The Dewi

This time, I'm going to post a vegetarian dish. A recipe that is close to my heart, and friendly to my tummy. It's one of my favorite dishes that my mother makes. Of course when she makes it, she would always include shrimps or fish, but this time I'm just going to rely on the herbs and spices for flavors and make this dish meat free (complete recipe is available at the bottom of this post). I'm going to share with you my mother's recipe for making ' gulai jamur ' or mushrooms in coconut gravy. As I have mentioned before in my earlier post on cooking jumbo shrimps , I think my mother is a gifted cook. She has excellent taste buds, as most people who have tried her cooking would agree. That is why she can come up with the tastiest dishes. This one is no exception, it is my second favorite dish of hers, very wonderful (the first one being her battered fried shrimps which unfortunately to this day, she will not reveal to me the exact recipe). And what...

By now you should know why I love Indonesian food so much. Never mind that I was born and raised in Jakarta, Indonesia, or the fact that my basics in cooking anything is based on Indonesian food recipes.......What was I trying to say again?? Anyways, I love Indonesian food because it involves three top things that I love in food: chili, coconut milk, and chili. Wait, those are two things, but who's counting? So naturally, I love sambal goreng . And not just any sambal goreng, it has to be Indonesian sambal goreng , because it contains stink/ pete beans more often than not*big grin. So I guess I could say the number three ingredient that I like in Indonesian food is pete beans, except I don't eat them....for aesthetics purposes. I have shared with you my recipe for sambal goreng ati ampela . which is basically similar to this one, except in this recipe we work with shrimps instead of chicken innards. Some of the herbs are different, but not by a lot. Basically, we ...

I was planning to post another recipe for Meatless Monday, but I forgot and made black pepper chicken instead (oooppss!). So let's do Meatless Friday instead, well it doesn't have to be a thing, as long as my plan to cut down meat at least once a week is still on track. You can read more about Meatless Monday here . So, black pepper chicken, popular dish. Is it difficult to make? Not at all! The sauce is basically made with oyster sauce and black pepper. And the variations between one recipe to another, that is what you can include in your unique black pepper recipe, is left to the imagination. You can make it with whatever you want, as long as it tastes good and somebody would want to eat it :D. It was many years ago when I first learnt how to make a proper black pepper sauce. At that time I wanted to impress my family by cooking them black pepper crabs. But then later on, I found a kick a** recipe for cooking crabs that is just....beyond words. So, I no longer pair bl...

And so passed the Chinese New Year.  祝你在新的一年里龙马精神. I hope you are also full of energy and everything goes well for you in this new year. My family and I celebrated with a simple meesuah dish as it is the tradition in my husband's family to eat meesuah during Chinese New Year. So what'd happen is, we'd spend the entire day visiting relatives, eating bowls and bowls of meesuah from one place to another. It's hard to describe the sensation you feel after that. You can find my recipe for the mee suah that I made here . I post daily recipes on my Instagram account, so feel free to follow me here . I hope you'd do that :). Anyways, for this next recipe, in Indonesia you'd find this dish in any Chinese restaurant. But peculiarly enough, when you go to China, you will not find this dish (as conveyed by my husband who has visited many times). Even in Singapore, we don't find this dish in the Chinese restaurants also. So, I think it's save to say that t...

Boy, the sound of this dish sure is extreme when you translate it into English. Reminds me of Halloween somehow. But hearing it in Bahasa delivers a calming sensation to my nerves. ' Sambal goreng ati ampela ', I associate this with deliciousness, bursts of flavor, and family :D. But, still, basically this dish really is chicken liver and gizzards cooked in chili, and if you're not used to this type of eating, then this is extreme for you, while it's like candy to me :P. Indonesia has many varieties of sambal goreng , every region has their own take on it, this is only one of them. This is the sambal goreng I grew up with, even though nowadays my mother has altered her recipe, but this is the flavors that I recognize and will soon share with you (complete recipe in the bottom of this post). What I've done here is I've cleaned and cut up to bite size pieces all the liver, gizzards and hearts. I should have showed you how it is done, but I forgot to...

To keep inline with today's theme of Meatless Monday, I decided to post a  vegetarian  (turns out this recipe contains anchovies) veggie dish, that should be satisfying on its own without leaving me feeling something is amiss without the presence of meat. When I thought about filling, satisfying veggie dish, my mind always goes to anything involving coconut gravy. And what better combination with coconut milk if not the stink beans/ pete ??! I think these dynamic duo is the bomb, whenever they're together, they make magic, alleviate a dish to a whole new level, at least that's what I think. It's hard to go wrong if you use these two items together. So I decided to make a veggie dish based entirely off the basic combination between coconut milk and stink beans. To add to the complexity, I decided to throw in fried anchovies/ ikan teri . Just so the coconut milk doesn't taste too heavy, and gives the veggie another layer of flavor. What better veggie that ...