Given that you live in Arlington, you have amazing access to Ethiopian food, the DC area has a huge Ethiopian community and there are lots of great restaurants all over the area.
I lived in Indonesia for two years and traveled to Malaysia quiet a bit while I was there, the two cuisines are pretty similar. I’d say that Indonesian cooking (at least in Aceh) favored sweeter flavors in their entrees; their soy sauce is thick and sweet as opposed to thin and salty. My favorite food in Indonesia was fresh fish simply grilled on coconut charcoal and served with soy sauce and onions.
Soup, or a stew, terms don’t matter. The fact is, kare-kare should be like any boiled oxtail dish. The trouble with KK is the way it (negatively) evolves when offered in an eat-for-pay setting:
They put in internal organs or sometimes ox chin. Real KK uses only oxtail.
You put saffron to color, and some gluten substance to thicken the soup. you could use pounded rice that’s been toasted, or some peanuts. You don’t put in something that will overpower the taste of the stewed oxtail. But that’s the kind of kk people have gotten used to.
The so-called bagoong being offered in Manila is of the inferior kind, even. I also like to put in something sharp into kk when it gets too tedious, but well-cooked oxtail doesn’t need it, really. “Alamang” will just further ruin the taste.
I say this as a 100% Latvian: Traditional Latvian cuisine is revolting. There’s grudenis, pig’s head stew. and galerts, jellied meat. I hated eating at my grandmother’s house. I still have visions of shimmering molded clear jello with meat inside it. GAH!
However, there are some traditional baked goods that are wonderful. I hope you had some piragi, a small pastry turnover filled with a bacon or ham and onion mixture. My piparkukas actually won me a dinner cruise. They’re an elaborate cookie with lots of spices, kneading and swearing. There are also many variations on apple bread/cakes as well as zeltene maize which is a sweet bread colored and flavored with saffron.
Georgian is an interesting one. Something like Mediterranean meets Central and South Asian or something like that, but that doesn’t quite cover it. I don’t think I’ve ever had a cuisine so interestingly spiced. Lots of dried spices (like their spice blend khmeli sumeli, which has things like dried marigold, blue fenugreek, hyssop, dill, etc. in it, but varies by blend), as well as tons of fresh herbs, like cilantro, mint, dill, tarragon, basil, and parsley, sometimes all in the same dish. Also, a fondness for walnuts and sour plum sauce. They also have their breads, wines, and pastries, but it’s the spicing of their stews like chakhokhbili and kharcho that I’m always craving.
And that should be “khmeli suneli,” not “sumeli,” though I’m unlikely to get called out for that typo, though I can guess there’s at least one poster, if not two, who’d know it.
Great topic! I love finding uncommon ethnic food. One thing I think is interesting is how common Ethiopian is, but how rare other African food is. I found a restaurant once near the Denver airport with Western African cuisine. Not sure how I would describe it though. I recall something with fermented grain that was pretty wierd.
Uzbekistan cuisine has become fairly popular down in the Russian neighborhood of Brighton Beach. Lots of lamb, cut up and cooked in pilaf with shredded carrot and onion; or minced and stuffed into dumplings. Mutton soup with lots of veggies. All kinds of noodles. Great stuff.
I was going to say there’s two styles of chicken and waffles, one with fried chicken, and another with a chicken stew kind of thing (like a chicken and dumplings dish), but it does appear this is the fried chicken style.
West African cuisine generally involves three things:
A heavy starch, such as pounded cassava or rice
A spicy soup
Whatever meat is available, which is cooked in the soup.
A dish is eaten by taking the starch in your right hand, dipping it in the soup and eating it.
The national dish of Ghana, for example, is fufu, pounded cassava with light soup. Light soup is the name of the soup, not just a description. Light soup is basically tomato soup with hot pepper and maybe some other spices.
We haven’t found too many Indonesian restaurants in our neck of the woods. Seems too hard to compete with the ubiquity of Chinese joints. We miss a good peanut sauce and gado gado, not to mention mangosteen. (Maybe we’re not looking hard enough?)
When I was 12, my family spent a month in the Austrian Alps along with some other relatives. Plane fare and lodging left little money for food, so we subsisted mainly on wurst, fish, and spaghetti, but once a week we went to the inn down the street. I always ordered the Hungarian goulash. To my twelve year old self it was the best thing I had ever tasted.
As for lunches, the market sold a powdered mix called Ungarische Zigeunersuppe–Hungarian Gypsy soup. no idea how authentic it was, but it was definitely the second best thing my 12-year-old self had ever tasted.
An Ethiopian (or Somalian? I’m not sure anymore) restaurant opened near my place recently, so I decided to go there. The patrons and staff were obviously Ethiopians (Somalians?), hardly speaking any French. Not able to deduce anything from the names on the menu, and since the waiter clearly wasn’t able to explain what the dishes were either, I let him pick the dish for me.
He brought me a kind of crepe, rather large, with some sort of meat and vegetable stew in the middle. That he put directly on the table, making clear that the “crepe” was doubling as plate. Didn’t bring any cutlery, so I asked for it. He tried to explain to me something that I didn’t understand, so he decided to make a demonstration instead. He picked a piece of crepe, grabbed with it some of my stew and ate it. Making me understand that the “crepe” was to be used as bread, plate and spoon (and putting his fingers in my food in the process).
I’m not too easily disturbed, so I ate the dish. Unfortunately, it wasn’t particularly good, and rather bland.
That certainly summarizes how I feel about Ethiopian cuisine, too. I’d gone to a restaurant with perhaps a dozen other adventurous eaters and got to sample a significant portion of the menu. I just can’t get excited about this food. That I don’t love their ‘crepes’* set the meal off to a slow start.
Rijsttafel is tasty, and definitely Indonesian-ish, but it’s heavily Dutch-influenced.
Indonesian food is a lot like Chinese food, in that it varies tremendously by region. Balinese food is not Manadonese food is not Padang food is not Javanese food. At the risk of generalizing too much, here are a few observations:
[ul]
[li]One food that is pretty uniquely Indonesian is “tempeh.” (Sold in US health food stores at a bajillion times the cost in Indonesia.) That’s usually translated as soy cheese, which sounds disgusting. But it’s delicious, nutritious, and inexpensive, and a staple of many people’s diets. I suppose the Western food it most resembles is TVP, but as I’ve rarely had TVP I’m not really sure.[/li][li]Another uniquely Indonesian food is emping, made by frying the smashed nut of the melinjo tree, either straight-up or with a sugary/spice coating. Emping are weirdly bitter and the taste is hard to describe, but once you develop a taste for them they are wonderful. I will miss emping when we leave Indonesia as I haven’t seen them outside the country.[/li][li]Rice crackers (krupuk) are not uniquely Indonesian but I think some of the flavors are. Shrimp is most common, but they come in garlic, onion, vegetable, and other flavors.[/li][li]Pork is generally not used because the country is majority Muslim.[/li][li]Peanut sauce is taken very seriously in at least parts of the country. I’ve seen strong looks of disapproval when I ignorantly put one kind of peanut sauce onto something that was intended for a different type of peanut sauce (probably like putting ketchup instead of tomato sauce on your spaghetti).[/li][li]Chicken is popular, and there is a Javanese fried chicken that I swear was the inspiration for Colonel Sanders decades ago, but the chickens themselves are chewier and more flavorful. Western-style chickens are disdainfully called “ayam roti” (bread chicken).[/li][li]A lot of the food is spicy, or if it isn’t, it is served with a ground-up chili condiment called sambal.[/li][li]Rice is ubiquitous. White rice is the usual favorite, but black and red rice are also used. There is a glutinous black rice that is popular for desserts. Red rice is a lot like brown rice in taste and texture. It is becoming more popular, I think due to greater understanding that it is better for you than white rice. But white rice is still the predominant grain.[/li][li]The food is usually pretty greasy by health-conscious Western standards (but good).[/li][li]Black pepper, shallots, garlic, turmeric, coriander, ginger, and galangal (both lesser and greater) are commonly used as flavorings.[/li][li]Another common flavoring is “kecap manis,” which is a sweet soy sauce.[/li][li]Desserts tend to be gummy and very sweet.[/li][/ul]
If pizza, hamburger, fried chicken and spaghetti are the national dishes of the US, probably the Indonesian equivalents are:
[ul]
[li]fried rice (the nasi goreng that** QtM** mentioned)[/li][li]beef or chicken sate (a lot like what you get in Thai restaurants)[/li][li]rendang (a spicy beef stew in a delicious coconut sauce, originally just a Padang dish but now beloved pretty much everywhere)[/li][li]“gorengan,” which translates as fried snacks and can be battered and deep-fried tofu, bananas, tempeh, or other things.[/li][/ul]
Indonesian restaurants in the US, what few there are, are apparently pretty terrible. I’ve heard Indonesians return from sojourns in Boston or DC speak of how they simply can’t get their home cuisine in the US, though I think there is, or was, an acceptable place somewhere in northern VA. If you want decent Indonesian food in America, your best bet is to get a well-regarded cookbook and make your own. (The Complete Asian Cookbook by Charmaine Solomon is pretty good, except for her shortcut recipe for peanut sauce that uses peanut butter, which horrifies Indonesians. Everything else is great though.)