The Balinese consider Western cuisine flat and tasteless. Their own cuisine tends to be peppery and served with such potent spices as mashed onions, garlic, fermented fish paste, and scalding red peppers. The most ramshackle roadside warung can bring forth an array of preferential cuisine with flavors , textures, and aromas that you never dreamed existed: tingling ginger sautes, sour but deep flavoured tamarind (celagi), rich and creamy peanut sauces, and the spice-laden chili spice called sambal that will fire the palate. Bright orange-yellow turmeric (kunyit), a root of the ginger famiy that resembles a small carot, is often used in Balinese festival cuisine to produce yellow-colored rice. Spices are ground into a paste in back of the family compound, using a black stone mortar (batu basa) and cone-shaped pestle (cantok). Surprisingly, one seldom comes across the spices - utmeg, pepper, mace, and cloves - that gave the "Spice Island" their name and spurred Columbus to accidentally discover America.
Coconut (nyuh), an essential ingredient in Balinese cooking, add richness to many native recipes, particularly curries and sauces. At least 12 varieties of coconut, either green or yellow, are found on Bali. Able to produce fruit for 50 years, when coconut is old and dried out it turns gray. Coconut milk is made by shredding the meat of the old coconut, kneading, sieving, then blending it with water. As it cooks, the coconut milk thickens; with the addition of flour or corn starch it becomes a thick, white, rich cream (santen). Balinese-style sate is kneaded into coconut cream. The sweet, creamy contents of the young coconut (kuwud) also makes a refreshing drink. Any man of boy can shape a spout and spoon out of coconut husk so that you may drink right from the nut and scrape out the gooey meat.
Chilies (tabia), the elongated pods of the Capsicum pepper family, turn from green to red when ripe. Usually the largest sizes are used principally to decorate offerings, but the smallest (tabia kerinyi) are highly flammable! Chili bushes grow easily indide the family kampung, and chilies are plucked as needed. Chilies are de rigueur in any kind of sambal, and thin slices of chili go into the spicy-hot, salty, and popular Balinese soybean sauce called kecap which has nothing to do with tomato-based catsup as we know it. In restaurants there are almost always two kinds of kecap, sweet (kecap manis) and salty (kecap asin). There are many kinds of hot chili sauces (sambal) and spiced chii pastes. Almost every dish has its own kind of sambal, and every Balinese family makes its own a bit differently.
But don't get the idea that all Balinese food is hot. Many cuisine are quite palatable to the westerner. When in doubt as to whether the dish is spicy hot or not, ask Pedas atau tidak? ("Hot or not?"). If the dish si too hot, don't try to douse the fire with a glass of cold water, cold beer, or a carbonated drink, which only exacerbates the problem. Instead, eat some boiled rice, cucumber, a banana, or some bread - al of which effectively absorb th potent chili oil. to make a dish less fiery hot, squeeze a little leon with some salt over it. Or drink hot tea or warm water which will sting at first, then bring relief.
Stay with us at Bali Ametis Luxury Villas, ee will ensure you will have unforgettable memories during you stay at Bali Ametis Luxury Villas.
Jumat, 18 November 2011
Minggu, 05 Juni 2011
Bali Ametis Luxury Villas: The fairy arts of Ubud
Bali Ametis Luxury Villas: The fairy arts of Ubud: "No place in the world could be greener than Ubud. Everything here is green: the fluorescent emerald flash of young rice fields, the thick cu..."
Bali Ametis Luxury Villas: Balinese cuisine
Bali Ametis Luxury Villas: Balinese cuisine: "In subtlety, variety and creativity, Balinese food holds a high rank among Indonesia's cuisine. And it's becoming much easier to find wester..."
Balinese cuisine
In subtlety, variety and creativity, Balinese food holds a high rank among Indonesia's cuisine. And it's becoming much easier to find western-oriented Balinese cuisine . Many hotel restaurants now have token babi guling (roast suckling pig) or a bebek betutu (spiced duck) on their menus but the dishes are modified to suit sensitive Western taste.
Since dining out is not a social custom on Bali, the visitor is not likely to experience real, unadulterated Balinese cooking unless invited into a Balinese home. Even on such monumental ritual occasions as weddings or family ceremony of passage, the Balineses themselves serve a majority of Javenese of Chinese dishes that are not distinctly Balinese. About the only commercial location to consistently experience the real thing, with all the proper spices and side dishes, are the night market foodstalls, warung, or from an old crone who serves up meals in banana leaf under the village Banyan tree during a cockfight.
Balinese ceremony food is difficult to find because it's usually only prepared for hundreds of people on exclusive occasions. Since coconut oil goes bad very quickly and refrigeration in villages limited, preparations for such perishable, difficult feast dishes as mebat and lawar begin early in the morning.
The two or three meals rural Balinese eat each day are almost identical - lots of boiled white rice supplemented by tiny fish, vegetables, peanuts, cucumber, chilies, and minute portion of spiced meat, egg, or tempe. In inland areas, dried and salted fish is more common. In poor areas, rice is even mixed with cord, cassava, or sweet potatoes.
There are no courses. In a sense, there are no mealtimes. Food is prepared in the morning and is left in pots under protective basket on the kitchen table to eat whenever desired. Except throughout ceremonial feasting, the Balinese are very simple eaters. A glass of warm water or tea accompanies the frugal meal, which is often eaten cold.
Balinese food is eaten with one's fingers so that none of the delectably spicy flavors are compromised by the savor of metal eating utensils. Finger are considered cleaner than eating utensils.
Stay with us at Bali Ametis Luxury Villas, and our butler will take you to experience all the sublime Balinese cuisine. We will ensure you will have unforgettable memories during you stay at Bali Ametis Luxury Villas.
Copyright 2011, Ametis Villa - Bali Luxury Villas | Private Villa | Honeymoon Villa
Since dining out is not a social custom on Bali, the visitor is not likely to experience real, unadulterated Balinese cooking unless invited into a Balinese home. Even on such monumental ritual occasions as weddings or family ceremony of passage, the Balineses themselves serve a majority of Javenese of Chinese dishes that are not distinctly Balinese. About the only commercial location to consistently experience the real thing, with all the proper spices and side dishes, are the night market foodstalls, warung, or from an old crone who serves up meals in banana leaf under the village Banyan tree during a cockfight.
Balinese ceremony food is difficult to find because it's usually only prepared for hundreds of people on exclusive occasions. Since coconut oil goes bad very quickly and refrigeration in villages limited, preparations for such perishable, difficult feast dishes as mebat and lawar begin early in the morning.
The two or three meals rural Balinese eat each day are almost identical - lots of boiled white rice supplemented by tiny fish, vegetables, peanuts, cucumber, chilies, and minute portion of spiced meat, egg, or tempe. In inland areas, dried and salted fish is more common. In poor areas, rice is even mixed with cord, cassava, or sweet potatoes.
There are no courses. In a sense, there are no mealtimes. Food is prepared in the morning and is left in pots under protective basket on the kitchen table to eat whenever desired. Except throughout ceremonial feasting, the Balinese are very simple eaters. A glass of warm water or tea accompanies the frugal meal, which is often eaten cold.
Balinese food is eaten with one's fingers so that none of the delectably spicy flavors are compromised by the savor of metal eating utensils. Finger are considered cleaner than eating utensils.
Stay with us at Bali Ametis Luxury Villas, and our butler will take you to experience all the sublime Balinese cuisine. We will ensure you will have unforgettable memories during you stay at Bali Ametis Luxury Villas.
Copyright 2011, Ametis Villa - Bali Luxury Villas | Private Villa | Honeymoon Villa
The fairy arts of Ubud
No place in the world could be greener than Ubud. Everything here is green: the fluorescent emerald flash of young rice fields, the thick curtains of foliage only greener for scarlet accents of ginger and hibiscus. Anything that began another color, brick wall or pebble walkway, soon becomes green with shaggy moss. Even the air possesses a pale green cast, as the moisture suspended in it picks up the pervasive glow of the leafage.
"Magic" is one of those words that travel writers must use with miserly care - usually, it's just hyperbole for "especially pretty" but there really is magic in Ubud. When Balinese people bereave something, they consult a balian, a benign sort of sorcerer, who tells them where they'll find it. Balians can read dreams, cure sickness, go into trances and speak in the voices of forefather. And magic, in the form of the island's unique religion, is at the core of Bali's arts. A blend of Hinduism and nature worship, Balinese religion is an ecstatic union of the aesthetic and the spiritual reminiscent of the civilization of archaic Greece. Bali's famous trance dances, for example, suggest the rites of Bacchus: in the Sanghyang, two girls who are supposed to be untrained in the dance's intricate choreography go into a trance and, eyes firmly shut, move in faultless unison. The dance is named after the divine spirit which inhabits them.
When Walter Spies arrived in Bali, he found a culture completely devoted to art, yet to whom the concept of art for art's sake was alien. The Balinese famously have no word for "artist"; painting, stone and wood carving, weaving, playing the gamelan, and above all the dance were just what one did when not fishing or working in the rice fields.
It is an axiom of art history that what used to be known as primitive art had a intimate formative influence on the emergence of modernism in twentieth-century Europe. In Bali, Europe returned the favor: Spies had an uncanny natural affinity for the Balinese sensibility, and he totally changed the arts of the island in the fourteen years he lived there. The familiar Pita Maha school of painting in Ubud, one of the principal reasons people come from every part of the world to visit here, was virtually his invention.
Traditionally, the Balinese considered painting the be among the lowest of the arts; before Spies it was comparatively primitive, consisting mainly of astrological shadow-puppet show popular throughout the archipelago. Painters were strictly limited by convention and the natural pigments, such as bone, soot, and clay, that were available to them.
Spies, later joined by the Dutch paste-list Rudolf Bonnet, acquainted Balinese artists to the vivid colors of Western painting, and the greater range of effects possible with ready-made brushes, pigments, and fine-woven canvas. More substantial, Spies and Bonnet extremely expanded the range of subject matter, encouraging their student to paint scenes from everyday life. Lest Spies and Bonnet be accused of tampering with an ancient tradition, it should be pointed out that Balinese art was always innovative; the island's most famous artist, I Gusti Nyoman Lempad, had already begun to experiment in both style and subject matter before Spies's arrival. Just Picasso chose African sculpture as ab influence in his work, so the painters of Bali responded freely and immediately to Spies's stimulus.
Stay with us at Bali Ametis Luxury Villas, and our butler will take you to see all the sublime arts of Ubud. We will ensure you will have unforgettable memories during you stay at Bali Ametis Luxury Villas.
Copyright 2011, Ametis Villa - Bali Luxury Villas | Private Villa | Honeymoon Villa
"Magic" is one of those words that travel writers must use with miserly care - usually, it's just hyperbole for "especially pretty" but there really is magic in Ubud. When Balinese people bereave something, they consult a balian, a benign sort of sorcerer, who tells them where they'll find it. Balians can read dreams, cure sickness, go into trances and speak in the voices of forefather. And magic, in the form of the island's unique religion, is at the core of Bali's arts. A blend of Hinduism and nature worship, Balinese religion is an ecstatic union of the aesthetic and the spiritual reminiscent of the civilization of archaic Greece. Bali's famous trance dances, for example, suggest the rites of Bacchus: in the Sanghyang, two girls who are supposed to be untrained in the dance's intricate choreography go into a trance and, eyes firmly shut, move in faultless unison. The dance is named after the divine spirit which inhabits them.
When Walter Spies arrived in Bali, he found a culture completely devoted to art, yet to whom the concept of art for art's sake was alien. The Balinese famously have no word for "artist"; painting, stone and wood carving, weaving, playing the gamelan, and above all the dance were just what one did when not fishing or working in the rice fields.
It is an axiom of art history that what used to be known as primitive art had a intimate formative influence on the emergence of modernism in twentieth-century Europe. In Bali, Europe returned the favor: Spies had an uncanny natural affinity for the Balinese sensibility, and he totally changed the arts of the island in the fourteen years he lived there. The familiar Pita Maha school of painting in Ubud, one of the principal reasons people come from every part of the world to visit here, was virtually his invention.
Traditionally, the Balinese considered painting the be among the lowest of the arts; before Spies it was comparatively primitive, consisting mainly of astrological shadow-puppet show popular throughout the archipelago. Painters were strictly limited by convention and the natural pigments, such as bone, soot, and clay, that were available to them.
Spies, later joined by the Dutch paste-list Rudolf Bonnet, acquainted Balinese artists to the vivid colors of Western painting, and the greater range of effects possible with ready-made brushes, pigments, and fine-woven canvas. More substantial, Spies and Bonnet extremely expanded the range of subject matter, encouraging their student to paint scenes from everyday life. Lest Spies and Bonnet be accused of tampering with an ancient tradition, it should be pointed out that Balinese art was always innovative; the island's most famous artist, I Gusti Nyoman Lempad, had already begun to experiment in both style and subject matter before Spies's arrival. Just Picasso chose African sculpture as ab influence in his work, so the painters of Bali responded freely and immediately to Spies's stimulus.
Stay with us at Bali Ametis Luxury Villas, and our butler will take you to see all the sublime arts of Ubud. We will ensure you will have unforgettable memories during you stay at Bali Ametis Luxury Villas.
Copyright 2011, Ametis Villa - Bali Luxury Villas | Private Villa | Honeymoon Villa
Kamis, 26 Mei 2011
Bali Ametis Luxury Villas: The peculiarity Balinese temple architecture
Bali Ametis Luxury Villas: The peculiarity Balinese temple architecture: "The most striking architectural structures of Bali and probably the first the visitor will notice, are the tens of thousands of temples foun..."
The peculiarity Balinese temple architecture
The most striking architectural structures of Bali and probably the first the visitor will notice, are the tens of thousands of temples found everywhere on the island - in houses, courtyards, marketplaces, cemeteries, and rice paddies; on beaches, barren rocks offshore, deserted hilltops and mountain heights; inside caves; deep within the tangled roots of Banyan trees.
There are genealogical temples, lake temples, hospital temples, bathing temples, temples dedicated to the spirits of source , temples for the deities of markets and seeds. There are also private temples for those of precious descent, royal "state" temples, and temples for clans (pura dadia) who share a common genealogy. Some temples, such as Pura Penulisan (Kintamani), are significant memorial shrines to ancient rulers and their families.
The temple is the most significant institution on Bali and the center of religious activity. Each villages has its own shrines for community worship, and public temples may be used by anyone to pray to the Balinese godhead, Sanghyang Widhi, or any of its manifestations.
All over Bali are agricultural temples dedicated to the rice goddess, Dewi Sri, devine consort of Vishnu, the Preserver. In northern Bali, where subak (local water boards) control every aspect of life, the outline temples dedicated to the rice goddess are the grandest religious edifices on the island.
Pura Ulun Danu Bratan in Candikuning (Bedugul) and Pura Luhur on Gunung Batukaru are dedicated to lake goddesses worshiped as sources of fertility. These are deemed female temples; their male counterpart is Pura Besakih on the downhill of Gunung Agung. Six temples are sacred to all Hindu Balinese. Besides Besakih and Ulun Danu Bratan, these include the beautiful Uluwatu sea temple on the Bukit Peninsula, built on a long narrow cliff 76 meters above the sea; Pura Tirta Empul in Tampaksiring, famous for its pool; Pura Sakenan on the island of Serangan; Yeh Jeruk in Gianyar; and Pura Luhur Batukaru near the top of Gunung Batukaru in Tabanan.
Four religious sites in certain stand out and shouldn't be missed: Gunung Kawi, Ulun Danu Batur, Ulun Danu Bratan, and Besakih. The last is the grand Mother Temple complex of Bali, the state temple. It lies in the downhill of Gunung Agung, the holiest mountain on the island, where it is believed all the gods and goddesses live. Other temples of architectural merit include Pura Panataran Sasih in Pejeng, Pura Dasar in Gelgel, Pura Panataran Goa Lawah in Klungkung, and Pura Kehen in Bangli.
Stay with us at Bali Ametis Luxury Villas, and our butler will take you to see all the great of Balinese architecture. We will ensure you will have unforgettable memories during you stay at Bali Ametis Luxury Villas.
Copyright 2011, Ametis Villa - Bali Luxury Villas | Private Villa | Honeymoon Villa
There are genealogical temples, lake temples, hospital temples, bathing temples, temples dedicated to the spirits of source , temples for the deities of markets and seeds. There are also private temples for those of precious descent, royal "state" temples, and temples for clans (pura dadia) who share a common genealogy. Some temples, such as Pura Penulisan (Kintamani), are significant memorial shrines to ancient rulers and their families.
The temple is the most significant institution on Bali and the center of religious activity. Each villages has its own shrines for community worship, and public temples may be used by anyone to pray to the Balinese godhead, Sanghyang Widhi, or any of its manifestations.
All over Bali are agricultural temples dedicated to the rice goddess, Dewi Sri, devine consort of Vishnu, the Preserver. In northern Bali, where subak (local water boards) control every aspect of life, the outline temples dedicated to the rice goddess are the grandest religious edifices on the island.
Pura Ulun Danu Bratan in Candikuning (Bedugul) and Pura Luhur on Gunung Batukaru are dedicated to lake goddesses worshiped as sources of fertility. These are deemed female temples; their male counterpart is Pura Besakih on the downhill of Gunung Agung. Six temples are sacred to all Hindu Balinese. Besides Besakih and Ulun Danu Bratan, these include the beautiful Uluwatu sea temple on the Bukit Peninsula, built on a long narrow cliff 76 meters above the sea; Pura Tirta Empul in Tampaksiring, famous for its pool; Pura Sakenan on the island of Serangan; Yeh Jeruk in Gianyar; and Pura Luhur Batukaru near the top of Gunung Batukaru in Tabanan.
Four religious sites in certain stand out and shouldn't be missed: Gunung Kawi, Ulun Danu Batur, Ulun Danu Bratan, and Besakih. The last is the grand Mother Temple complex of Bali, the state temple. It lies in the downhill of Gunung Agung, the holiest mountain on the island, where it is believed all the gods and goddesses live. Other temples of architectural merit include Pura Panataran Sasih in Pejeng, Pura Dasar in Gelgel, Pura Panataran Goa Lawah in Klungkung, and Pura Kehen in Bangli.
Stay with us at Bali Ametis Luxury Villas, and our butler will take you to see all the great of Balinese architecture. We will ensure you will have unforgettable memories during you stay at Bali Ametis Luxury Villas.
Copyright 2011, Ametis Villa - Bali Luxury Villas | Private Villa | Honeymoon Villa
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