You know there is a wedding when, just like Christmas, there’s a crowd at your house that doesn’t know how to shut up or stop eating and constantly high with happiness.  But unlike Christmas, everyone’s dressed up and dolled up and can’t seem to stop torturing the happy and content singles about how they too should soon get married and have kids, even though they may turn out as miserable as the divorced ones.  I mean, seriously, they can’t fool me.  I’ve seen enough relationships and marriages that ended up taking the wrong turn and caused so much misery not only to the married couples but also to their families.  On the defense of happy married couples everywhere, a wedding event IS a joyous occasion.  I respect those who are able to stay together and stay loyal to each other for many years.  It’s a lot of hard work and a life that’s full of bumpy roads, though not much worse than the actual months of preparing a wedding. 

Sunday was my sis’ wedding day.  It was the happiest and most exhausting day of her life.  I’ve seen her getting all stressed out for months in getting things ready.  She seemed to be the only one who had to make sure all is well and good, from the dress to the wedding ring, to the event location, to the food catering, to the new apartment she and her husband will move into, to the traditions that we all Chinese have to deal with when we are getting married.  She’s got a female dog to take care of too.  Her name is Boobees (…yeah, I know what you’re thinking).  That particular Sunday, our home became more like a festive Sunday school but with the kids all grown up.  Some of these kids have wrinkles, some have grey hair, some are almost bald, some with an apparent trace of botox, and some with boobs almost touching the ground.  They all ate like there’s no tomorrow, groomed from head to toe, made noise so loud even Boobies rather stayed inside the bedroom, and almost all of the girls looked alike with their blink blink and big puffy hair.  Where did I fit in the picture?  No where.  But as the brother of the bride, I was obligated to be present with big smiley face and all dressed up like 007.  It wasn’t that big of a deal really.  I love my sister and she deserved the best.  The last thing I wanted to do was to do something that might ruin her day.

The wedding day started as soon as the groom arrived at the house to pay respect to my parents and the older relatives.  This is a Chinese tradition that is a must for every single wedding and it’s called Phang Te in our Hokkien dialect.  The bride and the groom would pay respect by serving tea to the bride’s parents and the bride’s married relatives, in the order of rank and seniority in the family.  In return, her parents and all those married couples would donate a gift to the bride and groom in a form of cash in a red envelope or jewelry.  Once all of those who must be paid with respect have drunk their tea and the still single relatives (the young and not-so-young) received a red envelope (it’s got cash in it) from the bride and the groom, the session proceeded back to eating.  This time it’s the bride and groom’s turn. 

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In all Chinese weddings, all brides and grooms MUST eat a sweet dish called Hong Zao Long Yen, literally means red dates and longan fruit.  It’s a dish that consists of boiled eggs in a sweet clear light brown broth flavored with rock sugar, Chinese red dates, and dried longan fruits.  This dish symbolizes a congratulatory greeting to the young married couple that wishes them a long happy marriage with lots of kids.  I don’t know if this actually works but it is what the Chinese believed in and so it’s what they do, always.  After all these, the groom will bring his new bride to his family and redo the whole Phang Te scenario, this time with the groom’s side of the family, but without the need of eating Hong Zao Long Yen again.  A Chinese believe has it that the new couple must arrive before 12 noon in order to avoid a bad omen for the groom’s side of the family.  But don’t ask me why.  I have not a single clue. 

The celebration has not yet ended.  It continued to the night at a hotel with hundreds of invitees who were there to shake the hands of the newly wed couple and their parents.  For the most part, people came for the free food, I think.  Eating has been and would always be a part of our culture.  It’s the number one past time.  Food is considered to be the center of all successful relationships and business transactions.  I kid you not!  Anyhow, as festive as the occasion was, the only thing I despise when it comes to a wedding is the unavoidable question “When are YOU going to get married?”  I mean, please, haven’t they had enough singles to torture at every single wedding?  Knowing this, I tried to avoid all of my relatives the best I could by spending more time with my own friends, whom I deliberately invited to be there as my escape.  The occasion kept me preoccupied with engaging meaningless chit-chats, all I had time to eat were ice-cream and a few pieces of fresh fruits.  By the end of the night, I found myself so starved and dead tired all I could think of was crashing into my own bed, that is after I gulped down a banana and an orange in less than two minutes.  As soon as my shower, I could hear my bed calling my name.  It felt like I was in a total bliss, especially when the house was filled with a dead silence.  I didn’t have the energy to dream that night and the wedding left me with a migraine the next morning.  Urgh! Nevertheless, I’m glad to have the chance to be back here in Jakarta to be present at my sis’ wedding.  She couldn’t be more beautiful and mature looking.  I guess the little girl I used to know has all grown up and left her childhood behind, leaving me with pieces of past moments to keep alive in my head.

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Soup is the rave of the month.  In spite of the humidity, everyone is searching for the comfort-me soup ever since it’s been raining cats and dogs around here.  There is nothing like the rain you get in a tropical country.  Not one of those sissy [oh, I’ll pour some down now and continue with the rest later] kind of rain, but a real non-stop [die humans, die!] thunder storm type of rain.  You can barely see through your windshield no matter how fast your wipers move.  The rain drops fall faster than the speed of any wiper and harder than an egg being thrown to your car by your ex.  Yes, Mother Nature is angry.  Her heavy flow knows no mercy, no boundaries, no excuses.  Floods are everywhere in the city, causing more traffic to the already the worse traffic you probably have seen in south Asia.  Heavy rains can be typical here when it’s the season for it, though the rain season is a few months late, thanks to the global warming problem. 

Now frozen desserts are not exactly the most sought-after food items.  Soup is what everyone is looking for.  Christmas in Indonesia doesn’t include turkey, ham, sweet potato, green beans, and eggnog.  We may have the wet weather, the strong wind and the chills, but inside no fire place is necessary to warm and sooth ourselves.  All we need is a good soupy dish like bakso kuah, bihun kari, bubur kacang hijau/hitam/merah, kolak pisang, kwetiau kuah, sayur asem, sop buntut, soto ayam, and many more.  Since my family does not celebrate Christmas, my Christmas dinner came rather late.  A few days late.  The dinner itself was an event that focused more on two different occasions that had nothing to do with Christmas; a friend’s passing result on a corporate four-hour examination in overseas and my birthday.  The location of this dinner among friends was at a newly opened Italian restaurant called Rosso, an Italian for red, comfortably positioned at the far corner of the lobby level at Shangri-la Hotel in Jakarta.  As you enter the restaurant, you almost instantly get hit with the red color theme.  The ambiance is warm, friendly, and surprisingly homey.  Everywhere you see are dark wooden paneling, oversized glass windows and partitions decorated with Chinese-Middle Eastern lattice work embedded in the glass, white china and tablecloths, black and red uniforms, and splashes of more reds that come from the chairs, the heavy drapes, the carpet, and the art works.  The décor was undeniably a fusion of east meets west with a hint of Zen simplicity and Euro grandness all in one.  The staff couldn’t be more helpful and gracious.  Lucky for us, the special menu for the week was with dishes created with use of white truffles, especially imported from… where else, Italy. 

I started with an order of my favorite cocktail, Mojito.  Rosso’s version of Mojito has a much lower concentration of alcohol, which what I prefer, and the use of lemon juice instead of lime juice.  The drink was refreshingly pungent of mint, my favorite herb.  My dear friend ordered a large glass of warm water instead.  She came to the restaurant a half hour late and half drunk.  The poor woman arrived with a facial expression that was half asleep and sad.  Her mannerism was that of someone who lost interest in all things and as she moved she somewhat swayed to all directions.  She walked so elegantly slow you would thought she was in a museum admiring all the art pieces on the wall.  I love her dearly and was quite displeased with her usual lateness, but upon seeing her in her condition I didn’t know whether I was supposed to get upset, or to laugh, or to be concerned.  She is not a woman who drinks and so she was not in a humorous frame of mind.

Ordering from the menu was easy, she just let me ordered for her, as always.  We both were feeling a little under the weather (though that didn’t stop me from ordering Mojito) and so I ordered pea soup for the both of us.  The pea soup was a nicely bright green, thick and creamy but with no hint of cream or milk.  It was wonderfully fragrant with the sweet smell of fresh peas, topped with a succulent fillet of sole wrapped around a single large stalk of tender green asparagus, and garnished with drizzles of olive oil and specks of white truffle shavings.  It was exactly what we both needed, too bad the portion was a small one.  For the main course, she had seared white fillets of fish on a bed of creamy spinach, and I had a simple creamy cheese risotto, both dishes garnished with white truffle shavings.  Unfortunately for her, she was so not in the mood for eating, thanks to the alcohol in her system, so I ended up eating half of her main course.  To end the meal, we both shared lemon cream in a chocolate cup and a pot of hot mint tea.  We talked, we gossiped, we laughed.  Talked about work, gossiped about other people, and laughed at ourselves for being silly, for being oblivious to the things that do not interest us, and for being undetermined for getting things done.  More to choose from for the new year resolution, I guess.  Yeah, life is all good.  The only two things I would always remember vividly from that night is that how humorous she seemed when she’s drunk and how much I loved that sweet pea soup.

Yes, it’s that time of the year again for us Chinese, the time for eating Onde-onde.  Onde-onde, which what we Indonesians called it, is also called Tong Yuen in Chinese.  Tong means soup and Yuen means ball.  Onde-onde is boiled rice balls made with glutinous rice flour that has been mixed with hot water until it resembles white dough (Note: The rice flour has to be made with glutinous rice, instead of regular rice.  The reason being is that the starch content of glutinous rice has more sugar and fat content than the starch content of regular rice, and gives that sweet tender chewy texture).  This white dough then pinched out into tiny portions which will then be rolled in between the palms of our hands to be shaped into marble-size balls.  These balls are most often made with colors of white, red and green.  The coloring of both red and green has always been that of a natural extract of plants.  In most cases, we use the extract of pandan leaves to get the green color, while the red coloring is from Chinese red rice that has been simmered in water to bleach out the color and the water will then be mixed into the glutinous rice flour to form red dough.

These balls were made in hundreds by count, all lined up and rested on parchment paper until not a single speck of dough left un-molded.  They will then be plunged into boiling water to cook.  Once these balls start to float onto the surface of the water, it’s an indication that they are cooked and ready to be eaten.  These chewy tender little colorful balls are playful and yummy to the palate.  They are usually served soup style, in a syrupy ginger liquid that compliments the texture of the balls real well.  This liquid what really determines the flavor of the onde-onde dish.  It’s more like a dessert and is best eaten when hot.  The liquid itself is boiled water that has been infused with ginger and pandan leaves and sweetened with lots of palm sugar that makes the liquid nice amber brown color. 

In tradition, the Chinese usually starts making onde-onde about a couple of months prior to the Chinese New Year, on December 22^nd to be precise, which falls on November in Chinese lunar calendar.  When you start to see these delightful chewy balls every where, it is an indication that a new year is on its way.  The Chinese believes that by eating onde-onde you are adding another year to your life and another year older.  The roundness of the rice balls signifies completion and also family unity.  To me, glutinous rice balls mean culinary genius, heavenly bliss and hungry no more.  Hey, you would feel the same way too if you have eaten the rice ball dishes that I have eaten in my lifetime.

Onde-onde can also be enjoyed in a number of ways.  First and foremost, the plain cooked rice balls can be added into savory broth as its starch accompaniment.  The best flavor of soup to be enjoyed with rice balls is one flavored with both chicken and pork.  The soup can also be made with vegetable broth for vegetarians, however, you should never miss adding in Chinese white cabbage and garlic to boost up the flavor of the soup to its optimum.  This is a clear soup and you add in the rice balls right towards the end of the cooking process.  Just like any good soup, the feel of its hot savory sweet fragrant liquid trickles down your throat and all the way down to the stomach helps to easy any tension you may have on your mind and muscles.  It also fills you up without the need of extra serving of rice or noodles or potatoes or bread.  It’s a perfect soup for the cold climate, which is why onde-onde is consumed mainly during the winter season in China, Hong Kong, Korea, and Taiwan.  Not to say that it is not suitable to be consumed without broth.  In Korea, onde-onde is also eaten soup-less but lavishly covered with honey.  They call their rice balls Kyongdan.  This is another way to appreciate onde-onde.

Last but not least, it can also be stuffed with sweet toasted crushed peanuts or sweet black sesame paste.  I was fortunate to discover its unbelievably incredible flavor in one of the larger alleys in china town during my trip to Singapore earlier this year.  These boiled glutinous rice balls were huge.  You could probably fit no more than four of these balls in the palm of your hands.  One ball is more than a mouthful.  It was in late afternoon and I was all hot and sweaty after walking for hours in the city.  I was looking for a snack that would replenish my energy level but would educate my palate at the same time.  What a wonderful afternoon delight it was. I was entranced and bewitched by the delectable rice balls and I was focused.  I took the courage to order them, not knowing what culinary treasure about to lure me into becoming its lifelong faithful fan.  They were served in a hot and lightly sweeten peanut soup that still has plenty soften simmered peanuts floating in the soup.  The noise, the smell and the crowd of china town no longer bothered me.  It is true when they say that sometimes a hot soup is best consumed in a hot weather.  When your pores start to ooze out moisture due to the rise of your internal body heat, that sweat on the surface of your skin actually helps to cool you down as breeze sways right by you.  The warm feel in my stomach and the lingering taste of those rice balls, especially the ones stuffed with black sesame paste (Oh Lord!), really made my day.  I smiled for the rest of the afternoon as I started to head back to downtown to search for more culinary treasures the city has to offer.

In many other Asian countries, such as Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, and Thailand, you will find many different versions of the stuffed onde-onde, mostly broth-less, in a flatter shape and larger size, stuffed, and available throughout the year.  This month is the perfect time to search for those wonderful rice balls in sweet syrupy ginger broth.  Try to get your hands on those little balls of happiness.  If you’re in Asia, you’re in luck.  Just follow where the Chinese go.  If you’re in a non-Asian country, just visit the closest china town you can find.  Chances are you’ll find the rice balls in plentiful.

It’s been a week of non-stop eating.  What better way to kill the office boredom than eating you way through the office hours.  Day after day, week after week, we all started to resent the fact that we need to make a decision on what to feed our stomach when the needles reached 12 noon. 

We have tried all of the boiled, the deep fried, the pan fried, the salty, the savory, the soupy, the spicy, the stir fried, and the sweet stuff that are available within the fifteen minute drive from the office.  We’ve had the usual… ayam goreng, kwetiau rebus, lontong kari, nasi campur, nasi padang, rujak, sate, sayur capcai, siomai, soto, etc. (for those foreigners out there who have no idea what those foods are, you are more than welcome to e-mail me and I’ll explain what each one of them really are .  We were in serious need for something different this week, something that even we, the culinary adventurers, would probably not have for more than once a quarter.  Yup, we decided to go beyond our comfort zone and be a little crazy to liven the office atmosphere for a day.  Rumor has it that there’s this place a little further away well known for its… Mr. Freddy.  Ehem, you guessed it, frogs!  Oh no, we are much too civilized to eat bugs or dogs but apparently we are not too civilized to enjoy the cute little amphibians.  For vegetarians, this is where you should stop reading and move on to something more animal friendly.  Seriously!!

So the office boy was sent to buy our lunch.  While waiting, our mouths watered non-stop and our stomach did not stop growling.  There are many ways to enjoy the delicate and delightful frog legs.  You only eat the legs since frogs do not have much flesh apart from their leg muscles.  You can have them in a soup with pickled mustard green, ginger and tomatoes, or deep fried plain and then stir fried with Blue Band (Indonesian margarine) and kecap manis (Indonesian sweet thick black soy bean sauce), or in a rice porridge flavored with sesame oil and cilantro, accompanied with cakwe (fried dough).  These three are my favorite ways of enjoying my Mr. Freddy.  But recently I was told that this particular place where we’re getting our lunch has a different way of preparing frog legs.  So it was only natural that when one of the guys suggested this particular dish, I immediately said yes.  I was curious to see how good it would tastes.

We ordered not one but two frog dishes; a soup dish and a deep fried dish.  We all ordered our own steamed rice and soup but decided to share the deep fried frog legs.  The soup was basically a simple stock that has been flavored with tauco, a fermented soy bean paste, with the color of a murky brown.  Not exactly the most attractive soup I’ve seen.  It’s got nothing else but frog legs and garlic slivers.  Tons of garlic slivers.  You can imagine how strong the garlic flavor in that soup.  Before eating, we have to flavor the soup ourselves with a squeeze of lime wedge, crushed green and red chilies, pickled daikon radish and the restaurant’s own special deep brown sauce.  The sauce looked almost like soy sauce, except that it was not salty but more on a sweet-savory with a tint of vinegar-like flavor.  It was strange.  I took no more than a tea spoon of that stuff.  Not exactly my favorite seasoning for a soup.  The deep fried dish, however, was more welcoming in flavor than the soup.  It was batter-fried to a crispy consistency, accompanied by a sweet-spicy chili sauce that went very well with the frog legs.  If you ask me how I would describe the taste and texture of frog legs, well, they’re just like chicken.  Really!!  Teeny tiny skinny legs of water chickens.  Yeah, I think that’s the best way to describe frog legs.

God help me. I’ve said to myself “I’m so through with this!” a few years back when I walked out of the job. Tensions and boredom grew the longer I made myself stationed at the office. Finally, with f*#&-this,-i-don’t-care-anymore attitude, I authorized the HR personnel to cut off my monthly salary transfer and told the boss that I wanted out. Yup, that’s exactly what I did. I applied to a local Four Seasons Hotel for a summer internship in one of their kitchens. How liberating it seemed to step out of the office and into a professional kitchen. It was hard work, a far cry from the comfy i-don’t-have-to-do-anything position at the office. When family and money have to cross path constantly, something unpleasant eventually will come out of its closet and shake the mother boat, I thought. I refused to take part on something that I had no passion for. I returned to the states to pursue my passion and came out of it with a degree in culinary nutrition, tons of new friends, and a whole new perspective on life.

Having said all that though, I’m back in my home town, and am back at the SAME office!! This time, though, I’m a more willing participant of the turn of events. Much less tensions it seemed than before. What I learned from the past few months confirmed what I feared a few years back. Something unpleasant did happen and shook the mother boat. The end result forced a division in the management team. One team stayed behind and has been trying to correct all of the mistakes done in the past years. The opposing team moved on to built a new empire that is an extension of the old. A few lost their jobs, due to a grave action that brought a great loss to the company. Others remained loyal ‘till this day.

Seeing a familiar face walking into the office surprised almost all, with the exception of the new comers whom I have never met. The new guys wondered “who the hell is this guy?”, while those who recognized me gave a nervous smile, not knowing what to expect. Rumors traveled fast. Is he coming back for good? Is he just visiting? What’s going to happen now? Is he involved in the business? Etc...

Time passed. The more I listened and opened for suggestions and befriended those who stayed loyal, the more I learned that there were so many office politics and back-stabbing among the people that caused the mother boat to shake and almost brought it down to the brink of a chaos. The Asian economy crisis at the time did not help either. As a matter of fact, it forced the company to re-evaluate its strategy in keeping the business alive.

You may wonder what the hell am I doing back at the office then? To put the long story short, no matter how great the knowledge you have on a certain area, it doesn’t necessary mean that you’ll be able to thrive on it, especially when you’re not in the right environment, or culture for that matter. What I do as a personal chef, with my concept on food nutrition, seems too foreign and new for the locals to grasp and accept, let alone to pay money for. With the need of a steady income, I’ve accepted the reality that sometimes you have to compromise and give in to something else in order to achieve what you really have passion for. So I’ll still keep planning to find ways in establishing my personal chef/consulting work, while accumulating my savings by working a different job. This is why I’m back in the family business. In a way, it’s an approach to be close to the family whom I don’t think I know much about. At the same time, I’m testing my ability to see how far this will take me. Who knows what great opportunities come knocking when I least expected?