce.

Catcalls ensue immediately. 'Look pretty! Smile! You're going to be on TV!' Most of the hecklers are young male CD vendors with outrageous haircuts.

She doesn't know what to make of it, at first. But then she gets into the swing.

We're on the road and have no kitchen, but buy two tumpuk anyway. It's the least we can do, for a smile like that.

Tarry, Tarry Night

Stones for dinner? Not quite.

These rock-like objects are the hard-shelled seeds of the kepayang tree (Pangium edule), which grows wild in Indonesia and Malaysia. Known as kluwak in Indonesian and buah keluak in Malaysian, they are an essential ingredient in rawon, an east Javanese beef or chicken stew, and in ayam/babi buah keluak, a Malaysian Nonya chicken or pork specialty.

I'd been eyeing the piles of kluwak at Indonesian vendors' stalls in Kuala Lumpur's Chow Kit market for some time. It was the wonderfully rich rawon served by a Javanese vendor at nearby Restoran TAR that set me on the path to purchase.

Studded with tiny, barely sprouted soy beans, this beefy bowl begged to be eaten on a cold night in front of a roaring fire. No chance of that in KL, though I might set the aircon to high before I sit down to my own version.

The pale 'meat' of raw kluwak are poisonous. On Java, where most commercially-sold kluwak originate, they are soaked and boiled to neutralize their hydrocyanic acid. The pitch-black meat of the processed seeds is soft and oily, like half-cooled tar (some might say opium), and smells woodsy, like a forest floor after a long rain. It tastes a bit like a strong mushroom, with the barest repellant-yet-alluring hint of truffle.

Before being blended into rawon the kluwak is ground to a paste. The depth of flavor it lends to this humble dish is difficult to describe, but I've rarely been as taken by a bowl of beef soup. A better cook than I would no doubt figure a way to incorporate this intriguingly fungi-esque ingredient into a western dish or two.

Kluwak are easily available (already shelled) in the US - on Amazon, no less. Fans of (very) slow-cooked, big flavors might want to try this recipe, posted by an Indonesian food blogger, for rawon made with oxtail, or this one, for Nonya ayam buah keluak (chicken cooked with kluwak).