Food

Culinarywise, I was raised on a combination of Chinese and Indonesian food. For every meal, there was always rice on the table, and my mom or our maid prepared an array of dishes, both meat and vegetable. Occasionally, we went to sample the wide variety of food that my hometown, Bandung, had to offer. I took all of this for granted until it was time for me to depart for college.

Back then, every freshman had to enroll in a meal plan. For me, the meal consisted of having breakfast and dinner at the dining hall in John Jay. It was a pretty expensive plan for so-so meals, costing around $13 a meal. But since I had already gotten the plan, I endured it in my first year. But after that, I started to look for dining halls with kitchens. Spring came and the academic year ended. I decided to stay in NYC and worked on campus. The decision was a no-brainer especially due to the situation back then in Indonesia (this was the time when Soeharto was forced to resign, and there were riots, which according to popular belief, targeted Indonesians of Chinese descent). My residential hall for the summer was Schapiro, and there was a kitchen in every floor (hurray!!). However, the first order of business was to find cheap kitchen utensils. I found a family selling some for around $100 (rice cooker, knives, pots), and I got them. It was around 10 blocks north of Schapiro, and I don't remember whether I walked back with the utensils or took the subway, but I do remember it was quite an effort bringing them to my room. Note that until that point, I hadn't cooked anything either (well, instant noodle, but I would have gotten bored eating instant noodle every day), so it was a moment full of uncertainty (well, the failures were certain). My parents had shipped me some cookbooks in Indonesian, so those were my starting point, but I soon realized I didn't know the English name of many of the ingredients, not to mention those who didn't exist in the US. So experimentation was the way to go. The whole summer basically were filled with days when I had to eat some of my failed creations, because I didn't have enough money to order takeouts. Actually, that's not quite true. In fact, I tried to save money so that I could buy English cookbooks.

A couple of the first cookbooks that I bought were Joy for Cooking and The Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook. I tried recipes whose ingredients I could easily find in the local supermarkets (University Food Market (UFM) and West Side Market). Usually I ended up having an OK meal. My cooking skill was definitely improving. As the years went by, those two books went out of favor (I eventually sold them at half.com or something). In my sophomore year, I still had some meal plan (basically points that I could use for lunch), but after that I abandoned the meal plan entirely. So some days I had to buy grocery at the local supermarkets. I liked the West Side Market better since it seemed to have a better collection of stuff, but since it was 6 blocks from the Columbia gate, shopping there involved walking with bags of grocery for 6+ blocks (not fun, especially in the winter, my fingers were painful from both the heavy bags and the cold air!). I also did the occasional Chinatown trip to get Asian ingredients. A side note, due to developments in the area of its location, West Side Market no longer exists.

Then I graduated and moved to California. Naturally, I got a car there, and all of a sudden I could buy much more stuff than what I had been able to back in NYC. Also, I was working, so now I had money to spend on cookbooks, and also I had plenty of spare time. Basically, my cooking horizon expanded in California. I had tried Italian (pasta and risotto) back in NYC, but now I wanted to try French. What I can say is, it involves a lot of time, clarified butter, and demi glace. The books I used for French were The Professional Chef and Escoffier's Le Guide Culinaire. I would say those two are not intended for home cooking; in particular, I remember trying to scale down the measurements used by the recipes in The Professional Chef because they were meant for 10 servings. At some point, I decided to go less to Albertson's and Safeway and instead patronized Andronico's and Draeger's. I still cooked Asian dishes, expanding my library of Asian cookbooks in the process; for Asian ingredients, I went to Ranch 99. And I also managed to dabble a little bit with (white) truffle, thanks to the truffle paste that I got from A.G. Ferrari in Sunnyvale (as you can see, not cheap!). In short, the two years I spent in California were golden years for my culinary exploration. By the way, I clarified the butter myself (a lot of patience and skimming required), and I didn't make my own demi glace (I didn't have that MUCH time) but used this instead.

Well, furthering my education has a higher priority than all this culinary exploration, so I knew what I was getting into when I quit my job and went to Pittsburgh to do my PhD (abandoning my nice salary for a graduate student stipend, and abandoning the abundance of fresh ingredients that California had to offer). I had no regrets (well, maybe a tiny bit). The first year was miserable, mostly because I sold my car in California and decided to use the bus in Pittsburgh. I had thought that this was a workable arrangement, but after I got here, I found it not quite. It reminded me of the time I was in NYC, having to maul heavy bags of grocery, but in Pittsburgh, there is the added requirement of having to walk up the hill. I finally bought a car in late summer of 2004, and now I can sample what the Strip District has to offer. Not bad, I would say, especially thanks to Lotus, Wholey and Benkovitz. I wish I could still do more Italian now, especially with the availability for stores such as PennMac, but I figure cooking Asian takes less time, and since I am at school again, I have less spare time than before.