king leopold's roast
I hope everybody had a good Thanksgiving. Taking a cue from Speed Dating (a phenomenon at that perfect interesection of novelty and ubiquity where police dramas use it to kill people), I fulfilled my filial obligations in record time, making a trip from my doorstep to Brewster, NY and back in just under 31 hours. Props to Greyhound's Peter Pan service -- aside from an unavoidable conversation about cellphones with some weirdo who saw me reading Wired (human interaction? what kind of geek are you?) the trip was fast and pleasant.
My grandfather's Dutch, and consequently we had an Indonesian rijsttafel for Thanksgiving. Once they colonized Indonesia, the Dutch figured out pretty quickly that their own cuisine -- which is inexplicably boring considering their proximity to France and Germany -- could use replacing (although their breakfast and dessert items are pleasantly interchangeable). So they kind of borrowed the Indonesians' cuisine. In exchange the Indonesians got... uh. Well, let's just say it wasn't a great deal for them.
My grandfather loves Indonesian food -- partly because it's tasty, and, I suspect, partly because he's a bloody-minded old coot who gets a kick out of colonialism. After all, this is a guy who tells stories about fighting the Germans as if Hitler was a stepdad he was trying to piss off. Think Gordon Liddy with an aristocratic European veneer.
He cooked most of the Thanksgiving meal: satay, eggs in pinda sauce, krupuk (like potato chips, except made out of shrimp), coconut rice and generous helpings of sambal (fiery red goo). Good stuff, although I am sorry to have missed the traditional turkey.
It was an entirely unrelated culinary tidbit that fascinated me, though. My grandfather's live-in nurse/housekeeper is a wonderful lady named Jo, who's Jamaican. She joined us for dinner, and during it she said that Jamaican Heineken is an entirely different recipe from normal Heineken, and that the difference is sufficiently distinct and beloved that you can buy it in Jamaican groceries. I'm not a big fan of regular Heineken, but for some reason this fascinates me. Anybody else every heard of this?
Comments
Shrimp chips? That's new to me. Wow. --s
they're yummy, too! surprisingly so.
yeah... they're *awesome*. get some if you have the chance. You can buy them prepared, but their real original form is as business-card sized, 2-millimeter-or-so-thick, inedibly hard chips. Dunk em in hot oil and they blow up to three or four times their size, curling in weird ways. They go great with spicy rice dishes -- you can use the curls as a spoon. The shrimp taste is there, but not overpowering. Weirdest thing: if you press your tongue up to a freshly cooked chip, it sort of grabs on -- you could carry the gigantic chip around by your tongue, if you wanted. It's kind of like if you licked a cold metal pole (although it's considerably easier to dislodge them, of course).
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