What We Cook Today : Nasi Lengko (Lengko Rice)

When you are far-far away from your country, one think for sure, you'll miss the cuisine of your country. Maybe for those who came from world-wide-well-known-food country such as china (does anyone here haven't heard about chinese food?) , United States (KFC, McDonalds, Pizza Hut etc) , Italia (Pizza, Spaghetti, etc) India (Curry etc) and others won't feel that desperate as i am. I come from Indonesia, of course we have a lot of delicious food in my country, but there's not many place overseas put Indonesian food on their menu book.

Let say Malaysia, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Hongkong, and Australia are list of countries that sold or had Indonesia food there. Why ? Because a lot of Indonesian people there, for example in Hongkong, many household servant and store keeper are from Indonesia, and in Austaralia many student from Indonesia studied there. But here, in China, especially in Qingdao, there's not many Indonesian people lives here, and most of them (including me) are students, so we don't have enough money to run a restaurant business here.

Back to our topic, the one and only way to cure you from homesick-in-national-food is cooking by yourself. In my case, i really missed my hometown (i came from Cirebon, a city in West Java Province, Indonesia) cuisine called Nasi Lengko or Lengko Rice. The explanation about Lengko Rice was taken from Wikipedia :

"Sega Lengko (Nasi lengko in Indonesian, Lengko rice in English) is a typical cirebonese dish in Cirebon, Indramayu, Brebes, Tegal and surrounding areas.

The ingredients are white rice (better hot), fried tempeh, fried tofu, cucumbers (fresh raw, chopped), bean sprouts (boiled), leaves of chives (cut into small pieces), fried onions, peanut sauce (such as salad seasoning, spicy or not, depending on taste), and a thin soy sauce poured over the top.

Fried tempeh and tofu are cut into small pieces and placed on a plate of rice. Chopped cucumber is sprinkled on top. Well-cooked bean sprouts and peanut sauce are poured over it, with pieces of spring onion leaves. After this it is given a taste of soy sauce until browned, and sprinkled with fried onions. Aci crackers and a piece of white, round or square kondimennya. Kerupuknya smeared with ketchup is a popular appetizer.

This food is usually served with 5 or 10 satay in another dish."

Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_lengko

This is the visualization of Nasi lengko

 

So, me and my girlfriend are planning to make our own way Nasi Lengko. We are trying to make it as close as possible in taste compare the "real" Nasi Lengko in Cirebon. Anyway, my girlfriend also came from Cirebon, therefor we know exactly how does it taste because we already ate Nasi Lengko since we were child.
In china, you will hard to find specific ingredient like :

TEMPE :
this one is raw                                               this one is fried
 
taste almost same with tofu (they all made from soybean), but tempe need to be fermented first.


KECAP (Sweet Soy Sauce) :

in China, i can't find sweet soy sauce, they only have soy sauce and it taste salty. Fortunately i bring a lot of sweet soy sauce from Indonesia :)

FRIED ONION (Red Onion) :

This one is raw.                                                  This one is fried.
         
in China, i can't find red onion just like in Indonesia, so this one was replaced by fried white onion (maybe some of you more familiar with garlic, as shown picture below)

    



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Finally, after dealing with all constraint, our own version of Nasi Lengko was served.
I'll show you our dish :

It taste very similar..

It cure some part of my homesickness..

Every single bite remind me of my childhood (hyperbole hehe)..

Thanks Selly Kartika :)