On the phenomenon that is Indonesian Food.

Indonesia doesn’t just have its own food, it has its own food culture, food laws, foodaica (like Judaica, but for food?).

Here’s an example of the kind of food I’ve been buying and eating. I took two trips to the market today: one a traditional morning market, one a lebaran (sp?) market, which happens only during Ramadan. At food market #1 I came home with (2) eggplant, (1) papaya, (10) farm-fresh eggs, (1) block fresh tempeh, (2) packets flour (one specifically for making fried banana), (1) packet of some sort of bean that apparently one boils, then simmers in coconut milk (it looks sorta like lima beans), (1) 10 cent bottle of vinegar, (1) stick of doughnuts, (1) plastic bag of some crazy sweet porridge made from black sticky rice, tapioca jelly, crazy fruits/leaves that have been boiled and made gelatinous, all in some coconut milk, and (1) half-kilo of potatoes. Okay, that’s pretty standard. At lebaran market, I came home with: (1) bag of some sort of chips—Lilik could tell me only that they’re made from flour—, (1) plastic bag of fresh soymilk (apparently it exists in non-Silk-brand form!), (1) plastic bag of a drink called kolak kacang hijau (from what I can tell, it’s made from palm sugar, coconut milk and mung beans! Strange, but so delicious), (1) bag of paper-wrapped items: 1 fried tofu in some special seasoning, 1 fried tempeh in some special seasoning, with packets of fresh veggies and sambal to make the full meal, I guess, (1) package of black fermented sticky rice and normal white sticky rice.

This is the kind of stuff I eat every day. It’s as if your entire food consciousness, all your learned habits and acquired tastes and dislikes can be completely obliterated once you’ve entered a new food culture. I eat mini brown bananas (and by mini I mean 4 inches long at the most) like candy, I eat black gelatinous goo when it’s in something called es campur, I eat sticky rice like pizza. And the stuff is good. I mean, I can hardly believe I didn’t know these kinds of foods and meals and desserts existed. Let me try to recall some of my other memorable meals. Ah, yes, gado-gado. It’s fried tofu, potatoes, a hard-boiled egg, and raw veggies like cucumber, tomato, lettuce and green beans, saturated with peanut sauce. Amazing, and lots of protein. It does, however, come with these weird shrimp crackers. Okay, something I tried in Jogja this week: nasi gudeg telor. The nasi is just white rice, the telor is a hardboiled brown egg, but the gudeg is something entirely foreign to me: it’s young jackfruit, simmered for hours in a bunch of leaves, including cassava and who knows what else, and then chopped up, almost minced. Let’s just say it’s pitch-black in color and completely unrecognizable, both its taste and its texture. And again, absolutely delicious.

And then there were snacks. Indonesians love, love snacks, maybe as much or more than Americans do. They have chips of every kind (here, chip means something fried in oil until crispy). My favorite is the mlinjo chip: it’s made from the fruit of that name, which has an awesomely bitter taste. I cannot get enough mlinjo. If you can dream it, you can turn it into a chip.

Oh right. My entry on Indonesian food would be incomplete without a mention of durian. Yes, anyone who’s currently in Indonesia with me knows about the durian, so skip this, maybe. Durian is about as big or bigger than a pineapple. It is covered in a spiky skin, its inside is white like coconut, and it has by far the worst food smell you can imagine. Think filthy socks, body odor, and any residue in your toilet, and maybe throw in some animal droppings. But Indonesians, and I think at least some bule, love this fruit. I have yet to get over the smell. The best is when fruit at the supermarket smells and even tastes a little like durian, just from being near it in the stock-room! Truly powerful, this stuff. I want to like it! I will try again. I think it tastes like liver, if I knew what liver tasted like.

I think I’ve spoken enough about food, now. For a while I missed pizza and Mexican food. Now I fear that leaving this place will mean no more jackfruit, no more fresh papaya, no more soymilk made in people’s homes, no more mungbeans included in every kind of meal. I’m going to pretend that day isn’t coming.