Bali Night

The skin underneath my fingernails is still stained yellow from the fresh turmeric we were peeling and chopping this past Saturday. Fresh turmeric looks much like ginger except that when you peel off the skin, you find a pleasing orangish-yellow piece of root. The hue is so exciting, a revelation. The shock of color brightens any winter day. It stained the counter — but that wasn’t hard to remove. I’m mostly used to turmeric powder, a common ingredient in Indian and Pakistani cooking.  We searched our neighborhood oriental stores and online to find all that we needed for our dinner like aromatic ginger, galangal, fresh red chillies, fresh lime leaves, shrimp paste, candlenuts, stalks of lemon grass and more.

Our labors for Bali Night were to create a menu we prepared under the watchful eyes of the chef at the Arma resort in Bali last year. Everything began with Bumbu Bali – a mix of 17 ingredients and spices that form the base of the dishes we were going to prepare. The menu: cucumber soup in a turmeric broth (sup timun), fish cakes (sate lilit), Balinese chicken (ayam bumbu Bali), long beans in spiced coconut (lawar kacang panjang) — all to be eaten with plain rice. For a salad: an array of vegetables like blanched fresh mung beans, shredded and blanched cabbage, tiny fingerling potatoes, sliced cucumbers and tempeh (fermented and sautéed soy beans) served up with a spicy peanut sauce. We also served Indonesian krupuk or shrimp crackers with the meal. And dessert — black rice pudding served with a dollop of coconut cream. Our friends, all food lovers and adventurous eaters, brought accompaniments like a fish curry, some vegetables, an array of tropical fruits, mango sorbet and Asian-inspired almond cookies to round off the meal.

We had good reason to celebrate other than recreating and sharing the tastes and smells from a foreign visit —a Valentine’s Day birthday, good health, friendship. An eclectic group with diverse interests and passions, we come together to discuss and debate what happens to us, our communities and in the world. And yes, it turned out that the Egyptian people were celebrating the end of 30 years of oppression, so we joined in the revelry. As a South Indian poet once said: “Every country is my country. Every man is my kinsman.”