Eat and Sleep

We went to Kintamani to do ceremonies because Tuesday was Hungry Ghost Day, which is a Chinese holiday during which families made offerings of food and prayer for their ancestors and also for ghosts who do not have family to pray for them. There's really not much to do in Kintamani except eat and sleep and look at all the cute dogs running all over the place so we did a good amount of all three.

Since I haven't really talked much of Balinese/Indonesian foods in this blog so far , I'll just mention some note-worthy stuff. For dinner Wid and fam got some nasi ayam (chicken rice) from Nasi Ayam Kedewalan from Ubud, which is on the way to Kintamani. I normally would eat this dish (very authentic and delicious) but my stomach wasn't feeling well that day. Instead of the rice dish, I found these snacks consisted of peanuts and flour, all fried together forming these little round, salty crackers. I was actually expecting sweet, but if it was sweet, then it wouldn't have been Balinese anymore. Hehe.

The rest of Monday night dinner was the usual Balinese dishes (fried eggs, sambal, rice, fried fish, etc.), but what turned out to be my favorite dish was the stir-fried vegetable. This was the first time me trying this vegetable, called paku in Balinese, and it was very delicious. For some reason it reminded me of spinach and kung-kong (空心菜), but people eat mostly the stalks. Wid told me that this is peasant food because it is grown everywhere and people often just pick it from the side of the road and cook it. They could only eat this vegetable in the village because it's not popular to be sold in the area we live. Another food that can't be found anywhere else is the pork sausage with it's large chunks of fat and stuff. It's crunchy on the outside and soft and fatty in the inside. Sausages can be made easily at home, but what make this sausage special is that it's been smoked over the wooden stove to give it its distinctive taste. This particular batch was extra delicious because it was smoked for five days instead of the usual four days. The smoke from the wooden stove also gives other things a nice flavor, one of them being tea. The red tea prepared the usual way, but the smoke gives the tea a richer flavor and aroma. It's always nice to have a glass of tea to warm the body up.

The ceremony is like the usual with the typical Chinese/Indo-Chinese food offerings. Lots of pork, tofu, vegetables, fruits, tea, and alcohol. It's not very exciting to me because I've seen it so many times, but may be I'll talk about ceremonies some other time.