the night before last i was awake for about an hour, and for some reason i decided to obsess about the huge amounts of stuff in our basement.  kevin has made great strides in cleaning it out, but there are still many many many things down there, and some of them are mine, and some of them are things that should be gotten rid of.

so yesterday we spent quite a bit of time down there and i kept moving things from place to place and not doing such a great job of getting rid of stuff, but i did make a tiny bit of progress.  i cleared away enough stuff to get to some boxes stacked on a table next to the back wall.  i knew this was a bunch of my stuff because i’d gone through it when we moved in last year and had gotten rid of some of it.

but there was still a lot of things, stuff that i couldn’t bring myself to get rid of.  a couple of boxes were full of miscellaneous things that i’d been hanging onto from my movie “hope’s happy birthday.”  there were cards from a screening, there were many lists of the many things i did to finish the film, there were photos and….lots and lots of stuff.  did i really need to keep all those copies of the budget?  or all those damn lists?

no, i didn’t.  so yesterday i started throwing more of it away, and i whittled the box down to a very small pile of papers.

one of the things in the pile was my checkbook from the production.  i flipped through it, amazed at all the money i’d spent, and was about to throw it away.  on the back page of the register i had scribbled “risttafel Indonesia.”

whenever i need to write something down and don’t have even one tiny scrap of paper, i use the back of a check or the back of the check register.

this brought back a faint memory – i must have written the words  sometime during the very long production or post-production, in 1994 or more likely, 1995.  i’d read an article somewhere – maybe in gourmet magazine – about these feasts in amsterdam, called risttafel, and it was indonesian cuisine.

i know i was intrigued by the article so i scribbled down the words so i’d remember and do some research.

which of course i didn’t.

this morning i’ve been reading all about it, because now it’s easy to sit here on my couch and look it all up online.

it’s actually spelled rijsttafel, and they serve it in Dutch restaurants and fix it in dutch homes for special celebrations, and the tie with indonesia is because the dutch went there and colonized  it a long time ago.

here’s what it says about rijsttafel on wikipedia:

The Indonesian rijsttafel (often misspelled rijstaffel), a Dutch word that literally translates to “rice table”, is an elaborate meal adapted by the Dutch from the Indonesian feast called nasi padang. It consists of many (forty is not an unusual number) side dishes served in small portions, accompanied by rice prepared in several different ways. Popular side dishes include egg rolls, sambals, satay, fish, fruit, vegetables, pickles, and nuts. In most areas where it is served, such as Indonesia, the Netherlands, and other areas of heavy Dutch influence (such as parts of the West Indies), it is known under its Dutch name.

The Dutch colonial feast, the rijsttafel, was created to provide a festive and official type of banquet that would represent the multi-ethnic nature of the Indonesian archipelago. Dishes were assembled from many of the far flung regions of Indonesia, where many different cuisines exist, often determined by the religion of the particular island or island group – vegetarian cuisine from the predominantly Hindu island of Bali, halal cuisine from the Sumatra region, and many others from the hundreds of inhabited islands, which know more than 300 regional and ethnic language groups. Brought back to the Netherlands by former colonials and exiled Indonesians after Indonesia gained its independence in 1945, the rijsttafel was predominantly popular with Dutch families with colonial roots. In the past two decades, however, Indonesian food has become part of a mainstream interest in South East Asian cuisine, and there has been a proliferation of Indonesian restaurants in the Netherlands.

More of a banquet than a meal, the rijsttafel has survived Indonesia’s independence, composed as it is of indigenous Indonesian dishes, and is served in many mainstream restaurants in Indonesia. A typical rijsttafel will have several dining tables covered with different dishes, while in some fancy settings in Indonesia each dish may be served by a separate waitress.

Rijsttafels strive to feature an array of not only flavors and colors and degrees of spiciness but also textures, an aspect that isn’t commonly discussed in western food. Such textures may include crispy, chewy, slippery, soft, hard, velvety, gelatinous, and runny.

mmm, this made me want to try some of this food right now.  i looked for restaurants around here, and the closest one is in chicago but there are no reviews of it and it sounds more chinese than indonesian.  plus i guess i’d really like to go to the netherlands and try it there.  there are several indonesian restaurants on both coasts; i looked them up in LA, and i certainly could have tried them when i lived there, but i didn’t.  because i didn’t have that checkbook with me so i could remember that word.

i also found a website by a woman from indonesia who has written many cookbooks and one of her books is at the library and it’s available and i’m going to go there today and check it out.

her name is sri owen, and i enjoyed reading her site and if you want to see it, here’s the link – sri owen’s website

so now i want to have a rijsttafel dinner party.  maybe after thanksgiving.  when i lived in LA i had a couple of indian dinner parties and cooked for about four days making all the different dishes.  i haven’t done that in a very long time, so maybe i could combine the rijsttafel with the indian.  or i could have two different dinner parties.

it would be simpler to go to a restaurant and try a rijsttafel, but there are none close by.  there’s an Indonesian restaurant in brooklyn that sounds pretty good, and so many in LA (mostly in west LA), and i found one in Denver, plus of course lots up and down the california coast.  so if you live in any of those places, you should go try it and let me know how it is.

ok then,

saturday morning grace.