Everything Powdered

Dennis and I both got sick Friday night after going to the Jakarta Expo. We suspect it was the gado gado, but it could have been anything. Let’s just say we needed to get more toilet paper.

That Saturday (02 July 2011), when we finally had a bit of strength and wanted to eat something again, all we could think of was lugaw (Filipino chicken and rice soup). We only needed a few ingredients: cooking oil, ground black pepper, garlic, onion, fish sauce, chicken, chicken bullion since we weren’t using a whole chicken, rice and water. Little did we know how difficult it would be. The easy part was buying a bigger pot and other cooking utensils; it took us over 3 hours at the supermarket for everything else. An Inggris-Bahasa dictionary would have been nice, but we didn’t have one yet.

Ketchup is not necessarily ketchup. Unless the label/packet says “tomato ketchup”, it’s probably not ketchup at all. Ketchup asin is regular soy sauce, and ketchup manis is sweet soy sauce. AND everything is powered. We had no idea how difficult (impossible in our case) to find ground black pepper. I’m sure it’s available somewhere, just not at this Carrefour supermarket. There were lots of different peppers, but it was all powder—even the ones that read “ground” were powdered. In fact everything seemed to come in powder form, coffee and Milo included. We were told that this was to make things conducive to cooking (this is probably why many dishes that do not look spicy at all are actually super spicy and/or peppery). We settled on “ground” white pepper. It was packaged in a box and sealed in foil bag, so we couldn’t tell if it was really grounded or powdered like everything else. We were just hoping that maybe it would be what we needed.

When we got back to our apartment, the “ground” pepper was pretty much powdered though we told ourselves that it was not as fine as all the others. The propane stove didn’t seem to have a low setting. Maybe I just wasn’t used to it, but every time I tried to use the low setting, it would go out. The pot we bought wasn’t much better, and of course with the high heat and the pepper powdered, I burned the pepper before I even added the garlic. It was a mess, and one of the most frustrating cooking experiences I’ve ever had. The lugaw turned out fine—much more peppery than I anticipated—and it was the first sense of normalcy for us. Too bad I haven’t cooked since.