The Saramacca experience

Hi guys,

I know, it has been a while since I last posted something even tough I promised I wouldn't let time pass by like this! First of all, I'm sorry lol and secondly they say keep the best for last... So I'm here now with my latest food obsession.

So Christmas and New year came and went away, without anything special I must note! It was more of a home experience with friends and family and a few not so memorable experiences.

But then came January and February with some food experiences which I would love to share with you guys. On the right side you can see some Indonesian cuisine called the Berkat here in Suriname. It is a combination of yellow rice, cur cumin chicken, chicken in soy bean sauce, noodles, sambal of chicken livers and other organs mixed together with spices and a lot of pepper (it's supposed to be spicy), sliced and baked potatoes in pepper and sugar, peje (that's a mix of peanuts, flour and oil fried together), brown fried rice. Traditionally the berkat is presented (packed) in a banana leaf, but when you're carrying your food around with you you would not want it to leak or spoil your car seat. For my personal experience and that of my  acquaintances this food was above average, because I have had better then this. So how did we get to this berkat, I know you guys are wondering! So we were on our way to Saramacca, which is a district in Suriname and we were discussing about food (as usual) and one of our acquaintances told us that there is a warung (Indonesian restaurant) along the roadside which she heard about and the food was good. So we discussed as to stop or not and ultimately we decided to give it a try. We searched for all the warungs to find the one she heard of. I forgot the name b.t.w. (this is what happens when you don't post on time :(). We went inside the warung, mostly they are open, with not many chairs or tables. The warung is in front of their houses and they focus more on take away then accommodating clients. That's why you won't always find a warung with a nice interior or fancy things. We were the only ones so they took our order right away. There were a lot of dishes written on a chalk board, but not many were there when we came in according to the guy who took our order. We knew that we would take the berkat, but we wanted some other snacks also (which they didn't have), the only thing left was sate (parts of chicken meat impaled on a wood string) see the picture on the right below. The sate (chicken) was good actually, marinated in spices and soy sauce and then deep fried. The sate is usually prepared days ahead of frying so that the meat gets all the time to get tastier. It's made off of chicken thighs or breast meat. It depends on the person that prepares the sate with which meat it will be prepared. They say that checken sate with thigh meat tastes better then breast. We also have the kaaiman sate (a small breed of the well know crocodile  family which you can catch in a variety of swamps or lakes here), the beef sate and the shrimp sate. (there are more varieties of sates I guess, but these are the more popular once.