‘WONDER FOOD’
Eating should have been my middle name, given to the fact that I find it so entertaining to use my leisure time exploring some food stalls in my town.
When I stayed in Solo for my high school years Tumpang had been the curry that I fall for. It consists of boiled vegetables stirred with sauce made of crushed ‘tempe’, coconut milk and other ingredients. What made me startled was that this food used also flower as the main ingredient. The flower which looks like tulip is also boiled and comes together with other vegetables. And when I ate that for the first time I felt like a shaman who eats weird food in order to gain his magical power as I eat Flowers. ……yuck!…and yummy..then .
And when I moved to Yogya, I do not meet Tumpang very often in my dining room, in fact, I love to taste Gorengan (dryly fried food) a lot. It is snack; people in Indonesia mostly munch on gorengan anytime and anywhere, and surprisingly in any event. Here, it is amusing to find out that Steel Concrete (Balok) is another name of fried cassava, Molen ( a huge machine which has elliptical shape that rolls when it works) is an alias of fried snack made of a tiny slice of banana rolled by wheat flour molded physically like molen (only of course much smaller).
And not forget; Cat Rice; Nasi Kucing;! It’s not rice meant for feeding a cat, but very tiny little cooked rice with a little side dish (mostly is only minced chilly) on the top and is wrapped by banana leaves. So small portion that will not satisfy your hunger explaining why people in Yogya call it cat rice. And do you know what kind of food called SUBMARINE ( kapal selam)? It is fried wheat with yolk inside, comes with salty sauce. So imagine, how strong you are that you could eat Submarine, Steel Concrete and
serendipity 