Southeast Asian, Take 4

Whew! And I believe, my friends, that we have a speech!

I am now exchanging emails with a professor from the Southeast Asian Studies Department, and musicians from Oakland based Balinese Gamelan Sekar Jaya. As part of my speech will include a reading from Diwata, the gamelan ensemble musicians will be accompanying me on this, totally improvised. As one of the musicians tells me, this particular section or instruments within the ensemble traditionally play accompaniment to a singer who sings poetry in a way that I think fits Diwata, rolling loose storytelling.

This is going to be so exciting!

I’ve done improvised performance with Joachim Luis accompanying me on kulintang. This can be lively. An ensemble of similar instruments is going to be even livelier.

At any rate, in an effort to procrastinate on my speech writing, and work off some nervous energy, I took the veggies from this weekend’s trip to the Jack London Square farmers market, and some organic tofu, and I made vegetarian lumpia. Ingredients: sugar peas, baby carrots, white onion, green onion, garlic, and tofu sautéed in soy sauce and a little oyster sauce, freshly ground black pepper, and sesame oil. After letting this cool, I wrapped these up into some fat lumpias, and shallow fried them for a couple of minutes on both sides (fried to the color of my forearm).

To accompany: garlic fried rice made with leftover chicken adobo in coconut milk, and a salad made with organic mixed greens also from farmers market, tomatoes, and a peanut vinaigrette.

(Robert Karimi: “Remember folks, just because you eat lumpia, doesn’t automatically make you Filipino!”)

I should also say I was inspired by Robert Karimi’s and John Castro’s lumpia campesina (fried to the color of Castro’s forearm) at The Cooking Show Con Karimi y Castro. Because the revolution begins in the kitchen. Word.