There have been many husband and wife teams from years past that have worked well together. One couple that comes to mind was Marie and Pierre Curie. Although not Nobel winning, perhaps another couple might be that of Darta and Suti, the friendly husband and wife team who have turned their family home at 24 Jalan Kajeng (Kajeng Street) into both a guesthouse and a restaurant known as Rumah Roda.

Darta and Suti

Suti – wife, mother and chef – began her cooking career elsewhere. For about eight years she was the cook at Han Snel’s Bungalows, a slightly more upmarket tourist accommodation spot with individual bungalows in Ubud, Bali. After leaving Han Snel’s, Suti turned her attention to cooking a limited range menu for tourists at the family home in Ubud, Rumah Roda, where guests would sit at the one table for four placed right next to the family kitchen. About three years ago, the family decided to expand, and the current restaurant was built as an open air dining area overlooking the street, right above the family bedrooms. The extension provides a much larger seating capacity, about 20-25 rather than just four, and gives customers the option of either sitting at dining tables or on the elevated cushioned platforms.

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Curious to discover more about Balinese cooking techniques and the varied ingredients that make up the various flavours, I signed up for a cooking course. A number of restaurants in Ubud offer such courses, but I chose Bumbu Bali, a Balinese restaurant where I’d had dinner a few nights ago. Having eaten there, I knew the food was good and I’d therefore concluded that the course would probably be good too.

Ubud market

My day began with a visit to the markets to wade through the different types of local produce. Shopping at the markets for food has been a long standing tradition in my family. I prefer it to picking out packages of homogeneously sized vegetables at a supermarket. Chances are the produce has been produced nearby rather than shipped from afar, and I also prefer it for the fact that you also get to touch and smell the produce.

Back at the restaurant, we ran through the ingredients typically used in Balinese food including the many varieties of green and red chillies which I declined to taste test (ouch!). I was to cover six different dishes, but first and foremost, we covered in detail the base gede which is the true heart and soul of many Balinese dishes. This mixed spice paste consists of a large number of different spices including the most obvious ones such as ginger, garlic, chilli and turmeric.

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Rice fields around Ubud

One of the wonderful things about Bali is that despite having all the trappings of a modern tourist spot, in about a five minute walk it’s also possible to find yourself submerged in luscious green rice fields that spread on for miles. In the midst of one of these rice fields was Sari Organic, an organic farming venture that started about five years ago to service the needs of both local businesses and individuals. Its farming concept was based on ‘family-size’ farms, which consequently meant its business philosophy also provided jobs to local families. Over the years, Sari discovered that there was a genuine demand for organic produce in and around Ubud, and it now recruits and provides incomes to some 15 families.

Inside Sari Organic which looks out onto lush rice fields

For more immediate eating needs, there is also their organic restaurant, Warung Bodag Maliah. The restaurant is a two storey building, with the ground floor serving as the kitchen and the first floor as the dining area to allow you a wonderful elevated perspective of the rice fields. It’s an incredibly relaxed setting. The restaurant is windowless to allow in a gentle cool breeze and there are a range of seating choices; tables as well as cushioned platform seating areas. However if your fancy was to simply stretch out and snuggle up with a book on one of their benches as I saw one couple doing, this was also possible.

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Today, I found my way to the Jakarta zoo (Ragunan), or rather the kindly taxi driver drove me there. He was pleasantly friendly, but despite all his efforts on the 45-minute journey, conversation proved futile on account of my inability to speak Indonesian. He was also a little lacking in stature, probably a head shorter than me, so it amazed me that he actually had a line of vision above the dashboard.

Ragunan boasts the largest collection of Indonesian animals in any zoo in Indonesia. I found it to be a pleasant surprise, in particularly the primate collection which included many endangered species. The quiet of Ragunan zoo almost provided a reprieve from the hustle and bustle of central Jakarta and the ever-so-slightly cooler clime was also a welcome relief from the sweltering heat that I had been enduring over the previous two days.

I had to confess however that the attractions of (Ragunan zoo) were not my only motivation for staying another night in Jakarta. For having frequented the Grand Café at the Grand Hyatt Hotel two nights earlier and perused their buffet selection, I had been salivating at the thought of their lobster ever since. Unable to resist the temptation, I finally succumbed, which was where I found myself this evening.

My lobster (and prawn and oyster) plate

I started with what I had come to the Grand Café for, the lobster, and along with that the prawns and oysters too. The lobster was fresh but cold, obviously having been cooked and then refrigerated prior to serving. I prefer lobster freshly cooked and there had been many an occasion when I had gone to the Fish Markets in Sydney and bought live lobsters which I cooked fresh (steamed, not boiled, to maintain all the flavour). This wasn’t quite as good but it didn’t stop me going back for seconds, for lobster is lobster.

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