Valentine's Day gone wrong...

Hey everyone! So yes, I do realize that V-Day was like more than a week ago, but I still have to tell you about how frustrating my day was...

Actually Robe proved to be quite the romantic. I told him I would make him dinner, and so while I was preparing our meal he decorated part of his house for us. It was so cute and romantic – he put up black fabric to make it seem more private and set up a little table with candles and everything. It was all very cute. He tried to find flowers for me, but unfortunately florists don’t exist here. So he searched all over Malang to find me these really ugly plastic flowers. But of course I love them. It was so sweet!

So for dinner I planned on making chicken tetrazzini, one of my favorite dinners. Let’s just say that turned into quite an ideal because Indonesians just don’t have anything good to cook with…

First of all, the knives in their house are quite dull, so I had to practically pull the chicken apart with my hands. They don’t have small pots, so I had to use this really huge could-serve-an-army kind of pot that I was barely tall enough to see inside of. No skillets here either, so I had a choice between incredibly tiny or obnoxiously huge woks that are too heavy to pick up. I won’t even mention that they do measurements by weight (grams), not volume (cups) like we do. You can imagine me trying to measure things like “1 cup of milk” and “1 ½ teaspoons of black pepper.” If you know me at all you know how (not) often I cook, so I couldn’t really “eye” 1 ½ teaspoons of black pepper. I’m pretty sure I put in like 2 tablespoons, because the sauce was very “lada hitam” (black pepper) heavy.

Before I forget, they use these little gas stoves circa 1800 that poop out on you in the middle of cooking your chicken without you noticing. Thus, it took me about 2 hours to cook the chicken. Okay so let’s also not forget that nothing is in one place here (i.e. the kitchen). There is no water supply in the "kitchen," so I had to keep going back and forth between the bathroom and kitchen just for water. And they don’t keep any dishes or silverware in the kitchen, because that would make way too much sense. They keep them behind the pantry, where they have a very strange dish washing station which is very wet (all over, even on the floor!) and very disgusting. So if I was in the middle of cooking, oh I don’t know, sauce, for example. And I needed another fork, just for example. Forget it. I would have to stop everything I was doing, turn off the stove, and run to the washing station, grab a fork and run back to the kitchen, starting everything all over again.

That leads me to the sticking point. So after laboring intensively and uncomfortably (most Indonesian women are quite short, so their countertops are strangely low. I had to bend over awkwardly for about three hours while cooking), I asked Robe to get the oven out for me. He had told me before that they had an oven, but they put it away when they weren’t using it (so I’m thinking, a portable oven?). I was not prepared for what he did next. First he went outside, grabbed 2 bricks (and I do mean bricks, the kind you build houses with), and handed them to me. Yea, like I knew what I was supposed to do with those... He took them back, placed them on either side of the gas stove, then disappeared again. About a minute later he came back, awkwardly carrying this metal toolbox with holes in the side. Turns out, that metal toolbox was the oven. Oh my God. I swear you have never seen anything like this. He put the toolbox oven on top of the bricks, turned the gas stove on, and turned to look at me with this huge smile on his face. I just kind of stared blankly at him, all the while thinking “What the heck am I supposed to do with that?”

Anyway. After “preheating” the oven (did I mention there were no knobs or buttons or anything on this oven? You have no option about the temperature and you just kind of have to guess when the oven is hot enough), I pried open the oven door, literally using all the strength I had (with oven mitts on, of course, because the entire metal contraption was piping hot). I threw in the chicken tetrazzini and waited – for about an hour. Even after an hour, the dish was just hot, not even all good and melty, the way Mom makes it. Oh, well…

Did I mention that I didn’t start cooking until after 6pm? The housekeeper had told me she would finish cooking around 4pm so that I could use the kitchen. Yea, that didn’t happen… So poor Robe, who had worked hard all day, didn’t even get to eat dinner until after 9pm. I felt so awful. My “experiment” as I like to call it these days, didn’t even turn out all that great. I also made a salad, but that turned out to be a disaster because I bought way too many veggies (thinking Robe’s family could enjoy it, too). Clearly I was wrong and practically the entire salad went to waste because Indonesians don’t know how to eat anything that’s not fried. I told them they could eat vegetables raw, and they looked at me like I had three heads.

Oh, well. It doesn’t matter because after all the stress of cooking in Indonesia (which, by the way, I’m never doing ever again), Robe and I did actually get to enjoy our meal (which was not too terrible…).

That’s all I have for you today, ladies and gentlemen. I’m sorry, Tara, for not updating sooner! It’s been a little hectic around here lately… But thank you for all of the updates!! How is the new car? I can’t wait to see it!!! But purple…sounds a little trashy and weird to me…but if you like it then it’s definitely fine J