Chicken and Potatoes Smoor

Most of Indonesian recipes are spicy and salty. We use chillis in almost every meals but this one is different. It has sweet taste with a lot of spices on it. The original name in Indonesia is SEMUR but I can not find a suitable word in English so I use the original word instead, smoor. Meat is the common ingredient for this recipe, you can use beef, pork or chicken. But sometimes people also cook smoor with hard boiled eggs or tofu. In this recipe, I use chicken with additional potatoes.

Chicken and Potatoes Smoor

Ingredients:

1 kg chicken, cut into medium size

0,5 kg potatoes, cut and then deep fried.

A ltr of water

2 pcs cardamom

3 cm cinnamon

3 pcs star anise

Sweet soy

Salt and pepper

Blended ingredients:

10 pcs red onions

3 pcs garlics

3 cm ginger

5 pcs candlenut

1 pc nutmeg

How to cook:

Heat cooking oil in a medium size pan, then add the blended ingredients, stir well for about 3 minutes

Add the chicken breast and stir until medium cooked.

Add cardamom, cinnamon and star anise. Cook until you can smell fragrance of the spices.

Add sweet soy. The amount is depends on how sweet you want your smoor to be. The more sweet soy, the sweeter. My kids love sweet smoor so I always add more sweet soy :) 

Add the deep fried potatoes then stir well until all chicken breasts and potatoes turn brown with sweet soy. Then add water.

Let it boiled for at least half and hour until all the spices absorbed well.

I usually sprinkle parsley on top of it before served.

Enjoy! :)

Fish with Salty Soybean Paste

Soybean is commonly found on Asian cuisine. Its made of soybean (obviously) and has been preserved with salt and other ingredients so that it can be keep for longer time without being rotten. The taste is salty with dark brown colour and you can still see the soybean inside. This time, I want to share a recipe using this soybean paste.

Basically you can always use anything other than fish to cook with soybean paste, such as: shrimps, squids or eggs. This time I choose fish instead.

Fish with Salty Soybean Paste

Ingredients:

1/2 kilos fresh fishes, wash and cut into half. Sprinkle with salt and lemon, leave it about 15 minutes. Then deep fried the fishes until golden brown.

10 pcs of green beans, sliced

10 pcs green pepper

2 cm ginger, smashed

1 dried tamarind

1 lemongrass

1 bayleaf

Half tomato, sliced

1 tsp of Oyster sauce

Blended ingredients:

10 pcs shallots

5 pcs garlics

1 cm ginger

A spoon of of dried prawn

Shrimp paste

How to cook:

Add oil into medium size pan and heat it

Add smashed ginger and fried for 2 minutes, then add all the blended ingredients, stir for 2 minutes

Add tamarind, lemongrass, bayleaf and the green pepper and sliced tomato, stir well

Add the sliced grean beans and oyster sauce, then let all cook for about 5 minutes, then add 1 cup of water to blend all the ingredients. Cook until the green beans become soft.

Add the fried fishes into the pan and stir well so they covered completely inside the sauce, leave it for 5 minutes for to fishes to absorb the sauce.

Ready to serve ^^

Note: since I have already use enough salty ingredients such as soybean paste, shrimp paste and oyster sauce on this, I do not add anymore salt into the recipe but you can always add salt anytime you like :)

Spicy Sausages Fried Rice

My last post about Crab Soup with Corn here  is an usual menu for main course. Now, I want to share another favorite menu for my family, this time for breakfast. It Spicy Sausages Fried Rice. We all love fried rice for breakfast and I usually combine it with other type of additional and not just sausages. I love to combine it with scrambled eggs, pepperoni, mushroom, salted-fishes, etc. So, basically, you can always replace the sausages with other additional dish you like. 

Spicy Sausages Fried Rice

Ingredients:

- Two plates of rice (I usually keep the rice inside the freezer over night to get rid of the moist we usually  find in hot rice. Cold rice will taste crispy when used as fried rice. But its your choice :) )

- 2 garlics, finely chopped

- Chicken breasts (as many as you like), thinly sliced

- Sausages (as many as you like), sliced

- 6 onions, thinly sliced, fried

- 2 eggs, scrambled

- Sweet soy sauce

- Oyster sauce

- Spring Onions and Parsley, finely chopped

- Salt and pepper

Ingredients to blend using a blender:

- 10 onions

- 3 chillis (add more if you want)

- 1 ounce of dried shrimp

- 1cm of ginger

How to cook:

Add butter or cooking oil into medium size fried pan and heat it.

Add chopped garlics and stir for a while

Add all the blended ingredients, stir for about 2 minutes.

Add chicken breasts, oyster sauce, sweet soy sauce and stir well

Add sliced sausages and scrambled eggs. Stir well altogether.

Add cold rice into the pan, stir well for a few minutes until all the ingredients mixed well and the white rice turn into brown colour.

Add salt and pepper then sprinkled with fried sliced onion.

Sprinkle with finely chopped spring onions and parsleys.

Ready to serve :)

Happy breakfast...

Crab Soup with Corn

It's been raining a lot in here recently. Usually, we have rainy season in Medan starts from October to December. It's not like all day long kind of type rain of course. Only few hours daily. I especially call this as Christmas season. Yay! Christmas is almost here....

Anyway, any kind of hot soup will be suitable during this season. A kind of food we usually enjoy together. This recipe is one of our favorite meal that I'd love to share with you. The recipe is very simple and  can be served within an hour.

Crab Soup with Corn

Ingredients:
1kg of crabs, cut half
3 medium caroot, peeled and slice diagonally
1 potato, cut into 8
1 medium corn, cut into 10 part
2 spring onions, thin sliced
1 parsley, finely chopped
1 tometo, cut into 4
Salt and pepper
Onions, sliced and fried until golden brown

Blend these ingredients:
10 onions
5 garlic
Ginger 3cm

How to cook:
Boil water in a pot.
Cut 3cm of ginger and smashed but not broken. Put inside the water.
After the water boiled, add sliced carrots, potatoes and corns and let them boiled for half an hour.
(Since I have toddler, I want the carrots and potatoes softer and I will boil them longer)
Then crabs and let them boiled for another half and hour than add sliced tomato.

Add the blended ingredients into the pot, stir in and season with salt and pepper.
Add half amount of the spring onions and parsley, stir for a few minutes more.

How to serve:
Add the crabs in a bowl, add carrots, potatoes and corns.
Pour the broth.
Add the rest of the spring onions and parsley.
Last one, sprinkle with fried onions..

Bon appetite....Selamat makan ^^

The Oily Fried Noodles

I was having a research about our next family vacation on the internet. My main research actually is about a good and cheap hotel in a certain place which comfortable and suitable for family based on other people’s experiences. There are few particular sites where everyone can share their opinions and experiences about hotels on their vacations. I’m talking about foreign tourists who visited Indonesia right now. Along with the hotel experiences, they usually also share some other things about their vacation mostly about the food.
There is a kind of food which familiar in Asia and can be found easily everywhere called “Mie Goreng” (in Indonesia) or “Fried Noodle” in English. Maybe, some of you, my foreign friends, are not familiar with this food yet but its so popular here. The main ingredient is noodle of course (vermicelli or egg noodles) mixed with (usually) shrimps, squid, chicken, eggs and vegetables all fried together in a hot wok. But first you must know that fried noodle is different from pasta.
Most of the foreign tourists complain that their “mie goreng” are too oily. Indeed, the fried noodle is an oily kind of food. That’s why it is different from pasta such as spaghetti. Pasta tends to be cheesy and fried noodles tend to be oily. But believe me despite the oily look, the fried noodles taste really great. Maybe you’re just not familiar yet with the oily part. Once you tried it a few more times, then maybe you will realize that “mie goreng” or fried noodles will always be oily yet yummie, dear.

Soup, Everyone?

I’m back… I’m back, my dear friends. My laptop’s issue has been solved properly. I will start my blogwalking time again in a very short time. Thanks a lot for keep visiting me along this time. From now on, I will be able to visit you back again. Meanwhile, you may want to read something about soup.

Creamy Soup

Soup has been well known for its ability to heal few kinds of illness. It is also an easy kind of food and can be ready in few minutes, since all you need is just adding any kind of ingredients you like. If having a headache, you might like to try the rich and creamy soup with a lot of vegetables on it. Or when you’re having a cold or fever, you may try the chicken soup, my dear friends.

You know, the first soup was actually made around 6000 BC. At that time, people used hippopotamus’ bones to make the stock. In ancient England, the word “soup” actually has a different meaning. Soup means: a slice of bread covered up with meat stock. And a few decades later, you can even find several kinds of soup, such as thick soup, or even creamy soup. It may not have a slice of bread on it, but it definitely use meat stock on the process.

Yes, stock is the most important ingredient on soup. A perfect stock will give a tasty soup as the result. You can make a thick stock by boiling meat along with the bones for a few hours. There’s a quick tip for you. If you don’t have much time to make stock and refuse to use the package one, you still use this as a way out. Make a large amount of stock at a time. You don’t have to use them all on one bowl of soup. Keep the rest of the stock and put it into an ice tray. Let it freeze inside your chiller until turn out to be just like ordinary ice cubes.

So, each time you need to make a bowl of tasty soup, all you need is just taking a few cubes of frozen stock and melts them with the rest of your ingredients. It’s that easy, huh? So, let’s have a bowl of warm soup right now, fellas.

Chicken Soup

Maybe, a bowl of chicken soup. What about that?
Enjoy it while I'm visiting you right now (lol)

Ya Kun Kaya Toast

Do you like coffee? I mean a real coffee instead of instant one. Well, I do. My husband and I are big fans of coffee. I’ve told you before about the old coffee house we like on Jl. Hindu or Killiney and now I’d love to tell you about a new coffee house we love also. It called Ya Kun Kaya Toast.

Just like its name, this coffee house also has a great taste of toasts.

First I can tell you that the place is cozy and suit for family. As we came there, we can see several kids running around with a slice of toast in their hands. Toast in not for breakfast only here. They also served Fried Kuetiaw, Spring roll, ice cream and other kind of snacks. See? This place is really suit for family time.

We order coffee, obviously. We want to know whether they have a good taste of coffee also. In fact, they do.

The taste is good but we still prefer the coffee on Jl. Hindu better. But I love the toast. The mix of peanut butter, honey and kaya gives the perfect flavour with the coffee

I also took pictures of this place from a few different angles like these.
Below are two old style of ads from this coffee house. It looks unique.

And these are the pictures of the bar from two different angles.

Although the coffee is not as good as the one at Jl. Hindu, I still love the peanut kaya toast. So yummy.

Sop Sum-Sum Langsa

What is Asha’s most favorite food, beside chocolate, noodle, biscuits and a sip of coffee? The answer is: SOUP. Since she was a baby, she already loves soup. She’ll have her dinner faster, just because I serve it with soup.

There are a few places which sell delicious soups. One of them is: SUP SUMSUM LANGSA. The place is right beside the famous Mie Aceh in Medan, Mie Aceh Titi Bobrok.

The main menus in here are: various kinds of soup (meat soup or bone soup) and various kinds of soto (beef and chicken). And Asha loves the beef soup. It tastes great. This place has also been visited by Wisata Kuliner’s host, Bondan Winarno. The host of Santapan Nusantara, Enita Sri Yana, has visited this place also.

The price is good too. We only pay 12 ribu rupiahs per bowl for meat soup. And 22 thousand rupiahs per bowl for bone soup.

Sometimes, when you visit Medan, you must visit this place too..

Come And Get Killiney For Coffee

My husband and I are coffee addicts. I mean the real coffee that you can only get in the coffee house (kopitiam) instead of the instant coffee.

We have several favorite places. From Starbucks to a simple coffee house like Kopitiam Jalan Hindu or Ya Kun Kaya Toast. Including: Killiney.
I love the

Kopi Tarik

The composition between coffee and sugar is really nice. Not so sweet, for sure. I don’t like coffee with too much sugar on it. In fact, Killiney’s coffee beans are Columbia’s Arabica blended with Indonesian’s Robusta. Perhaps, this combination is the most important thing that makes Killeney’s coffee tastes so great.

Killiney also served many kinds of food. Such as

laksa

curry

or nasi ayam hainan. Asha loves the chicken rice there. There’re also various kinds of breakfast.

The toast

hmmm.... taste great...
Sometimes, we especially spare our time to go there and buy two cups of kopi tarik to go.

The waiters are very nice. And the service is good. So, I think I should give Killeney a place here in my blog.

Old Style Coffee House

Let us go back to coffee story. I wrote an article about coffee once, actually it’s about a nice coffee house called Killiney. What I’m going to tell you this time is about another coffee house. But there’re certain differences between these two coffee houses. The second coffee house has no certain name. But people usually recognize this place by calling it Kopitiam Jalan Hindu. This coffee house exterior itself is so simple. Just an old kind of building (some says the building already exist since the Dutch invasion to Indonesia) with old furniture too. You can only find wooden tables which can be found in almost every Chinese place. Some of the wooden chair there has been broken due to their ages. So be careful when you pick your chair.

The room is small and narrow because every round wooden table is placed unorganized. They don’t use special interior design unlike fancy coffee houses you can find in malls, hotels or plazas. They just put the tables as well as the chairs every where they considerer fit, as long as people can sit there nicely. There’s no air conditioner because the place stands right in road corner. And the giant windows give way to every wind to flow freely. But the owner of this coffee house also prepares a big fan in his place just in case the weather is getting hotter. But it rarely used.

Do not expect a clean shiny floor like in Killiney or maybe Ya Kun Kaya Toast or Starbucks here. You can’t even find a fancy bar with expensive espresso machine on it, just an ordinary table which sometimes looks fuzzy.
The color of walls looks a bit hazy, it also full of pictures with Chinese alphabets. The owner also puts an article about this coffee house that has been written on a national daily, Kompas. That’s all for the decoration.
But the coffee tastes really great! The same recipe has been used in this coffee house for a very long time. They can assure that the taste is still the same like it used to. They also served other kind of food beside coffee because you can order kaya-toast too. Our favorite is kaya-toast with touch of salt-butter. Yummy..
There’re other food-stands together with the coffee house owner. There’s an Hindi man who sells nasi briyani and martabak. A Minang man sells nasi soto. And a Jawa man sells nasi uduk for breakfast. Everything is complete, right? Almost every people who lived along this street are Chinese. That’s why sometimes it’s a bit hard to find a rightful kind of food for almost all of them contain pork. So these three kinds of food really make a difference for those who need it.

Eventually, this coffee shop is famous enough up to other countries nearby. We saw a few visitors come to this place from Singapore and Korea. They said they had their friends recommended that place. The other visitors come from the haves. Most of them are become regular customers and have a close relationship with the owner himself.

Every visitor is so welcomed here. Every customer knows each other. Or at least they say hello and smile to each other every time they met. The coffee shop owner always greet his customers with ”Halo..” or ”Thank you for coming..” Maybe, this is why this coffee shop will always have regular customers for a long time.

De Dago Restaurant

Actually, we often eat in this De Dago Restaurant, but I always forget to write it down in my blog. However, I really want to share this place with you all. But every time I found my stomach so full, all those intentions seems to fly away.
Finally, when we visit De Dago Restaurant again, I take my time to write it down this time.

The place actually not as chic as Gelato Bar. De Dago Restaurant's interior is more like oldies style. The place is on Jalan Majapahit in front of Herna Hospital in Medan.

Every visitor can choose any place they want to sit. There’re spaces inside and outside the restaurant. Outside the restaurant, you can find some rows of tables which neatly arranged around the restaurant. You also can choose to sit on a row of round tables with big umbrellas beyond, right in the front yard. This tables usually full with smoking visitors.
Inside the De Dago Restaurant, the air is cooler because they use Air Conditioner inside. They also placed some aromatherapy’s candles on the floor. I love the scent of aromatherapy here. The decoration is more garden alike. A big synthetic tree is placed right in the center of the room. The branches are arranged to fill most part of the ceiling. So it feels like you’re eating under the tree in a garden. A few garden lamps are also placed neatly inside the room. In the corner, we could find a little pool with a few colorful koi fishes in it.

I can tell you, the De Dago Restaurant indeed impressive. You’ll feel like eat your food under a tree but inside a room. And you can hear the sound of water splashes from the whirl-pool and smell the aromatherapy scents in the air. It makes the food taste even better.

The oldies style is also the theme they choose for furniture inside the room. Every window has long sheers curtains. The light comes from a few little lamps in ceiling. There’s also an antique buffet made of wooden. All these furniture has made the the room’s style look oldies, as they wished.

The menu they offered there are various too. They have national foods like nasi timbel or soup, and western foods like spaghetti and steak. The beverages are also various. Such as fruit juices, coffee, bottled beverages, and es campur.

My favorite beverage is es teler. The taste is great! Completely served in a big bowl with slices of jack fruits, coconuts and avocadoes. My favorite food is beef spaghetti, but I also like Nasi Goreng Kampung.

My husband’s favorite is Mie Sop Daging Sapi only. He never changed his food. For Asha, we give her fried potatoes but also let her sip our beverages sometimes.

De Dago Restaurant's building is big enough and cozy too, unfortunately only e few visitors come here. Except on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays. The food price is good, actually. It’s not too cheap or expensive either. But the taste is great.

Actually, we love to hang out in De Dago Restaurant if it's not too crowd. Because we can eat better and choose any table we like.