Warming up inside: Sayur Lodeh

Over the last months people have laughed at me in my thick scarf, woollen hat and gloves. ‘It isn’t cold,’ they’d grin. ‘Just you wait until winter really starts.’

More than chilled enough by autumn, I would shudder. And now it happened: winter started. We’ve had frost at night and during daytime the temperature stays in single digits. Yes, I know, it can get much worse still, but this is bad enough for my tropical bones. Our mornings are a flurry of looking for hats and mittens for the children who complain of having to cycle to school in the crisp dark – this time of the year the sun won’t rise until after school started and sets somewhere mid-afternoon. I’m not sure yet what is worse, the cold or the darkness. The kids quickly caught on to the fact that Dutch winds are always headwinds when you cycle to school, and then somehow defy physics by being the same when you turn around. 

A few weeks back we were stuck without heating for a weekend and now, in the chilling wind and drizzle, the new heating system struggles to keep our old, leaky house as comfortable as I’d like it to be. So what can one do to heat up? Cook warming, spicy, Asian food! I spent our last year in Singapore painstakingly noting down recipes for Indah’s amazing Indonesian food, and when we miss her, miss the sunshine, we cook it and warm our chilly guts. I get many requests to share Indah's recipes - her cooking was famous amongst family and friends, and not without reason: her food is amazing. 

Foraging Singapore for wild greens

Today it is time for Sayur Lodeh. The great thing about this dish is how versatile it is. Sayur simple means vegetable, and lodeh signifies they are cooked in a coconut milk gravy. The dish is mostly vegan, apart from the dried prawns, but those can easily be left out if you don’t eat them.

The soul of any curry is the rempah, or spice paste for the gravy. This particular one is a base you can use for many different varieties of vegetable curries. It’s a great dish to empty your vegetable drawer as most things work. In Singapore we would go and forage for our vegetables: tapioca leaves, moringa, jackfruit, tiny round aubergines. But for lack of those, kale, carrots or green beans work just as well.

We are lucky that the Hague boasts a large community of Indonesian people, so most of the ingredients are available easily enough. Although the only place that sells fresh (well, frozen) galangal is half an hour drive away, so I do sometimes resort to powdered. And I really don’t understand why all the crispy fried shallots here are made with wheat flour (which I’m intolerant to) when in Asia they never are! If you can get fresh ingredients, do so, but with dried spices this dish will still be nice. Candlenuts (kemiri) can be replaced by macadamia or brazil nuts. 

Rijsttafel, an Indonesian feast

Sayur Lodeh

Rempah (spice mix)

8 small (or 3 bigger) shallots
3 cloves garlic
2 or more chilis (mix large ones for colour with small ones for heat)
3 cm fresh galangal
3 cm fresh ginger
2 stalks lemongrass, hard outer leaves discarded
3 cm turmeric,
8 candlenuts,
1 teaspoon shrimp paste (belachan in Malay, terassi in Indonesian)
1 tbs dried shrimp

As with all Asian recipes, quantities are indicative, kira kira. Indah’s original recipe that she wrote down for me just has a list of ingredients, but I added some indications of how much to use because I know working intuitively is difficult if you are less familiar with these spices. Based on the strength of the spices you use and your personal taste, use more or less of each. If you use dried, about one teaspoon of dried spice roughly equals 3 tablespoons of fresh.

Chop all rempah ingredients coarsely and blend them to a paste. Add some oil and/ or water if needed. I do this in a bender, if you are a traditionalist you can use a grinding stone or pestle and mortar.

Fry the spice mix in large pot with thick bottom until fragrant, five minutes should do it. Add your vegetables (see below for some suggestions), a few cups water and bring to boil. You an add more water later if it gets too dry, you are looking for thin curry/ think soup consistency. Add some salam leaf, kaffir lime leaf, and salt to taste.

Boil 15-20 minutes then add coconut milk, about 400ml should do it. If you use fried tofu, add this only at the end. Sprinkle with crispy fried onion. Sayur lodeh can be part of a nasi campur or rijstafel, a selection of different dishes served together with rice and spicy sambals. But for a simple weekday meal it is fine on its own served with rice.

Vegetables

As I said, you can throw anything you like in this gravy, but I’ll share two classic versions that I love. 

Singkong lodeh is even better the day after as leftover lunch!

Singkong lodeh (tapioca leaves)

One of our favourites is lodeh with tapioca leaves, which in Singapore and Bali we’d pick wild in front of our house. In the Netherlands I’ve found them frozen in an Asian supermarket. Take the thicker stalks off the leaves, wash them, then boil the leaves for 20 minutes. Squeeze out excess moisture, then chop them roughly. Add the leaves to the gravy as described above. This curry is usually made with only the one vegetable. It is quite an ‘adult’ dish to me and the first time I tasted it, Indah made it for herself for lunch. Suffice to say, the heat of the dish blew my tastebuds to pieces. Although I don’t make it as hot as Indah, I still like my singkong lodeh on the spicier side. If you can’t find tapioca leaves any dark green leafy vegetable like spinach, kale or beet greens will work as well. 

Classic sayur lodeh

Classic Sayur Lodeh 

The best known version that is served over Indonesia usually contains a mixture of green beans, carrots, aubergine and cabbage as well as cubes of fried tofu. It is the one that can be seen in the picture of the rijsttafel above right in front.

Wash and chop the vegetables into bitesize pieces, then blanch them briefly - be careful not to overcook, they still need some crunch at this stage. You can either buy ready fried tofu puffs or fry cubes of firm tofu in oil before adding them. Add the tofu to the curry at the end only, and boil until thoroughly heated and the tofu has soaked up all the flavours.

Lodeh with wild aubergines

Miri market mysteries

It is simple. I love markets. It does not matter much what they sell, antiques, bric a brac, made-in-China plastic tat. I love it all. Best of all: food markets. My husband gets a very heavy foot whenever we pass a market on the road, but for me, markets are the highlight of any holiday. Off course we had to see all the markets when we visited Miri, the city where I lived as a child in Sarawak, Borneo, a few weeks ago. Since we were staying in a hotel, I could not buy any of these lovely foodstuffs, so there rested no other option than to take my camera, and shoot away. Today I share my treasures. 

The colours of markets can make every casual snap a piece of art. 

This vegetable on the left is midin, or lemidin, and it can only be found in Sarawak. They are the tops of wild jungle fern, and served stir fried with sambal or cooked with Chinese wine and garlic. I have rarely eaten a tastier vegetable, and dream of it still. The pink flowers on the right, in the small pink bowl, are ginger flowers, used for laksa, and I imagine the flowers and leaves in the middle are of the ginger family as well. 

So pretty, but I have no clue. Some type of aubergine?

These guys, petai, we find in Singapore as well, but here the thick, juicy beans you buy shelled from their long, winding pods. The petai, or stink bean, grows wild as well, on tall trees. It's flavour is surprising, lovely with prawn and sambal, and will make your urine (and some say breath) stink. 

Displays like this make my mouth water. The beans on the left are winged beans, which have a funny shape when you cut them, that gave them the name 'star beans' in our house, one of my futile attempt to make my kids think of vegetables as fun. 

Bario rice. This rice, from the mountain area of Bario, is famous, and full of flavour. I kick myself now, why did I think bringing some home would be too heavy for my suitcase?

This is a mystery. Ikat, unfortunately, is not the name of this mysterious vegetable (or fruit?), it simple means bundle. My mother suggested it could be batu raga, a wild type of mango, but I am not sure as the shape is different. 

P'ria, or bitter gourd, looks like a wrinkled cucumber, very pretty, but it is a bit of an acquired taste. It is definitely growing on me, though. 

Not a clue what this is..

Just sereh, lemongrass, but I love the presentation. Beats any supermarket cling film hands down. Markets. Gotta love 'em.