Belajar Bikin Kue Tradisional

Now that I only have a few weeks left here in Indonesia (a few weeks, is that right??) I’ve been thinking about everything I’ve done so far, and what I have yet to do in the little time that remains! Ah stressful. But in the best way possible.

            Before leaving Minnesota, I had made a “To Do List” for my exchange year here in Indonesia- and I don’t think I even brought it with me. I don’t know if I’ll be able to recall all ten goals, but this is a good time to go through it and see how I’ve done so far.

            Firstly, ‘Learn bahasa Indonesia’ was surely on my list, and I think it’s safe to say I can check that one off (thankfully- I remember when I first arrived here and I was so frustrated with not being able to communicate. I had also thought that Indonesian would ‘just come to me’ after awhile, since I had heard it was such an easy language to learn, but that turned out to be wishful thinking). Also on my list was ‘learn traditional dance’. Double check that one, and write SMKI afterwards circled with a big heart. Now I’m not sure, but fairly certain, that ‘learn to cook Indonesian food’ was on there- which leads me to my main point for this post…

            Around the middle of my exchange I had mentioned to a Rotarian that I’d like to learn to make Indonesian kue (translates to ‘cake’, but this can mean anything from a popover to jelly snack) particularly because one of the Yogya Tugu Rotarians owns a bakpia bakery. One of my very first posts about food here mentioned how I liked bakpia, and I really wanted to get the recipe. The trip to the bakery never worked out, but I did get quite a good replacement: lessons at AKS, a vocational academy for cooking, sewing, and hairdressing/cosmetics, and visits to three different kitchens to learn to make an assortment of snacks, kue lapis, and moci. Good thing I had five days off of school so I could fit this all in!

            First I went to the snack shop owned by a friend of the Yogya Tugu Youth Exchange Program coordinator. She runs a small shop, but also distributes to markets around the city, and caters and fills private orders. Here I helped make risoles, martabak telur, kroket, and lumpia. These are all fried snacks- the martabak and lumpia use a stir fry filling and are wrapped in a thin pancake, and the krokets and risoles are potato dough mixed with veggies or minced meat and then rolled in bread crumbs. I also watched the making of roll cake and ‘brownies’, which aren’t like American brownies at all, but just chocolate cake. One quick note here: Indonesians love to mix chocolate with cheese. I thought this was so odd when I first arrived, but it’s become a normal sight. And if you ever make it over to this side of the world and order cheesecake, just know you won’t get a heavy cream cheese pie, but a frosted vanilla cake with shredded white cheddar cheese on top. They also make many other snacks and pastries which I hope I can learn how to make, too, at some point.

Here's the Indonesian brownies and cheesecake, as well as a danish, risoles, lumpia, kroket, fruit pie, pisang goreng (fried banana), macaroni, and what I think is called suis (like a bite size chicken salad sandwich).

            Next, on to AKS. Here I worked with Suster Maria Angela, a nun who teaches cooking classes at the academy, and together we made mento, dadar gulung, talam ubi, kelepon, and onde-onde. One thing that I’ve learned about Indonesian cooking is that there are usually a ton of spices, and none of them are in powder form. This is good because it means all the spices are fresh, but it also means you have to prepare most of them using a mortar and pestle. Turns out crushing spices is hard work; I’m not very good at it. A lot of recipes use garlic and you have to smash the cloves into a paste before adding the other ingredients- for me that’s the hardest. Pepper is pretty difficult, too, because the kernels like to fly off the mortar when I’m attempting to crack them into powder.

Suster Maria crushing the mento spices (because I was taking forever) at AKS. If you can see on the table there's fresh daun sirih, daun jeruk, jahe, merica, and other spices.

            So technically these were lessons to just make snacks, but the recipes sure took a long time to complete. Now, dadar gulung and mento are basically the same thing, filling wrapped in a thin pancake, except the first is filled with coconut and the mento is filled with chicken stir fry, then covered in coconut sauce and wrapped in a banana leaf and steamed.  Talam ubi is a funny Jello-like snack half flavored with coconut milk and half with ubi (like a sweet potato, but bright purple). Kelepon looks the weirdest- small green balls of rice dough filled with melted gula jawa (palm sugar) and rolled in coconut flakes. Lastly, onde-onde is simply fried dough filled with mashed soybeans. Notice all the coconut? It tastes delicious, but also explains why I gained about five pounds during just five days, trying all these traditional snacks. This was also the second time that I’ve been told I should become a nun since coming to Indonesia- and Suster Maria said they have a convent in the U.S., too. We have plans to move there together and open up an Indonesian restaurant ;) If I ever do get around to becoming a nun, anyways.

Mento 

Mento after being wrapped in the banana leaf

Talam Ubi

Onde-Onde

All of my snacks for the weekend- the dadar gulung are the green wraps on the plate, moci is the white balls in the middle, then kelepon are on the far right. 

            The kue lapis and moci visits were just to watch, but I hope to get back to the moci place sometime to actually learn the process start to finish. Moci (pronounced mo-chee) has a very odd texture, though I like it. It’s made from tepung ketan (glutinous rice flour), sugar, and water all mixed together, and becomes stretchy and sticky like raw dough. Traditionally the moci is rolled into sheets, covered with chopped peanuts and then rolled and cut into bite size pieces. This particular seller uses jelly, too, as filling (my favorite is lemon).

            So I’m glad I put Indonesian cooking on my to-do list. It turned out to keep me quite busy, as I hope to continue the visits/lessons in the coming month. For now, I think I can check this one off the list. I hope the next item to be checked off will be ‘learning to batik’, but I still have a bit to go before finishing that one. Once I have a finished product, I’ll post about the whole process and such. Going further on down the list, I know there are two items I’ll have to scratch out, because I won’t be able to do them this year. The first is surfing- I’ve mentioned before that the beaches around Yogya aren’t suitable for swimming, let alone taking beginner’s surfing lessons, and I don’t think a trip to the good surfing beaches is in the cards for me. The next is hiking up a mountain/volcano. Ahhhh I wanted to do this so bad, and I’ve asked about it multiple times but it seems like there’s no way to make it possible. The road and trails up Merapi are still closed from the last eruption, which would have been my go-to volcano, and it doesn’t seem like the Rotarians are crazy about me going out trekking in the jungle outside of Yogya. Sigh. We’ll save this for the return trip in a few years I suppose.

            There are other items that will have to be scratched out as well; I think I had one about visiting Aceh or some far away part of Indonesia that’s a long shot, and I’m still holding out for a chance to go snorkeling or diving but who knows. I’ll have to ask my parents to dig around at home for my list (it’s odd to think I still have a bunch of stuff sitting on the other side of the world…), though more likely I brought it with me here and lost it. Dia agak pelupa, my host sister often says about me. I’m a little forgetful.

            I certainly had some big dreams while writing my list. At the time I really had hoped to do all of those things, but I feel like my exchange has still been more productive, rewarding, and out of the ordinary than I ever expected, regardless of whether my To Do boxes are all checked off or not. There’s so much more to a student exchange than the sum of individual activities or trips. I’d have to say I’m more proud of becoming accustomed to using the bathroom here than getting to lay on the beach in Bali- give me a bucket of water and a pail and I can shower in under ten minutes. Now that’s remarkable.

So I’ll keep on moving down my list of goals and quietly pass over the ones I now know to be unfeasible, impractical, or simply superficial, and I won’t feel any less fulfilled. I’ve learned to thrive in a foreign country and that’s all I ever wanted. Tetap sukses. Next June I’ll come home laden with incredible pictures, clothes, and an assortment of other new items that I've harvested throughout my year, yet it’ll be the journey of learning that is the true treasure. (Because nothing builds character like learning how to use a no-flush, in-ground toilet.) 

Sampai jumpa!