Lontong Sayur aka Vegetables in Spicy Coconut Broth

Now that we have finally moved and settled and I finally almost fully recovered from flu, it is time to update my forgotten blog. This post will be about lontong sayur, another common Indonesian dish. Been having huge craving for this meal for months but will all those house inspections and moving etc, I hardly found time to get into it. And just as we settled in the new place, I came across few posts about this dish – talk about good timing, eh 🙂

Anyway for the vegetable soup, I used recipe from here. I followed everything as per Flo’s recipe, but ended up added a lot more chillies for colour and kick. If you do not handle chilli well, her recipe is perfect as I find it tastes quite mild yet super delicious. Also, I did some variations on my condiments for lontong sayur – based on what we have in the pantry/fridge 🙂

Here is the recipe as copied from the link above:

Ingredients:

500 gr young papaya fruit/chayote, julliened (I used chokos)
10 stalks long bean, cut in 3 cm pieces
Optional: fresh tiger prawn, cleaned and deveined
3 cm galangal, crushed
2 stalks lemongrass, crushed
3 pieces bay leaf
1000 ml light coconut milk
500 ml coconut cream
500 ml water

Spices:
10 pieces of shallot
6 cloves of garlic
4 pieces of candle nut
3 pieces of red chilies
Salt, pepper and sugar to taste
1 teaspoon of shrimp paste
2 tablespoons of dried shrimp, roasted and ground
2 tablespoons oil for saute

• Ground and saute the spices until fragrant, then add the ground dried shrimp. Stir well and cook for another minute
• Add in the julliened chokos, stir well
• Then add the coconut milk and water to the pot, let it boil and cook the chokos until 75% cooked, and add the long beans and all other ingredients
• Lastly, turn the heat to low and add the coconut cream. Bring it to simmer and it’s done. Make sure to adjust salt, pepper and sugar level

The usual condiments that always goes into lontong sayur is ketupat or rice cake. And since I am lazy, I just used my pressure cooker to cut down the cooking time of ketupat. Do head to Flo’s page for instructions on making the rice cake in a more traditional way. Thankfully mine turned out well taste wise, although didn’t look it.

At the time I cooked this, we happened to have beef rendang in the fridge – so we threw that in as condiment as well. The other condiments I prepared are fried boiled eggs and shrimp crackers. And lastly, sprinkle some fried onion on top of the dish before serving.

As you can see, there are a lot of things to prepare for this meal. But, it is totally worth the effort and time, happy tummy happy life, right? 🙂