Indonesian Dinner -- My Kitchen My World

A huge thank you to Michelle of My Year to Get Skinny! She picked Indonesia as our country of the week and I had so much fun trying my hand at an Indonesian dinner. As I looked for foods I discovered that Indonesia is the home of satay. Across Indonesia there are many many variations of this dish. I found a recipe for tofu satay on foodnetwork.com and it was amazing!

The marinade:

2 tablespoons tamari soy sauce

2 tablespoons Asian sesame oil

2 tablespoons sherry (I used white wine)

2 pounds extra-firm tofu, sliced 1 inch thick and patted very dry, then cut into 1-inch cubes and patted again (I only had 1 lb tofu but I made the entire portion of marinade and sauce which was a great idea since it was so delicious!)

1 red bell pepper, cut into 1-inch squares (I used a wonderful purple pepper we picked up at a farm stand)

The sauce:

3/4 cup canned coconut milk
1/2 cup natural-style peanut butter, smooth or chunky
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 1/2 teaspoons curry powder (I used red curry powder)

1 1/2 tablespoons brown sugar

1 tablespoon lime juice (I used lemon)

1 tablespoon canola oil

1 1/2 tablespoons tamari soy sauce

Dash cayenne pepper

Combine the marinade ingredients in a large bowl. Add the dry tofu and red pepper and toss gently with a rubber spatula to coat evenly. Let marinate 30 minutes or up to 8 hours. Refrigerate if longer than 1 hour. Prepare the grill or preheat the oven to 450 degrees.

To make the sauce, place all the sauce ingredients in a food processor and blend until smooth. Pour into a decorative serving bowl.

Remove about 1/3 cup of the sauce and drizzle it over the tofu. Use the rubber spatula to toss the tofu gently with the sauce. If you are grilling the satay, thread the tofu and red peppers on skewers. (Bamboo skewers must be soaked for 30 minutes.) If you are roasting the tofu in the oven, place it in 1 layer in a large, shallow baking dish such as a 9 x 13-inch lasagna pan. Use 2 pans if one pan isn't large enough.

Cook the tofu on the hot grill at least 20 minutes, turning it occasionally, or roast in the oven for 25 minutes. The tofu is done when it is a deep golden brown. Let the tofu cool to room temperature before serving. Serve alongside a bowl of sauce for dipping.

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This was amazing, I had so much fun making these and the results were SO delicious! I think this is one of my new favorite tofu recipes, really!

I had a bunch of peppers and decided to slice them up, salt the lightly with some sea salt from the grinder, and serve them with my extra sauce from the tofu satay recipe (I made double the sauce).

I just had to share this bowl. I love it. It's Sanrio, and I bought it on ebay probably 5 years ago, right after my husband and I got married. When I was little it was on special weekend shopping trips with my mom that I would spend all of my allowance on Sanrio items at the store Middle Earth . I could not wait to go in and go the the left wall where they had all of these neat Sanrio items.

After seeing Natashya at Living in the Kitchen with Puppies do a recipe from Deborah Madison's book, Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone, I thought, hey, I have that book! I've never cooked from it, it mostly just sat on my shelf since I bought it a year or so ago. I was turned off by the lack of pictures that I just pushed it aside. I think I've been missing out! I'm a picture cookbook person. No offense to non picture cookbooks, I have a ton of them, but when I want to cook from a book I tend to grab the ones off of the shelves that I know have gorgeous foodie photos. Anyway, I decided I'd look in the index of this book and check to see if there were any Indonesian recipes for MKMW this week. And there was! I picked Indonesian Fried Rice -- Nasi Goreng to try. I deviated so much from the actual recipe it isn't even funny, but let's just say you start with rice, I used our favorite jasmine variety, make a paste with chiles and an onion, add in some soy sauce, molasses, and ketchup (which I forgot), then some peas and fry it all up in roasted peanut oil, which I didn't have so I used sesame. See, I told you I switched up the recipe way too much. I also about tripled the pea amount, just because I had some peas to use up and I thought, why not? Can extra peas really make a rice dish that bad? Nope! Those little peas did just fine.

Rice just starting to get spiced up...

Overall this was an amazing dinner which I loved and would happily make again! I plan to try the rice recipe as written at some point, but I got the just of it with this recipe and I liked it. I think Indonesia and Jamaica are tied so far as my favorite My Kitchen My World meals, they were both packed with amazing flavors and totally new for me to try. I'd always seen the 'meat' versions at ethnic restaurants and longed to try the exotic flavors, it was great to try my hand at making it vegetarian.