Burnt Rice, Chaotic Rice

Back in the kitchen of our cabin in west Denpasar, I had a second stab at bubur injun - black rice pudding. If the rice wasn't black before I started, it certainly was by the end. The pot boiled dry and a layer of rice turned to carbon at the bottom. I will shamelessly blame the hob, which seems to have two settings - 'off' and 'rolling boil' - which makes simmering rice quite difficult.

Say what you like about bad workmen blaming their tools, but some tools genuinely do have shortcomings, and if my Dad taught me anything, it was always to use the right one for the job. He also taught me that no food should go to waste, so I served up the burned offerings.

K was characteristically enthusiastic, and one might poetically describe the rice pudding  as having a delightfully smokey taste, but I rather less charitably felt as though I was chewing on a piece of charcoal.

During the day, we picked up K's top, tailored in the style of a traditional Balinese garment. The lady looked relieved that it a) fitted, and b) K liked it. And so she should; it looks good, really good.

To avoid the pain of hovering over the pan waiting for the moment when the rice goes from raw to a state in which it is fused with the metal, I proposed that we pick up some fried rice this evening.

We returned to the husband and wife duo at the end of our street and ordered up a couple of helpings of nasi goreng mawut. This seems to translate as 'chaotic fried rice'. The chaos, it transpired, seems to arise from the inclusion of short lengths of noodles in amongst the rice.

Rice! And noodles?! Chaos!!

I was about to claim that pandemonium didn't result from our eating such blatantly disorderly food, but in fact the power went out just as we were tucking in. This left us having to finish up in the pitch black and find a torch.

Out of interest, we ventured out onto the street to see how the Balinese cope in a power cut. They revealed themselves to be most resilient. All the warungs remained open, some with presumably battery-powered light, and the street stalls continued by candlelight. Impressed, we ordered up a wonderfully indulgent, but hopefully non-chaotic terang bulan (stuffed pancake) from our local vendor. It was glorious, but as we sat decadently in bed, gorging ourselves on it, the bed and cabin shook. We presume aftershocks from an earthquake elsewhere in Indonesia, but it makes me think twice about what we eat next time. Perhaps just straightforward nasi goreng from now on.