Fried Chicken with yellow spice (Ayam goreng bumbu kuning)

Relieved!! After hours of cooking, and my back was hurt, I'm happy because the results were very satisfying. I guess nothing can beat Indonesian food.

Like the title, today we cooked "Ayam goreng bumbu kuning". I also cooked "Sayur Asam". Together, they are really really good combination. Let me tell you how I do it.

Ayam Goreng Bumbu Kuning

Preparation: 60 minutes
Cooking: 75 minutes.

Ingredients:

- 1 whole chicken, cut it to 8 pieces (breasts, wings, and thigh).
- 2 stick of lemon grass
- 3 bay leaves (Salam leaves)
- 25 gram of coconut milk powder or 100 gram of thick coconut milk
- 3 lime leaves
- 1 liter of water
- 3 cm of ginger

Crushed Ingredients:
- 6 clove of shallots
- 6 clove of garlic
- 3 candle nuts
- 2 cm of ginger
- 4 cm of yellow ginger/turmeric
- 1 tablespoon of Corriander
- 2 cm of galangal


First, grind the crushed ingredients into a paste. After finished, heat the wok with 2 tablespoon of cooking oil. Stir fry the crushed ingredients for about 2 minutes with medium heat.
Put the bay leaves, lime leaves, ginger, and lemon grass. And add water, mix it, and let it boil. Add about 2 teaspoon of salt, and 2 teaspoon of sugar, and a cube of beef stock.
After boiled, pour the coconut milk, slowly with continuously steering. Wait until boiled, and put the chicken pieces inside.
Let it cook for 75-90 minutes (until dry or thick).
When its done, they are ready to be deep fried :)
Heat the cooking oil(a lot) to deep fry the chicken. Set on medium-high heat. The deep frying only for making the chicken more crispy, because the chicken already done (not raw). Fry it until the skin become golden brown (about 5-7 minutes).
Rice is the perfect match for the dish.

We need chili paste to make it more delicious.
Making the chili paste is very easy.

Chili paste (Sambal)

Ingredients:
- 10 thai red chilies
- 1 clove of garlic (Peel only, don't crush it)
- salt
- lime juice
- soy sauce (Kecap manis)

Heat a wok with 1 tablespoon of oil. Stir fry the chillies and garlic on medium heat for 1 minute. And then crushed them with some salt and about 1 tablespoon of lime juice. Mix with soy sauce. The chili ready to be served.

Look! Steve Jobs and Bill Gates can get along. (Interview at D5)

Probably this post not really suitable with the theme of the blog because its not about code or cooking. But these 2 guys are really very big deal (if not the biggest) in the software industry, so I think it's interesting to share.
These videos taken from http://d5.allthingsd.com

This is the first part where they talk and respect each other.


The second part they talk about the relationship between both company.


The third is about devices and apps in the futures(5 years).


The fourth is continuing the discussion on the third.


The fifth talk about their company correlation in the entertainment business.


This one talk about the misunderstanding in their relationship.


And this is the last one.


Enjoy!

Chicken Stuffed with minced beef

This recipe quite easy.

Preparation: 20 minutes
Cooking: 20 minutes

Ingredients:

Chicken
- 200 gr Boneless chicken breast (thin slice)
- salt and pepper
- Lime leaves finely chop

Beef
- 100 gr minced meat
- 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg powder
- salt and pepper
- 1 clove garlic finely chopped
- bread crumb

Coating
- 50 gr plain flour
- 1 tablespoon rice flour
- 1 egg white
- salt and pepper
- 1 clove garlic finely chopped

First, make the chicken breast to thin fillet, so you can roll it.
Marinade with some salt and pepper also lime leaves. Leave it for about 5 minutes.

Then for the minced beef, just mix the ingredients together.

And the coating, beat the egg white. Mix flour with rice flour, salt, pepper and chopped garlic. Add the beaten egg white inside, and mix them.

Heat the oil.

Spread the minced beef on the surface of the chicken, and then roll it.
Then dip into the coating, and deep fry it until golden brown.

My result not to pretty, but the taste is quite good.

X'mas dinner (kind of)

Okay we couldn't call it Christmas dinner, but its only dinner at Christmas. I cooked 2 dishes for today's dinner. First was Chicken Katsu (at least it looked like chicken katsu :p), and the second one was Steamed egg.

I'll give the the recipe and the process.
First is chicken katsu:

Preparation: 10 minutes
Cooking: 10 minutes

- 200 gr boneless chicken breast
- Plain flour
- Bread Crumb
- 1 Egg
- salt and pepper
- rice wine
- light soy sauce

First of all, marinade the chicken with rice wine, light soy sauce, salt and pepper for about 5-10 minutes.
Place the flour, egg and panko crumbs into separate shallow dishes. Beat the egg.
While waiting the chicken, heat the wok and cooking oil for deep frying the chicken with medium heat.
Coat the chicken in flour on both sides, then dip into the egg, and coat in bread crumbs.
After the oil hot enough, deep fry the chicken until golden brown. Done!

Second, the steamed egg:

Preparation: 5 minutes
Cooking: 30 minutes

- 3 eggs
- chopped spring onion
- salt and pepper
- 100 ml water

Beat the egg on a bowl, give salt and pepper. Mix them together, and put spring onion into the egg. Add water into the egg, mix it well.
prepare the tools for steaming. I don't have any steamer, so I just use a pan and small bowl. Put water into the pan, and put the small bowl upside down into the pan.
Wait until the water boil. After boiled, place the bowl of egg on top of the small bowl. Close the pan, and wait for 20 minutes. Use low heat.

Pictures probably tell much more.
So here they are.

Marinading chicken




Frying chicken



Cutting chicken



steamed egg



End Result

Valid Reasons to Create a Routine

"Valid Reasons to Create a Routine", I've been trying to make the list of the reasons for few years, because 4 years ago I teach programming at my University. But it seems I can't explain it to myself either. Yeah of course I know (some of)the uses of routine, it just I can't put it into words.

Until lately, I read this sentence from title of a sub-chapter on a book called "Code Complete" by Steve McConnell. Currently I read only 170 pages from 850 pages of the book, but no doubt, this is one of the best book I ever read. If you are a programmer, you better read this book. :)

Here's the list that the book wrote:
- Reduce complexity
- Avoid duplicate code
- Support sub classing
- Hide sequences
- Hide pointer operations
- Improve portability
- Simplify complicated boolean tests
- Improve performance

There's description for every point stated above in the book, and I couldn't agree more with the list. So buy the BOOK. Thanks Steve for the knowledge. :)

Soto Betawi

Preparation: 30 minutes.
Cooking: 30 minutes.


Today we cooked "Soto Betawi", a traditional Jakarta, Indonesian food. We "googled" and got the recipe. We used a few web pages as reference. One is using Indonesian language, and the other is English. Here they are:
Indonesian Language
English

We modified some ingredients, because we couldn't find few herbs.
The ingredients:

• 300 grams boneless chicken breast
  
• coconut milk (thick)200 ml
• lemon grass 1 stick
• lemon leaves 4
  
• water 500 ml
• 2 cm of galangal.
  

Seasoning (crushed together):

• garlic 3 cloves
• shallot 4 big size
• candle nuts 8
• turmeric 2 cm
  
• paper
• salt

Accompanion:

• 5 small potato
  
• 2 tomato ripe, cubes
  
• spring onion, for sprinkle
  
• Lime
• Chili
  

Extra seasoning:

• salt and sugar
• beef stock cube
  

The recipe uses beef, but I've tried the chicken version of this dish, so we decided to use chicken breast instead of beef. We didn't get the bay leaves, so we didn't use it.

Peel the shallots, garlic, and turmeric. We used a traditional Indonesian tool called "cobek" to crush the ingredients, but using blender should be fine.
Put the shallots, garlics, turmeric, candle nuts, salt and pepper together. Crush them until become smooth paste.
Beat the lemon grass and galangal.
Heat the wok and add 4 tablespoons of cooking oil. Stir fry the crushed ingredients for 1 minute, and put the beaten lemon grass and galangal also lime leaves inside, and add the chicken. Mix them well together for 2 minutes. Add water and let it to boil. Add beef stock.
After it boils, add coconut milk inside. Pour it slowly while stir it continuously. And let it boils again.
Taste it, if you like it to be saltier and sweeter, add salt and sugar. The dish is ready.

While waiting the "soto" boils, we can prepare the companion. Cut the potatoes and tomatoes into cubes. Boil the potatoes to make it tender and then deep fry it. Put cube tomatoes to a plate to serve. Chop the spring onion to sprinkle.
To make the chili paste, boil some water in small sauce pan and put chilies inside. Let it boil for 5 minutes. Peel some shallots. This time we used 15 Thai chilies and 2 shallots. Dry the chilies, and crush the chilies together with the shallots. Put it on a small bowl to serve.

To prepare the dish, put some chopped tomatoes and fried potatoes. Pour the "soto" on top of it. Sprinkle the chopped spring onions. If you like sour taste, add some lime juice.
Rice will be a perfect match for this dish.

I'm quite proud with the result today. For me it was very delicious.

First Post and First Problem

How do you code to open a new window when a button is clicked? If you use HTML or server side scripting like ASP, it's pretty simple, because you only need to call a javascript function window.open(...) in the button's onclick event. Thing gets a bit more complicated if you code using ASP.Net, which I experienced lately. In my case, I want the popup window to display a particular page according to selected value of a dropdownlist.

So, after doing some little research in Google, I tried to use Response.Write() method and put "<script>window.open(...)</script>" as its param. The Response.Write () was called inside the OnClick event handler of the button.
Note: I was using code behind class.
Since the popup page should be dependent on the selected value of a dropdownlist, so I used a switch-case statement to determine which page I should open. Actually it worked, but there was a small thing that bother me. After I clicked the button a popup window was displayed, and the main page was also refreshed. This refresh made the layout of the main page in a mess.

Then, I tried to use another method, that was ClientScript.RegisterStartupScript() and used window.open function as one of its param. This method worked perfectly fine for me. A popup window was displayed and the main page was still refreshed (of course!) but didn't ruin the layout.

"<script>window.open(...)</script>"I guess it was because the difference of where ASP.Net put javascript function in the page. Using the first way, the javascript function is printed on the very first line of the HTML code, while the second way, it prints javascript function inside "body" tag after the button tag.