Food!

After a request from my sister, I have now started to take photos of everything I eat. This is strange enough for most people, but then I ask what the food is called, and proceed to write down the English and the Indonesian. I'm sure everyone will get used to it, and it's fun explaining that my twin sister is a teacher just like me :-) but after this plus the maths puns on Pi day (among other things) it's obvious some of the kids think I'm a bit strange. Thanks sis! Mission accomplished ;-)

So, here are some of the things I have been eating:

This is my lunch from the school canteen yesterday - they do a cooked lunch for around $2 (Aus) which in my opinion is amazing, but for here is perfectly normal! There is nasi (rice), bawang (onions - cooked until they are soft and sweet), ikan (fish, served with gravy) and pangsit goreng (fried and filled wontons). The pangsit goreng are really yummy - if you want to try them I found this easy recipe: http://asiancook.eu/indonesian/hidangan/554-pangsit-goreng-fried-filled-wonton

Before I went to pilates last night, we had these two: the one on the right is tahu brintik (essentially nuggets of tofu, fried and covered in sweet chilli sauce and some other sauce I couldn't identify!) and the one on the left is bakmie nyemek (the 'mie' means noodles - this was a lot like mie goreng, which I love, but had a runnier sauce, and more of it).

On the weekend I had batagor saus asam manis. Batagor are essentially nuggets of fried tofu, like the brintik above - I have no idea how they are different, but apparently they are. I guess I have very little experience with tofu! The saus asam manis is sweet and sour sauce.

I have no idea what these are called, but they are too cute not to share! A couple of teachers and I went out for dim sum one night after school, and these were our sweets. They look like little alien creatures, and are green because they have pandan in them. Pandan is often described as the asian vanilla, although it is used in both sweet and savoury dishes. Plenty of foods here are coloured with it, and no one cares about the vivid green-ness, unlike some of the teachers at one of my past schools, who weren't sure about the pandan pancakes I made for Independence day ;-)

This is a dessert called mie jelly (literally, jelly noodles!). Like a lot of Indonesian desserts, it has a lot of components - the jelly noodles (which were grape flavoured), fruit (strawberries, dragonfruit and kiwi), shaped jellies (one that looked like an egg and some that looked like turtles or monsters, I couldn't decide which!), and grape syrup on the bottom. It was very sweet, and very unlike the desserts I am used to!