Soto Ayam - Indonesian Chicken Soup

The easiest way to prepare warm food at home, especially if you don’t have much time to spend in the kitchen!!

All you need to have:

1 pack of bumbu instant SOTO AYAM
ca. 400gr chicken (2 chicken legs or breast – whichever you have in your fridge!)
1 lt water
(1 pc of lemon grass and a few of dried citroenleaves – optional!)

Boil the chicken in the 1 lt water until the meat gets tender.
Take out the chicken, let it cool first and cut the meat small. See above pict.
Put in 1 pack of bumbu instant SOTO Ayam in the clear soup – lower the heat.
When done with the chicken, put the sliced chicken meat back in the soup.
With the low heat, cook for another 15 minutes…

This is how it looks at the end….

for the final touch I have put in some vermicelli (rice noodle), cooked egg, and sprinkle over the soup some fried red onions.

You may add some fresh coriander leaves, and that will give really a boost in the taste!!

Rendang (Indonesian goulash... ;-)

Feels like having some spicy meat for lunch? Why not try the instant spice for Rendang... It doesn’t take much time for preparation, yet the taste is great!!


This is what you need to prepare:

1 pack of Bumbu Rendang (Rendang spice)
1 coconut milk 500ml
300 gr meat – cut in pieces
1 onion and some garlic – chop them fine.
1 pc of lemon grass and some dried citroenleaves.






Sautè the finely chopped onion and garlic with enough cooking oil in a big pan. After a while, put in the lemon grass and citroenleaves, as well as 1 pack of the bumbu Rendang (Rendang spice), stir it slowly.

Then put the small pieces of meat in, and 1/3 of the coconut milk. Slowly, stir it and low the heat. When the meat gets tender, put in the rest of the coconut milk. Let it cook until some oil comes out (from the mixture)... See the picture below for the final serving…

Somehow, it looks like the Austrian Goulash… humm.. yummy!!

Tip:
For those who like hot spicy meat, feel free to add some red chillies –chop nicely and put them in together with the onion and garlic while cooking. Or if you found it late, well… you still can add some 1 or 2 teaspoons of Sambal Oelek.

Another tip:
One say, the more you let it cooked, the more tasty it becomes. It's true, though. Even somew would find it more tasty to have it somehow 'dried'. You may let it stay overnight first, and re-heat it the next morning. You will find it more tastier than before.

Banana blossom in duet with chicken hearts…

Back home in Jakarta, we call this kind of cooking style ‘tumis’. I have to say, this was the first and the easiest way I found when I had to prepare food when I was teenager. Every kind of vegetables (bittergourd, morning glory, bean sprouts and tofu,..) you can do almost every vegetables with this cooking style, and add anything small or anything you can cut small, chicken meat, chicken hearts, shrimps, meatballs…




You just have to have: onions, garlic, galanga roots, red chillies (and some pieces of bay leaves.

And the preparation is always the same: cut them all nicely, only the bay leaves stay the way they are.




Sauté all the ‘tumis’ ingredients together (onions, garlic, red chillies, galanga roots, and bay leaves). After a while, put in the chicken hearts (or whatever you feel like having: shrimps, meatballs,... anything). This time I am using the chicken hearts and the banana blossom in can. The chicken hearts get into the pan before the banana blossoms (vegetables in the can don’t need to be cooked too long!). You may want to slice the banana blossoms if they are too big in size.

Let it cooked for some more minutes with low heat, and then serve it.





Voila!! One vegetable dish is served in almost no time!!!