Mom, dad, and Susie.
Actual date: October 16, 2008
The first restaurant we went to was a Chinese restaurant in Surabaya right after we landed. On day 2 we went to our first Indonesian food restaurant: Gadjah Mada restaurant in Malang. I call it an Indonesian restaurant because its main dishes are uniquely Indonesian despite their distinctly Chinese roots. Gadjah Mada is known for its Pangsit Mie, which is a noodle dish (mie = noodles) served with dumplings similar to Gyoza (pangsit = a type of dumpling). Despite the name, instead of fried/boiled dumplings you can get it served with a variety of other meats on top of the noodles like shredded or ground meat, meatballs, etc. Beef and chicken are popular toppings, while pork is more likely to be served at Chinese-inclined restaurants where their clientele are less likely to be muslim.
Chowing down on some Es Kelapa Muda
Susie is having some Es Kelapa Muda (es = ice, kelapa = coconut, muda = young), which is a drink with young coconut, typically with sweet syrup mixed in. By syrup I don’t mean maple syrup like you’d drizzle (or pour if you’re like me) over your pancakes although the consistency is similar. In Indonesia it’s popular to buy these fruit-flavored syrups to mix in with cold water to make fruit-flavored drinks. The coconut is young, which means it’s very soft. Denise and I have actually found young coconut in our local grocery store (Kroger?), and although the shell-cracking process is a real bear the results are worth the effort.
Before
In front of Sofia and Denise are 2 Pangsit Mie dishes with different toppings. The brown lumps in the middle are Bakwan Goreng–fried meatballs (bakwan = meatball, goreng = fried). To the right are a couple of bowls of broth, and a small saucer of pickled cucumbers. Close to the bottom of the picture is a multi-colored dish called Es Campur (campur = mix).
Es Campur
Es Campur is a colorful mix of various fruits and jelly bits. Sorry, I can’t really come up with a better description, but it’s really tasty despite my inability to make it sound that way. In the previous photo there was a mound of shaved ice on top, which had mostly melted by the time I took the latest photo. It’s a snack/dessert dish.
I’ll take a stab at identifying all the floaty bits in it. The black cubes are Agar-agar, which is a jelly made out of seaweed Cincao, otherwise known as Grass Jelly. The yellow slivers are pineapple. The green is Cendol, which is some kind of gelatinous substance. Pink stuff I think is Cengkaleng, which even if I’m right about that I’m not sure what it is. I’ll have to ask the fam and see if they know is Kolang-Kaling, which is the soft seed of a type of palm tree with a slightly hard/more chewy center. Note that this is merely one implementation of Es Campur. You can mix in a wide variety of other ingredients similar to the ones thrown into this one, so Es Campur will vary from place to place.
After
Gadjah Mada is well known for its Pangsit Mie, and it delivered the goods as usual. It’s a fairly straightforward dish–just noodles with some meat sprinkled on top–but they consistently serve some of the best Pangsit Mie around. We cleaned out our bowls, and Sofia made a sizeable dent in hers.
Of interest to people who have never been to Indonesia, in this picture you see an ashtray because you can smoke in most (all?) restaurants. The green container holds napkins, or rather the Indonesian version of napkins–toilet paper. I’m pretty sure at least one of the metal containers holds Sambal (chili paste/sauce). Lots of Indonesians like their food spicy, so some kind of hot sauce or raw chili peppers is never far away.
There’s a menu on the wall that’s a bit too small to read at the size of image that I uploaded for this post. In the original version I can see the prices. Regular Pangsit Mie–called Istimewa, which means “special”, oddly enough–costs Rp. 14,500. That’s fourteen thousand five hundred Indonesian rupiahs, which, allowing for an exchange rate of 10,0000 rupiahs to 1 U.S. dollar, is roughly $1.50. The most expensive Pangsit Mie variant with meatballs is still less than $2. The dollar goes a loooooong way in Indonesia. If you can stomach the cost of a round-trip plane ticket ($1300 or so), once you get there you can really live it up for cheap if you don’t just eat in your posh hotel. And Gadjah Mada isn’t some nasty hole-in-the-wall place either. It’s a typical average restaurant–not high-end but not low-rent either. You can expect to pay these kinds of prices for food everywhere that isn’t snooty. A $5-$6 dish is considered expensive in most restaurants.
So come to Indonesia. The people are super friendly, it’s always sunny if you don’t come during the rainy season, and the food is delicious, not to mention cheap.
N.B. July 9, 2009: Thanks go out to my mother for the corrections on the ingredients of the Es Campur. Man, I really shouldn’t even have tried, I was so far off 
To reinforce the point about Es Campur implementations varying from place to place, I’ve had it with ingredients such as avocado and young coconut, while my mom has seen it with tomato! In addition to the pink syrup, condensed milk (plain and/or chocolate) is often used as well. Mom says there’s a place in Pasar Atom (an old and famous shopping center in Surabaya) that has 20 varieties of Es Campur.