Bali: Food

Let’s talk about food today, shall we? Specifically, what we ate in Bali. Because we ate like no one’s business and it was glorious.

(Side note: If you’re getting tired of the Bali posts, I was planning on sharing a few more this week, then being done with it.)

To start with, we ate breakfast at home every day. The cottage we rented came with a nicely-stocked kitchen, including lots of fresh fruits, a huge canister of Balinese coffee, cream for the aforementioned coffee, pineapple juice, bread, and eggs.

Throughout the week, more fresh fruit would appear. And by fresh, I mean actually picked from a nearby tree.

We ate a lot of fruit in Bali.

The one fruit we did NOT eat was durian. In theory, we were game, but when confronted with the revolting, noxious, fetid, putrid, malodorous reality, we just couldn’t do it. And I say that as someone who once had two children in diapers at the same time.

Moving on, rice is a major part of eating in Bali. The cottage we rented came with a large rice cooker and an even larger bin of rice.

At home, we eat brown, black, or wild rice, but in Bali, we shrugged and then dug in. Because we figured that since 3.5 billion people around the world depend on rice for much of their sustenance, then we Americans could certainly do the same.

If rice isn’t part of a meal, then ramen is. Yes, the same ramen we all ate in college, but with fresh vegetables and seasonings. One of the girls’ favorite dishes was soto ayam, which was ramen in broth with some chicken, vegetables, and seasonings (usually a little spicy).

For lunches, we usually ate at a warung, which is a small, local, very casual cafe. The food was always very good and quite inexpensive. A typical meal would be rice (or ramen), some vegetables, and either chicken or fish. The fish was probably swimming only the day before and the chickens, well, the chickens in Bali are very, very free range:

Some of our favorite meals took place at simple warungs on a beach. It’s kind of hard not to be happy with while eating barefoot and looking at this view:

For dinners, sometimes we went out and sometimes we cooked in. Consequently, we visited several grocery stores and got a sense of the local food culture. In short, the produce sections were large, the dairy sections were small, the meat sections were far less visually sanitized than in the U.S., and there was plenty of Western junk food for anyone who was so inclined.

Generally, my policy on vacations is to try new foods and enjoy them, but also not gorge to the point that I feel sick. In short, I don’t worry about how my jeans fit, but I also don’t lose my head and wind up, for example,  dazed in a gutter covered with a pile of German chocolate wrappers.

For this trip, the same policy applied, although I did drink a lot of fruit juice, which is not something I normally do. We walked, but not a lot. Certainly not as much as we have on previous trips. Still, by the end of the week, my trousers were loose on me and my suspicions were confirmed when I got home and stepped on the scales.  I’d say that Balinese food agreed with me.

So that’s the food report.

Finally…

Yes, Gingy went with us to Bali. He’s actually Gingy 2.0, as the original Gingy went with us to California last year and then decided to relocate there permanently. We’re pretty sure he’s in San Francisco.

Anyway, for the first time, Gingy shared his adventures on Instagram. (There’s one other #travelinggingy in there that’s not us, which will become obvious when you see it.) He had a great trip and is already planning his future adventures.