Just one more post on Bali…

… and then I’ll be done with the topic. This one is short, I promise.

Technically speaking, it is also about food, provided you are, like me, one of those beings who do consider things like this food:

Momogi corn stick snacks! Thanks to Nefatari Villas for making sure that there were always six packs of the stuff in our room every day. Gratis.

I have nursed an absolute weakness for savoury empty-calorie snacks for about as long as I have had teeth, particularly if said snacks are made out of things like sliced potatoes, monosodium glutamate, mushed corn, salt, monosodium glutamate, cheese powder, oil and monosodium glutamate. 

Each pack contains two square-ended, hollow, fake-cheese-flavoured, oily, crunchy-then-melt-in-your-mouth sticks of goodness (this last word being purely subjective). Yum yum.

It was just like being a kid again.

Balinese food: Lobong cooking class

When Mr. Manx and I visited Paris last year, we had an unexpected whale of a time at O Chateau’s wine appreciation class, so I signed us up for for another class in Bali – a cooking class, which, if I may say so, was very brave of me because my cooking skills are beyond words. The ones that come closest are “terrible”, “dreadful” and “abysmal”, sometimes in partnership with “gut-wrenchingly”.

Choosing the class was really easy – I simply went on Tripadvisor and picked the top attraction (correct at time of writing). Booking was really easy too because Lobong Cooking Class has its own website – you can make a reservation there and then you’ll receive a confirmatory email. Payment is only made in person, in cash, after the whole event. They even pick you up in a nice van at your hotel! We chose the morning class and were on our way to the market (the name of which escapes me, sorry) by 8a.m., and there we met Sang De, our guide for the day. We were the only Asians in the class; the rest were couples from Australia, the US and Canada.

This is the market that Sang De brought us to. He is the guy in the bottom left picture, giving us a tutorial on chillies. Don't be fooled by his traditional attire - he speaks near-perfect English and manages the online bookings via Blackberry. The picture on top shows a typical fruit and veg stall and the right bottom picture shows a lady spreading cacao beans out to dry.

The next picture, showing an industrious lad obviously unused to Chinese women pointing cameras at him, is perhaps my favourite of the ones I took that day, so it gets its own space.

We didn’t buy anything at the market as everything was already prepared at the venue of the cooking class, which turned out to be the ancestral home of Sang De and his family. It turns out that the class is a family business, from guide to chef to chauffeurs, on board for only the past ten months but already thriving.

Here Sang De is giving us a crash course on Balinese culture as we have coffee and pisang goreng (fried bananas) in a corner of the sprawling grounds of his home. He's telling us about the significance of the various structures, down to the human placentas ceremonially buried under stones placed outside the door of the family elder. He's also telling us interesting facts, like the way many Balinese share the same name because naming is done according to birth order - Wayan for the firstborn, Made for the second, then Nyoman, then Ketut (and then if Number Five comes along, s/he is Wayan all over again).

After the lecture, we trooped to the kitchen area to put on aprons and towels, and then we met:

The man on the left is Dewa, the chef and our tutor for the day. For a moment the class looks like the Balinese version of Hell's Kitchen, but this is just a front, as Dewa is actually affable and funny, and a really good teacher. The second picture shows three chef-wannabes. They are very cheerful identical triplets.

Then we were put to work.

These peanuts, for example, were deep-fried in homemade coconut oil with spices. Then we all took turns grinding them to pulp and later cooked the mush with palm sugar syrup and lots of coconut milk to make the world's best peanut sauce. It's advisable to not think about the calories. And look! The cheerful triplets turn out to be septuplets!

Thus we bumbled our way through, if you will believe it, to produce a beautiful nine-course Balinese meal. The truth was, of course, that the brains and skills of the cooking came from Dewa, and all us participants really did was stuff like chopping, mixing and stirring, but that suited us well and it was fun.

After the cooking was done, the food was plated and laid out, but before anything else could be done to it, offerings had to be made because that's what the Balinese do to give thanks for each meal. We didn't have to make the offerings ourselves; Sang De got his mum to do it for us. Thanks, Sang De's mum!

And yes, we got to eat all that good food for lunch. I particularly liked the peanut sauce and the ayam bakar bumbu bali, which is baby chicken in spicy yellow coconut sauce. At the end of the meal, we were each given a recipe booklet and a small bottle (thoughtfully sized at 100ml so that it can cross Customs) of homemade coconut oil as souvenirs, and then we were ferried back to our respective hotels.

It was a fantastic way to spend a morning in Bali.

Our Bali base: Nefatari Villas

Mr. Manx and I are back from Ubud in Bali, fat as a couple of pigs from all the good eating, and peppered with more mozzie bites than we’ve had all the rest of the year combined.

Arriving at Denpasar airport was a nightmare because several planes touched down at about the same time and the signage at Customs was frankly lousy. We witnessed much queue-cutting and selective blindness to fellow humans (nice to know that this is not restricted to Singaporeans), and the airport officials were either pathologically slow or outright rude.

The nice thing about an unprepossessing start is that things generally get better from there. Faith shaken, we were slightly nervous about whether our ride from the airport would show up, but our chauffeur was practically the first thing we laid our eyes on upon leaving the building, and events improved markedly from then on. This pickup was a much-appreciated service from Nefatari Villas, which was recommended by Orange (the first thing he raved about was the ability to swim nuddies as each villa comes with its own private pool). My rave would be how you can ask for transport to and from anywhere in central Ubud, up till ten at night (wow!), and at no additional charge (wow wow!). It’s not as if the transport vehicle is some half-assed motorbike either; the villa runs six vans at the level of the Toyota Innova for this purpose. 

Here’s a quickfire gallery of Villa Jepun, one of Nefatari’s nine villas, which we stayed at for two nights:

With reference to the middle picture, the shower, tub and toilet bowl (which is not shown for aesthetic reasons) were all outdoors - a truly novel experience for us. Unfortunately for him, Mr. Manx was once attacked by a wasp while utilizing said toilet bowl. Much screaming ensued.

 The food provided at Nefatari was good too:

The first picture shows a funky little pot containing black-as-sin Balinese coffee. The middle picture shows Nefatari's famous banana pancakes, topped with palm sugar syrup, which you can order delivered to your villa for breakfast and are totally yummy. The right-most picture shows a platter of bebek betutu, an evil-looking mutilated duck carcass that has been slow-smoked in spices and is utterly delicious, and very good with the local Bintang beer.

Speaking of food, do you remember learning about food webs in school? The mash-up of arrows showing who gets to eat who if everyone finds themselves in the same room? This is what I consider the predominant food web in Bali:

We saw a huge gecko in our villa trying to bite the head off another gecko one-tenth its size, so, yeah, I reckon that geckos eat geckos. Also, they are bullies.

They even got into our sugar bowl:

Kidding! You gotta give it to whoever designed this sugar bowl. Perhaps they reasoned that a ferocious-looking, pre-occupying statuette would keep the real McCoys away. After all, bullies are insecure at heart, right?

Coming up on the next Bali installment: the REAL reason we went. Stay tuned.