Kool and the gang
Actual date: October 18, 2008
The day after my parents’ mega-super-duper shindig we all packed into the car and went to Surabaya for a couple days on our way to Yogyakarta. Denise, Sofia, and I were scheduled to go to a get-together organized by some old (and I do mean “old”–graduated in 1994) high school friends of mine that evening. Some of my high school friends and I still keep in touch with each other through an unofficial, member-run class mailing list, and when I mentioned that I would be coming to Indonesia a few of them formed a small impromptu committee of sorts and put this gathering in motion–deciding on a time and place, sending out invites, and organizing every detail. One of them even picked us up from the hotel where we were staying, since we’re not familiar with the streets of Surabaya. » Continue Reading…
Snake fruit
Actual date: October 18, 2009
This is a fruit called salak, nicknamed “snake fruit” in English because of its scaly skin. The hard, scaly skin peels off to reveal the off-white fruit inside divided into 3 sections. The sizes of these sections vary from instance to instance: 3 relatively equally sized sections, 2 big and 1 small, or 1 big and 2 small. The larger sections have a hard pit in them.
This is a fairly labor-intensive fruit to eat. First you have to peel off the outer skin, which if you’re not careful can cut your fingers. I usually tear off the pointy tip and start working my way down. Then you rub the inner fruit sections to remove a transparent membrane/skin from them, which can take a few minutes.
The payoff is a fruit that isn’t very fruity to westerners used to thinking of fruits as being juicy and sweet, because salak is neither. Denise wasn’t a fan, but this is one of my favorite Indonesian fruits, probably second after the Manalagi mango, which is one of the many local variants unavailable in America. If you’re a fan of mangos and ever make it to Indonesia, you must try some Manalagi. When unripe the fruit is white in color, a touch tart with dark pockets of sugar concentration spread throughout the fruit. This is my preferred ripeness at which to eat this mango. When it’s fully ripe it’s incredibly sweet–way too sweet for me. We ate some (not enough!) in Indonesia, but I have no pictures of it. The mango intoxication made me forget my camera.
Sorry, don’t have pictures of the innards of the salak either. This was taken at 8 a.m. and I wasn’t about to eat any, so I didn’t think to peel one just for pictures. See, I told you I’m a terrible travelogger/foodblogger.