In light of the possibility of "ignoring" my mother's culture of richness of food, the boyfriend, a Midwestern, in every sense of the word requested that my dish of the following the great Easter desert mishap, he requested I do chicken. Not just chicken any way I wanted, but he wanted Indonesian chicken. So, I turned to my mother and said, "Indonesian chicken requests the boyfriend." She looked surprised back at me, and said, "really? is he really wanting an Indonesian dish?" I said, "apparently bule (white man in Indonesian) food isn't acceptable this week."
I did my fair share of research, and my mom of course upped the ante to include an ingredient that most bule dislike, including my own father, fermented shrimp paste. Normally, when she uses her shrimp paste it comes out in the form of sambal terasi --Indonesian chili paste made of fermented shrimp paste. Sounds as horrible as it almost tastes, but the BOYFRIEND, likes it, even if it has fermented shrimp paste.
She handed me the recipe of chicken rica or as my cousins fancy, rica ayem. I probably should've gone as far as serving rice with this dish as it normally is, but decided to only serve lightly blanched green beans. I also figured, go bolder with serving with a Heineken since I couldn't find the Indonesian beer of Bintang (a subdivision of Heineken).
