Fig and chèvre toastie

An über-schnell sweet & savoury snack which saved me from just-got-home-from-a-long-day hunger pangs. 

Fig and chevre toastie

Serves 2 for pre-dinner snack

Ingredients

About 2 tablespoons of chèvre (goats cheese)

2 slices of crusty bread, slightly toasted

2-3 cherry tomatoes, halved

1 large fig, quartered

ground black pepper to taste

Method

Lightly toast the slices of crusty bread in an oven. Spread the goats cheese on top and put back in the oven until the cheese has slightly melted (about 2 minutes). Take the cheesy toasties out of the oven and sprinkle black pepper liberally. Top with figs, cherry tomatoes and whatever green salad leaves you have.

Devour. 

Meatless Mondays: Caprese Polenta Pizza

These days I am constantly running between my master thesis work and my (paid) work. I should really get a bike... So when I get home starving, express cooking is the way to go. That, and when even takeaway Chinese costs 20 bucks, there is just no option but to home cook all the time.

So, I am super happy to have found out about polenta. It cooks so quickly and is ready in minutes. This vegetarian version of the polenta pizza I made last week makes a super speedy and colourful dinner!

Terong Balado (Spicy eggplant): Being Indonesian means – part 2

... continued from here

Being Indonesian means…

You can never make up your mind when ordering in restaurants, so you just order everything and end up with too much food.

See, what people don’t understand is when one grows up having a rijsttafel (rice table) at every meal, it’s hard to pick ONE main dish per meal. A rice table is when you eat rice with multiple options of side dishes (‘lauk pauk’), anywhere between 3 (typical lunch) to 40 (a feast).

Cah Kangkung (stir fried spinach): Being Indonesian means - part 1

Cah Kangkung (Stir fried spinach)

I was just thinking about this today and decided to write it down... Of course it's nothing serious, just a small reflection :) 

Being Indonesian means…

You need a hint of chilli in every single dish you eat, no matter where you are. This may lead to (erm, interesting) habits such as:

• Having packets of chilli sauce (the stock standard sambal ABC) in your handbag ready to whip out and pour on any meals from street food to Michelin star food. 
• Knowing the word for chilli sauce options in many cuisines. I can count the words sambal, togarashi, aji, tabasco, chipotle, la jiao you, piri piri, and harissa in my vocabulary. I thank my mum for teaching me most of these (she is completely obsessed with chili).

Meatless Mondays - Swiss Chard (Krautstiel) Pesto

I just realised recently that I’ve been pretty ignorant when it comes to vegetable shopping. When I first started cooking (fresh out of college and finally got a real kitchen in a share house), my champion dish was always the Mie Goreng. From all the vegetable choices out there, for some reason I have always stuck to zucchinis, capsicum and mushrooms which I always put in my Mie Goreng. This became a habit and for a long time these were the only three veggies I would even think of buying!

Galettes: cheap eats in Paris!

Montmartre at dusk.
Sacre Coeur (L), throngs of tourist trying to take arty photos of that pointy tower at sunset (M), an artist hard at work (R)

The past couple of months have been full of hectic travelling for both work and fun, going from super-hot to super-freezing weather! But this also meant lots of feasting in between, which has unfortunately resulted in coming home to Switzerland with an extra 3 kilos of food baby… (detox starts next week).

Mie Goreng: Makan-makan!

Food coma in Solo, Central Java (top left); just a regular Tuesday night dinner at my house (bottom left);
breakfast of champions (right)

There are two things about Indonesia that always fascinates my BFF (boyfriend forever i.e. husband), M. The first is obviously the surfing, which unfortunately he doesn't get to do much in the landlocked country of Switzerland... :( Anyway that's another story... The second is the simplicity of the language, at least compared to German which we have been struggling with for a year. No grammar, no tenses, no gender, no conjugation. But the best thing is that a plural noun is just the single noun repeated twice. Like 'anak' is a child, 'anak-anak' means children. His favourite words are those that are already repeated in a single form (spider = laba-laba, spiders = laba-laba-laba-laba...?).



The word to eat (=makan), when 'pluralised' into makan-makan means the favourite past time of Indonesians: feasting! Seriously Indonesians love eating!! But thanks to some good genes, they are always so skinny! I on the other hand, share the love of food that most Indos do as well... but after changing diets when moving to Australia (I blame Nutellas in boarding school), somewhere along the line I've lost my Asian skinny genes and adopted the fresher-ten genes which never really seemed to go away even after I finish my degree and got a job... (FYI: the fresher-ten is the 10 kilos you put on in your fresher year)