About Me

Hello!  I’m Titi, an exercise nut who loves all thing food.  I was born and raised in Indonesia and was sent to California to pursue education right after high school.

Three decades and two kids later I’m still here, happily I might say. 

My love affair with food started at a very young age.  My parents were lucky I was not born a picky eater.

I would eat everything placed in front of me.  It even landed me a job as the assigned “garbage disposal” of the family (I was also the skinniest one of three girls with a stretchy belly).  Anything left uneaten on the dining table, my mom would put on my plate to clean.

As an adult, this passion has not let up, some might even say it has gone a few notches up, partly because I’m now old enough to cook and bake.  You’ll find me in the kitchen experimenting with recipes and ingredients.

I think of cooking as edible art, a way to channel creativity and the best part, of course, is to eat the finished product.  A nice change of pace from my day job as an accountant.

I also view food as a way to connect with people.  I’ve been known to herd some hungry co-workers around the office kitchen and fried up home-made carnitas and sunny side up eggs on a George Foreman grill.

MY MEMORY OF INDONESIAN COOKING

Growing up I always enjoyed watching my family’s cook work in the kitchen.  She wore a standard sarong and kebaya top, and squatted on a little stool. She prepared all our meals and I specifically remember her grating fresh coconut for coconut milk, grinding bird’s eye chili pepper and other spices with a mortar and pestle to make sambal, and frying entire fish to making her famous nasi goreng.

Back then I always thought preparing Indonesian food was too labor intensive and complicated.  I guess in a way it was since everything was prepared the old-fashioned way. 

We did not have a rice cooker nor a food processor.  Coconut milk did not come in a can. Instead, it was squeezed out of a freshly-grated coconut with a lot of elbow grease. 

HOW I STARTED THIS JOURNEY

Because of that perception, I never cooked much Indonesian food except Satay and Bistek and a couple of other dishes.  I never even attempted making any Indonesian sweets except for Avocado Smoothie.

This past year though, I found myself with more free time on my hand after my divorce.  A friend suggested I should start an Indonesian food blog where I can work on the recipes during my off week from the kids and write a story about it. 

Well, here I am, creating an introduction to my blog.  I should say so far this has been a fun and inspiring project.

Aside from the opportunity to introduce my girls to some of my childhood favorite and feed my demanding sister (we had lamb satay and tongseng for Christmas dinner and both girls agreed they would much rather have those than a turkey or ham dinner), I have discovered a few surprises along the way: 

• First, how easy and simple some of my favorite dishes are to prepare at home. 
• Second, how widely available are some of the Indonesian spices/ingredients; such kecap manis (sweet soy sauce), kemiri (candlenut), galangal (in the same family as ginger), and gula jawa (coconut palm sugar).  Think Asian supermarkets and yes, Amazon! 
• Lastly, how much the coconut is used in just about every sweet and savory dish in variety forms: coconut milk, coconut water, freshly grated coconut, and young coconut pieces.

As a tribute to the abundance of coconut and spices used in Indonesian cooking, I think It’s only fitting to name the blog Coconut and Spice. I hope you enjoy reading the story and I hope I did a decent job demystifying Indonesian cooking and inspire you to try some of my recipes in your own kitchen.