Organic Cooking: Balinese Sambal

At Jiwa Damai we place a high value on sustainable food practices and organically grown produce. We grow and eat a fair amount from our permaculture garden. Astri, our very talented Balinese cook, prepares food with great care and love. We eat mostly traditional Balinese dishes here.

In this blog, we want to share some of Astri’s amazing recipes with you. We start with a very important dish in the Balinese cuisine - Sambal.

Ingredients for one batch:

• 5 to 6 cloves of garlic, chopped
• 5 to 6 little red onions, minced
• Spicy: 3 red chilies, Mild: 1 red chili
• 7 medium sized tomatoes
• ½ block veggie stock (homemade is best)
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon of sugar

Tomatoes

Preparation:

Peel and chop garlic, red onion, tomatoes and chilies. Combine in medium mixing bowl.

Heat skillet with around 3 tablespoons of oil. Add ingredients and allow to simmer. Stir occasionally, reducing the tomatoes down. Add the teaspoon of salt, continue to reduce until tomatoes are soft and juicy.

Remove from heat, add veggie stock and sugar. Put ingredients into blender, run until smooth. Most of the time at Jiwa Damai, we eat sambal with tempe and rice. It makes a delicious addition, however, to cooked vegetables or eggs.

Cooking Sambal

Note: There are many variations of sambal in Indonesia, used both as a sauce, a dip and a regular table condiment. Variations include those with Kaffir lime, peanuts, or shrimp paste.

Cleaning the pool

The pool is one of our key features here at Jiwa Damai.Of course, such a pool requires a lot of dedicated maintenance. It needs to be cleaned daily - its mostly leaves, fallen from the trees,  that have to be fished out of the water.

Pool cleaning

Responsible for this task is Wira, our general coordinator. Looks like he is enjoying his work ;-)

Pool cleaning

The pool is filled with natural water from our spring, located on the grounds of Jiwa Damai. Since we want to keep the water as natural as possible, we only use a minimum amount of chemicals and only when needed.

The pool cleansing takes place early every morning, so that our guest can always enjoy a refreshing swim in a nice clean, blue-shimmering pool.

Have fun!

Tropical fauna on Bali

Experiencing the tropical wildlife in our extensive permaculture garden is quite a spectacle. Jiwa Damai is inhabited by different animals crawling, flying and jumping around in the huge garden. Today we want to introduce you to some of the little creatures.

The Tokes you'll hear as soon as it gets dark. They like to crawl around under the open roofs, looking for insects. They make that nice sounds: tookeeee, tokeeee.....

Toke

Our other noise-makers are the little froggies, quacking and quacking.

At nights, just sit back and listen to the beautiful concert !

Frog

Going for a walk in the garden , right after a heavy rainshower, I noticed some spiders weaving their nets.  - What incredibly talented  artists these creatures are !

Spider

But we have way more cute little animals in the huge garden. Beautiful animals..... butterflies, colorful birds, snails, ... ( it's just so hard to take pictures of the birds and butterflies.... but we'll keep on trying ;-) )

Snail

It is a pleasure walking through the garden and you can be sure not to be bothered by too many mosquitos and flies.  The ponds and water have been exposed to EM-Technology and as a result the breeding of mosquitoes has been significantly reduced.

Come visit us and see for yourself!

Jiwa Damai's team

Today we want to introduce you to our staff here at Jiwa Damai! All our employees live in near-by villages. In this way we want to contribute to the local communities by supplying employment.

Jiwa Damai's Balinese staff, from left to right and from top to bottom :

Wayan, our night guard; Lana, responsible for all maintenance issues; Ketut, our head gardener; Astri, our cook (probably the  best chef on Bali); Wira, our coordinator; Wayan, our second gardener and last but not least Sugik, our junior administration manager.

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The team gets complemented by Philippe from Switzerland, our guest relations manager, who is living on Bali for quite a while now and Simone, responsible for Marketing & PR, working from Germany. Watching over all is Margret, Jiwa Damai's caretaker and guardian.

.... and not to forget our 3 dogs, Angrek, Salju and Blackie !

Nous souhaitons vous présenter le très sympathique staff de Jiwa Damai !!

De gauche à droite et de haut en bas :

Wayan, notre garde ; Lana, l’homme de la maintenance ; Ketut, notre jardinier ; Astri, notre cuisinière (la meilleure chef de Bali); Wira, notre coordinateur; Wayan, notre jardinier et Sugik, notre responsable administratif.

Bee hives in the permaculture garden

Recently we put up five new bee hives in the permaculture garden. We want to produce organic Balinese honey. Jiwa Damai is a social responsable retreat center. We take great care of our natural environment and constantly try to minimize our ecological footprint. The organic honey being produced in the permaculture garden is an environmentally friendly product.

The bee hives are distributed all over our compound, high up in the trees.

Bee hive up in the tree

These are traditional Balinese bee hives.  They are made out of coconut shells wrapped with palm tree fibre.

Getting attracted by a secret sugar-mixture (we can not tell the ingredients ;-), the bees fly in through the little hole and (hopefully !) start producing honey.

Bee hive

We also painted some signs  - so that our guests can spot them on their tour through the organic garden!

Come by and learn more about organic honey production on Bali! Jiwa Damai is located close to Ubud, just a 20 min drive away.  We offer guided tours through the permaculture garden and explain about biological farming and a sustainable way of living. Enjoy the tropical fauna and flora.

Sign bee hive

Coconut harvest on Bali

Do you know how our coconuts are being harvested? Bringing down the nuts is not an easy task! Only few local men know how to climb the coconut tress and harvest the nuts. I've seen them climbing up the high trees, sometimes up to 30 m, without a rope, without a safety net, just the machete in the back of the pant, .....like a little monkey.

Made Sueca is a real acrobat. He is climbing to the top of coconut tree just with his bare feet and hands. It’s impressive !

Made Sueca climbing a coconut tree

His work is to clean the trees - cut the leaves and harvest the coconuts.

When he finally made it to the top, when he reached the crown of the tree,  he is simply 'sitting' there, supposedly very comfortable, cutting off the nuts with his machete.

For me it is amazing how a person can climb up a tree like this and then, without effort 'sit' there for minutes until all the coconuts and dead leaves are cut off. What an incredible strenght is needed for this kind of work! Respect.

Made Sueca est d’une agilité déconcertante. Il grimpe dans les cocotiers à 30 mètres de haut et à l’aide de ses bras et ses jambes, il se retrouve au sommet en moins de deux minutes. C’est impressionnant !

Son travail consiste à élaguer les arbres, en coupant les feuilles un peu trop encombrantes. Et bien sûr à cueillir les noix de coco.

Tropical fruit in the permaculture garden

In Jiwa Damai's organic garden many different fruit trees are growing. Look at these Papayas high up in the tree. Our gardener Ketut brings them down with a long stick, he created for this purpose only.

Papaya tree

Check out our Banana trees.

Banana tree

These bananas are not ripe yet, but will be soon. And then our cook Astri will make delicious banana pancakes! yammi....

Here we see some ripe Jackfruit. Jackfruit is the largest tree-borne fruit in the world, reaching 80 pounds (36 kg) in weight and up to 36 inches (90 cm) long and 20 inches (50 cm) in diameter. The flesh of the jackfruit is starchy, fibrous and is a source of dietary fiber. The flavour is similar to a tart banana.

Jack fruit

And of course we have lots and lots of coconut trees at Jiwa Damai.

Coconut tree

Besides that we also have guava trees and we grow avocados.

We'll tell you more in one of our next posts!

Lumbung construction in Bali

The construction work at our two new Lumbungs is advancing rapidly. Within a matter of 3 weeks a huge progress can be seen!

Lumbung

These new Balinese houses will turn out beautifully.

A wooden staircase is leading to the 'top floor' where our guests will sleep. The 'ground floor' will be the living area, a private bathroom is attached to the back of the house.

Lumbung inside

We only use natural materials to construct the Lumbungs - wood and bamboo. The walls are made out of  braided stripes of bamboo.

Lumbung wall

Our guests will enjoy an authentic sleeping experience in the middle of nature.  You will fall asleep to the sounds of quacking frogs and geckos - a truly calming sound and a deeply relaxing environment.

One Balinese Lumbung will accommodate 2-3 persons.

Cremation ceremony in Bali

This  february 10th in Ubud we witnessed an important cremation ceremony. It was a king’s cremation. The body of each dead Balinese must be burned so that their souls can join the spirit’s world. This kind of event is very important for Balinese people .There are ceremonies for every stage of Balinese life but often the last ceremony-cremation-is the biggest. A Balinese cremation can be an amazing, spectacular, colorful, noisy and exciting event. In fact it often takes so long to organize a cremation that years have passed since the death.

Kings cremation

The funeral ceremony is generally led by a priest and punctuated by a lavish offering of gifts. For the occasion, a large bullock-shaped wooden structure is built . The tower is carried on the shoulders of a group of men, the size of the group depending on the importance of the deceased and hence the size of the tower.

King's cremation

At the cremation ground the body is transferred to a funeral sarcophagus. Finally it all goes up in flames - the funeral tower, sarcophagus, body and the lot.

Cremation king

Apart from being yet another occasion for Balinese noise and confusion it's a fine opportunity to observe the incredible energy the Balinese put into creating real works of art which are totally ephemeral.

Health Room at Jiwa Damai

After some weeks of work,  our Health room is finished and awaiting our guests. It turned out very beautiful.  You enter through a beautifully carved, Balinese wooden door.  This door was carefully refurbished and painted - it looks amazing!

Health room

The Health room features a bathtub, the walls are made out of green shimmering glass stones.

We offer holistic body therapies, individual therapy sessions as well as massages and body care.

Health room_new

Relax and enjoy your massage!

Massage

Health room

After the massage you can take a refreshing swim in our pool.

This is the perfect way to spend your day at Jiwa Damai....