Whenever I find myself wondering why the restaurant industry in a polyethnic city such as ours doesn’t serve a particular population—where are all the Maltese eating anyway?—I’m usually forgetting about the caterers.
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Last month, on the second and final afternoon of the Custer’s Last Stand arts festival in Evanston, Chris and Jane Reed had run out of chicken and pork satay, the peanut-sauced meat skewers common all over southeast Asia. But they were still doing a brisk business in stewy beef rendang over yellow rice and coconut curried tempeh—an Indonesian staple long before it became a meat substitute for texture-starved vegetarians. For a little more than a year the mother-and-son team have taken their catering business, the Rice Table, to street and music festivals and tastings. Chris, 26, is a Kendall College grad, but it was Jane who brought the recipes to Skokie, via Amsterdam, from her native city of Bandung in West Java.
The dishes I just mentioned are probably some of the more familiar Indonesian foods in the U.S., but the Reeds have a repertoire of hundreds more. Frequently at private events they’ll prepare the more elaborate feast known as a rijstaffel, or rice table, a presentation of many varied dishes that’s a remnant of Dutch colonization (and seems to be available on pretty much every block in Amsterdam).
Lontong, a similar rice preparation made without coconut milk, is just right for sopping up the peanut sauce that accompanies the Ruklis’ satays (chicken, beef, and lamb) and their salads, among them gado gado, a vibrant, carefully arranged composition of green beans, boiled eggs, carrots, sprouts, cucumber, and watercress; and ketoprak Jakarta, featuring rice noodles, bean sprouts, and cabbage drizzled with a thick, sweet soy sauce called kecap mani.
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