notes from my food diary

Dinnertime could be stressful and to make things easier, I choose easy but equally tasty meals.  One of my family’s favorite proteins is egg.  Eggs could be made into frittata or omelette, with the addition of vegetables or cheese and pair it with a side dish, you’ll get a meal in about one hour.  I made the latter about a month ago and it was also submitted to ThinkSpain guide for the recipe section in its October edition.  The recipe was adapted from my favorite cooking book, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison.  Armed with this one book, I won’t go hungry at every meal time

Chard and Onion Omelette (Trouchia)

3 tablespoons olive oil

1 large white onion, quartered and thinly sliced crosswise

1 bunch chard, leaves only, chopped

Salt and freshly milled pepper

1 garlic clove

6 to 8 eggs, lightly beaten

2 tablespoons chopped parsley

2 tablespoons chopped basil

2 teaspoons chopped thyme

1 cup grated Gruyere

2 tablespoons freshly grated Pecorino-Romano

Heat 2 tablespoons of oil in a 10-inch skillet, add the onion, and cook over low heat, stirring occasionally, until completely soft but not brown, about 15 minutes. Add the chard and continue cooking, stirring occasionally,
until all the moisture has cooked off and chard is tender, about 15 minutes. Season well with salt and pepper.

Mash or chop finely the garlic with a pinch of salt, then stir into the eggs along with the herbs. Combine cooked chard mixture with the eggs and stir in the Gruyère and half the Pecorino-Romano.

Preheat the boiler. Heat the remaining oil in the skillet and, when it’s hot, add the eggs. Give it a stir and keep the heat at medium-high for about 1 minute, then turn it to low. Cook until the eggs are set but still a little moist on top, 10 to 15 minutes. Add the remaining Pecorino-Romano and broil 4 to 6 inches from the heat, until browned. Serve trouchia in the pan or slide it onto a serving dish and cut into wedges.

Source: adapted from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison

The calendar will turn to September tomorrow so before it’s too late I’m going to write this piece of good news.

About two months ago I was approached by ThinkSpain.com editor, Anita, to write a recipe for the guide for the month of August.  She likes what I do in my food blog and she would love to feature my recipe in the guide.  It was totally unexpected and I was in a position where I could try a recipe, bake something sweet and write it for a different audience.  ThinkSpain.com is a guide published in both English and Spanish language and it also has both Internet and printed editions. 

One of the thing to keep me focused on what recipe I would like to write at that time was what an appropriate baked goods to eat in the month of August.  Anita also mentioned that I had to consider the ingredients, not all of the ingredients I use here would be available in Spain.  Blueberry was my first choice because it was readily available during summer months and galettes would be nice and something easier to make for friends or family gathering. 

My timing was slightly off during the month of July because my family had a vacation and the house remodeling started soon after we came back from vacation.  In between those time I had to move my house stuff so finding time to bake was one the hardest thing to do   I’ve came up with the recipe long before I planned to bake it, so at least that part was done already.  Tweaking a recipe was not an easy thing to do especially when you’re facing with a deadline, vacation and remodeling.  

If a blessing was disguised in form of friends then I was lucky.  In the weekend before I left for vacation, my church friends invited me to have a picnic.  Because I had to bake the galettes right that week, I could not be happier than to have a handful of testers.  My church friends were very supportive in that they helped me finished the galettes and made comments on how they tasted.  They were my best reviewers ever!

I am not posting the recipe but you could see go here to see it.  I am sharing all the photos I made that session and hopefully you will enjoy them as well and big thank you for Anita for featuring my recipe in the guide this month!

I will come back with more baking and recipes, but in the meantime enjoy my Currant-Orange Pound Cake with Orange Liqueur Glaze which appears in Desserts Magazine Issue #8.  Click here to access the online magazine with my recipe in it.

click here to read the article online, titled Words from Afar

I just want to write this story so I have a memento about how my name and my food blogs appeared in a newspaper.

About two months ago, I was approached by a freelance writer, Prapty Widinugraheni (Yiyik), who lives in Australia and occassionally writes for the Jakarta Post, the English language newspaper in Jakarta, Indonesia.  She wanted to use my food blogs, Dapur Ngebul Terus (in Bahasa Indonesia) and this one, Notes from My Food Diary, for an article she’s writing at that time.  I was surprised, flattered, yet in an instant I said of course 100% yes.  She said that the article would appear in the Weekender, a supplement to the Jakarta Post that comes every Friday, in August. 

Well, my vacation came, I went away anxiously waiting for it to come out.  We can’t get Jakarta Post edition here in the US, but since they have a website, the Weekender can be accessed from the same site.  I didn’t have any idea how and where my blogs would appear.  And, I didn’t even asked why my blogs were chosen among thousands of other Indonesian food bloggers.  And I was afraid to ask Yiyik if she knew that even though I was born and raised in Indonesia, I’m not an Indonesian citizen anymore.  Maybe I wasn’t qualified anymore if I said so.  So I didn’t want to take a chance that she’d say, oh, never mind then Eliza, we’re looking for an Indonesian citizen who blogs from afar! ;P

The good news arrived after I came back from my vacation.  I was very happy, did a little dance and kissed my hubby!  Yay…my first mention in a newspaper (no matter where).  I didn’t want to sound like I was boasting, but if this was my one and only mention, then I couldn’t not say anything.  Yiyik was gracious enough to email me the scanned copies of her article because it turned out that in the website, it didn’t show the rest of the article.  You see, my name, other bloggers’ names and some other things were placed in sidebars and those were in page three of the article.  Those sidebars were not included in the website edition.  What a shame, huh?  I also wish that my last name was mentioned, but hey, could I be annoyingly pickier?

Look on page three of the article, under the headlines "Good blogs from Indonesians abroad", my name comes second after Ambar.  So sorry that scanned pages were itty-bitty!

Thank you so much Yiyik!