Cooking Balinese Organic Food with Astri

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Astri at Work

Astri at Work

Today I spent the morning cooking with Astri. She is the Balinese cook at Jiwa Damai. She is this beautiful lady who is always smiling and makes the most amazing food. So I thought it would be a fun way to spend my day by being her assistant in the kitchen. Oh. I'm Giulia by the way. I'm a WOOFer here at Jiwa Damai. I basically work 6 hour days, 5 days a week & in return I get to live at Jiwa Damai and get these delicious cooked meals for free. I'm very lucky if I may say so myelf.

On the menu for today was Balinese-Style chicken, butter & lemon tuna, curry-style tofu, green beans and red peppers & rice of course. We started working at 10:30 am. We kicked off by making the sauces. Everything is done by hand. There are no blenders, or fancy knives, just a little cutting board. Let's just say to chop up lemongrass, 3 cloves of garlic, 2 mini onions, 3 peppers it took me about an hour. I do have to give myself some credit though. It was so finely chopped that it almost looked like a paste. A good job indeed. While I was working on that, Astri was making a beautiful mix using our mortar & pestle. I want one of these things so bad to bring back to the States. Too bad it weighs like 15 lbs!

Curry Paste

Curry Paste

After that I started cutting up the string beans. It sounds so easy, but since presentation is pretty big over here, it took me quite some time to make them perfect. I thought I was going to cut my finger off a couple of times, but hey, it was worth it. Look how pretty they came out!

Hands at Work

Hands at Work

Astri & I had a lot of fun cooking together. It is so relaxing & rewarding at the same time. You learn to be very patient! Especially when we made the Balinese-Style chicken where we cooked it and then had to peel the chicken one little strip at a time. It took forever, but oh, does it look good.

Overall, it was an A+ morning. I don't know if I ever spent 3 hours making a single meal, but it sure was awesome to do so here in Bali. The pace of life is totally different here & that's what I love about this place.

Now...let's eat up!

Four-course meal

Four-course meal

Jiwa Damai now on Flickr and Twitter

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In addition to starting this blog, Jiwa Damai is now also on Flickr, the popular photo-sharing service, and Twitter. We will be continually posting pictures of life at Jiwa Damai at our Flickr account, so you can connect with us there. You can also always access our Flickr photos from our right sidebar here at this blog.

As for Twitter, the account will be run by a variety of people, including volunteers and staff, to hopefully share the depth of experiences available here.

We look forward to keeping in touch with the outside world about the relaxing and nourishing activity here at Jiwa Damai.

Welcome to the Jiwa Damai Blog!

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Hello, and welcome to the Jiwa Damai Blog! Jiwa Damai is an organic garden and retreat center located in the heart of Bali. It is an amazing place for guests who are visiting Bali to get a hands-on experience at a socially responsible lodging. We offer a variety of accomodations that can all be found at our main website.

Thank you for checking out the Jiwa Damai blog, and we look forward to keeping you updated with what is happening here.