Terong Balado

With school six days a week – though it’s only a half-day on Saturdays – Sundays are the one day that we have entirely free in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.  During the week my host aunt, a chef who has her own catering service, brings homemade dishes in the afternoons that we heat up again for dinner and then, if there are leftovers, again for breakfast the next morning. Cooked foods sit in the center of the kitchen table underneath a large basket-like cover that keeps the bugs out and then at mealtimes we serve ourselves rice from the rice cooker on the counter - always the central part of the meal - and top it with the dishes on the table as we sit down to eat. We often fry tofu or tempeh, or steam vegetables and set them out on a plate to go along with the other dishes; and if there aren’t enough leftovers from the night before we might make a fried egg with vegetables for breakfast. But on Sundays my host sisters make the main dishes for the day.

At 5:30am last Sunday morning Mbak Ayu, my oldest host sister, poked her head into my bedroom to wake me up to get ready to head to the morning pasar, or traditional outdoor market, to buy ingredients for cooking that morning.  I groggily pulled myself out of bed, the promise of bubur kacang hijau, a sweet mung bean porridge that you can often find at the market, the only thing keeping me from laying my head back down on the soft pillow and falling back asleep for a few more hours.

The market is within walking distance of our house so we set out on foot, me trying to contain my yawns. I always have trouble getting up early but the mornings really are a wonderful time to be outside; while the air is still cool and fresh, before the roads become crowded with traffic and the air becomes hot and polluted. The colors, the sounds, the sweet smells of cooking foods - everything is so vibrant and beautiful in the morning. We passed a man sitting beside a heap of green coconuts as he scooped white flesh from the shells; warm aromas wafted from storefronts selling gorengan, assorted fried snacks like battered tempeh, and cassava fritters filled with palm sugar; and pedicab drivers slowly biked past on their morning routes. 
We turned down a long narrow street off of the main road we walked past fields of rice and grasses, brilliant shades of green glowing in the warm sunlight. The street was dotted with trees bearing every type of tropical fruit imaginable - massive spiky jackfruit tugging down on their flexible branches, bunches of bright pink rambutan with their soft spiky hair, and dark maroon cacao pods hanging nobly from their high branches.

Chocolate Beet Cake

There are a lot of great things about having a CSA share. When you sign up for a weekly share you're supporting local farmers and sustainable farming; you get quality produce at a cheaper price than you could find in a grocery store; and each week you get to bring home delicious foods like seed breads, raw cheese, and sweet corn, that might not have found their way into your kitchen otherwise. For all the wonderful things that come with it, the one drawback of a CSA share is that you also can get stuck with produce that you don't really want. And then you have to find ways to use up all of the fresh fennel, or the eggplant, or the stalks of edamame that you indirectly purchased.
For us, the greatest challenge has been finding ways to use the steady supply of red beets we've received this summer.

As a kid I had the shock of mistaking roasted beets for slices of canned cranberry sauce at a Thanksgiving dinner and have been a bit wary of the root vegetable ever since. But when they started popping up in our vegetable drawer this summer I had forgotten what beets taste like and really had no aversion to trying them again. I topped a pizza with caramelized onions, walnuts, chèvre and small wedges of roasted beets. We quickly decided that none of us liked the beets and we ended up picking them off to salvage the pizza.
But there was still hope; as beets continued to come in each week we discovered that when they are subtle and a side note to other flavors and textures they can be quite nice. We enjoyed the same pizza with a light topping of grated beets instead of wedges, and found that golden beets make for tasty muffins. And so I suspected a chocolate beet cake would be an absolutely delicious way to use up this weeks red beets.

Marinated Tempeh Burgers

In just a few weeks I will be leaving for Indonesia. I am unbelievably excited, and nervous too. Just a couple of days ago I found out that I have a host family in Yogyakarta (pronounced jōg-jə-kär-tə, and sometimes shortened to Jogja) making me all the more excited. I feel nostalgic, too, for something I haven't even left yet; I haven't even left and I'm already beginning to feel the weight of how much I'll miss everyone. 

With just a few more weeks in the states, it seems like I should be doing crazy things - but really, things have been pretty normal. Though I've been trying to learn some Bahasa Indonesia and I have just recently started to contemplate how one goes about packing for a year abroad, for the most part things are the same as usual.

I stumbled upon this recipe a little while ago when we were in the middle of a hot spell - the perfect time to have burgers (so maybe it wasn't the best time to be turning on the oven, but it was definitely worth it). Incidentally, these delicious vegetarian burgers combine a traditional food made in Indonesia - tempeh - with something as quintessentially American as a good ol' burger. 

Now, how cool is that?

And it couldn't be a better combination. The tempeh is delicious marinated, it's moist, and it doesn't crumble apart like many homemade veggie burgers do.

I think they are best covered in melted cheddar, with crisp boston lettuce, ripe tomato, and maybe some avocado, too, next time. But however you like your burger - with mayonnaise or mustard, ketchup or sauerkraut, peanut butter or strawberry rhubarb jam - there's no denying these tempeh burgers are good.

Zucchini Bread

Our weekly CSA share fills our fridge with root vegetables, summer squash, berries, and deliciously fresh eggs. The wide variety of produce we get creates a weekly challenge of sorts: how to use all of this food. It has inspired great pizza, a batch of golden beet muffins, crêpes made with the eggs and pastry flour from our share, carrot pancakes, and vegetable salads of every shape and size.
When our share delivered a bounty of zucchini my sister took to making zucchini pasta for lunch - peeling off thin strips of zucchini and topping it with a drizzle of olive oil and some nutritional yeast. She only used the outer layer of the zucchini for the pasta, so before long the leftover zucchinis began to pile up in our vegetable drawer.

With a bag filled with naked zucchinis sitting neglected in the fridge, it seemed like a good time to make zucchini bread. It worked out well because I had been sitting on my hands, just waiting to make a batch of zucchini bread since the spring.
Rewind three months to the night my sister returned from the co-op with a small loaf of zucchini bread made by a local gluten-free bakery. It was deliciously moist, not too sweet, and was made with buckwheat - among other gluten-free flours - giving the loaf a pronounced earthy, slightly bitter, nutty flavor. The buckwheat worked well in the zucchini bread - it blanketed the other flavors without strangling them, giving it a level of sophistication and complexity that set it apart from other zucchini breads and made it truly irresistible. The loaf disappeared far too quickly, leaving me with nothing to do but dream of making a zucchini bread that could fill its place.
So, without further ado: a vegan, gluten-free (provided your oats are confirmed gluten-free) zucchini bread that is rich in flavor and texture, and has just enough buckwheat flour to remind you that this is not your grandmother's zucchini bread.
Unless she makes her's with buckwheat flour too - in that case, hats off to her!

Raspberry Rhubarb Crisp

There is a small restaurant in our town that makes delicious, hearty meals. The buffet steams with Indian curries and vegetable stews, wild rice casseroles layered with melted cheese and warm slices of baked sweet potato clinging to their toasted skins. Once you've filled your plate with a colorful array of foods you reach the counter, and as you hand the waitress your plate to be weighed, you'll notice all of the beautiful baked goods. Thumbprints filled with raspberry jam, a chocolate bundt cake dusted with powdered sugar, and apricot muffins with grandiose tops.

There is often one giant crisp filled with seasonal fresh fruits. When you decide to try some, they'll fill a wide soup cup to the brim and heat it in the microwave. Once it's warm a waiter will bring it over to your table and you'll dive in with a spoon, scooping out a warm mouthful of berries with a sprinkling of oats. The berries are tart and sweet, and so velvety they will seem to just melt away in your mouth.... Suddenly you'll realize how little you have left and you'll try to savor the last few bites. When you reach the bottom you'll fervently scrape the last traces of filling from the dish, licking the spoon clean. And when you've finished you'll ask yourself why you don't eat crisps more often.