Thursday, October 1, 2009

Anyone know recipes for baking bread in a wok?


I doubt this was a cultural specific advertising tactic. It didn't taste any better than it sounds.

I consciously ate an apple core yesterday. Not sure if it was because I had become more used to eating other sorts of fruits besides apples or if I had just become accustomed to eating the parts of food that I previously would have put aside for the trash. Either way, the action made me reflect on my eating habits here and my vain attempts to introduce some foods from home into my diet. It is hard not being in control of what you eat, particularly when you watch your plate being filled with fried foods and fish caught straight from the polluted murky river that sludges through Jambi city. I crave a good salad and a simple sandwich with whole grain nutty bread. While I have resigned myself to the absence of such basic Western goods, I have tried to make do with what is at hand. This means cooking scrambled eggs and hash browns in a wok and then making crepes only to realize I had no utensils to eat them with! You can learn a lot about a people by the kind of things you find in their kitchen. One look at our kitchen and you would notice the abundance of woks, there are at least four, a massive stone mortal and pestle, just one small sauté pan that I have adopted, and no oven at all! But more significantly, we only have spoons! It’s true; I have yet to see a single fork or dinner knife in our kitchen, just a jar full of spoons. I guess I should be thankful for that one convenience because out in the villages (or even most restaurants) eating with your fingers is the norm. The environment here does give Sumi and I ample opportunities to go papaya hunting, i.e. visiting neighbors and friends known to have papaya trees in their backyards and then asking for whatever is ripe. I fully enjoyed my fresh papaya smoothie this morning after the work it took to knock it out of the tree and catch it in a sarong. So I am still hoping that this culinary confusion created by eating eggs with spoons and crepes with fruit salad by hand like I was dipping naan in curry, will eventually lead to some creative genius in the kitchen where I can make food both palatable and functional.

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