Our honeymoon couple is taking a cooking class with our Balinese chef, Made. This is one of the programs Jiwa Damai is offering for its guests.
Jiwa Damai cooking
Preparing Balinese chicken, with many different spices, ginger, lemongrass, onion, hot peppers which is then mixed into the finely plugged apart chicken… Then they prepared tempeh with Balinese sambal (spicy tomato sauce). Have a look!
Jiwa Damai cooking
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
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
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
Jiwa Damai is a hands-on, socially responsible organic garden and retreat center.
We are located amidst lush tropical vegetation in the heart of Bali (20 mins from Ubud).
