Bakso , Gudeg , Rujak Cingur and such @ Botani Square, Bogor Indonesia

A  short 2 day working trip to Bogor, and in the spirit of ‘short’;  I will try to keep this posting brief.

 We landed at Jakarta and was immediately whisked to Bogor and after a brief stop at the clients office , it was near to lunch time and  we headed to Botani Square (one of the largest malls in Bogor )for lunch.

We wanted something local and I wouldn’t mind having some baso, so we  ended up at Mister Baso   

Baso ( or some call it bakso) is actually meat ball, (usually beef) served in soup with noodles ( like meat balls noodles lohhh). There are many versions of bakso including bakso tennis, named as the size of the meatballs are the size of  tennis balls. ( might be some exaggeration there , I suspect)

I ordered Baso Malang , which has tofu, meatballs (springy, tasty and meaty), fried ;’siu mai’ and a piece of crispy thingy on the side. This was good, the soup was sweet and rich ( kinda like sup perut), The noodles portion was quite small, but it wasn’t polite to ask for seconds when no one did…..so, greedy me- refrained..

 My colleague ordered Baso something ..err..forgot the name, sorry …

 

On the tables are also basket filled with packets of crispy puffs that you can add to your bowl of baso.

 

 We stayed at Hotel Santika- which is attached to Botani Square, so, this was very convenient. The hotel is  sitting on land owned by a university, my clients commented that this used to be part of their campus , and thus the hotel ( and the shopping complex) pays rental to the university, talk about being self sufficient !

View from my room

 

 My room ( funny thing is when I met my colleague over breakfast the next day, he was commenting on the cold mosaic floors in the room, but umm..i had wooden flooring in my room ..hehe…I guess I was given a better room ? :D)

 

 For dinner we did a walkabout Botani Square , found familiar names like Breadtalk and Giant. We decided to  try out  the food court

My colleague ordered Rujak Cingur from Warung Khas Jawe Timur Surubaya, Under the brown paste ( he said this taste like the prawn paste in penang laksa), it’s a mixture of vegetables like cucumber, taugeh and also lontong and 2 crispy thingy

 

From Wikipedia, Rujak Cingur is a mix of  of boiled and raw vegetable salad, with a special twist that is the boiled beef snout (cingur) mixed in. It is then dressed in a sauce made of caramelized fermented shrimp paste (petis) , peanuts, chili, and spices. It is usually served with lontong , a boiled rice cake.  ( I bet my colleague didn’t know about the beef snout..Mooo Moooo… snort snort..)

I ordered a Gudeg set from ‘Gudeg Solo, Ibu H Sri, Masakan Jawa’  for RP17000 ( I felt kinda rich when I pay  17 thousand for a meal ! ).

The jackfruit taste nice but I find it a bit too soft, this is my first taste  of beef skin, the texture is kinda like fried fish maw, it was soft, slightly springy and spicy. The fried chicken drumstick was slightly salted and deep fried yum..Overall, interesting.

 

 from Wikipedia Gudeg is a traditional food from Central Java and Yogyakarta which is made from young nangka (jack fruit) among other things, boiled for several hours with palm sugar  and coconut milk. Additional spices include garlic, shallot, candlenut , coriander seed, galangal, bay leaves and teak leaves leaves, which last imparts a brown color to the dish. It is also called Green Jack Fruit Sweet Stew. Gudeg is usually served with white rice, chicken, hard-boiled egg, tofu , and/or tempeh , and a stew made of crispy beef skins (sambal goreng krecek).

 

And after the Rujak Cingur, my colleague still had some spare compartment in his system, so he ordered a bowl of bubur ayam ( chicken porridge) . When the bubur arrived, it was a 1:1 ratio of bubur : crispy stuff on bubur, the crispy stuff include yau chat kwai and 2 other ‘species’ of fried stuff. My colleague was commenting that why did they serve chili paste with the porridge, and ended up adding that to the bubur to make it more palatable.so, I guess, this was just so so for him.

A quick one ( or two)  on Bogor extracted from Yahoo Travel

the Guinness Book of Records notes the city for the “most days per year with thunder” – and famously lush Botanical Gardens (daily 8am–5pm; Rp1500), which were founded by Sir Stamford Raffles in 1811.