Sri Owen's Webpage

The new book has been officially 'out' now for a fortnight. In the UK it's called (as I intended) "Sri Owen's Indonesian Food" and the cover looks like this:

It's published here by Pavilion, which is an imprint of Anova Books, based in London. All the Anova / Pavilion people have been absolutely marvellous, and I'd like to thank them here for being helpful, considerate, patient, and always friendly and cheerful - and highly efficient as well.

In North America, the book is published by Interlink, who I'm sure (from previous experience with American publishers) are equally wonderful - so far, however, I've had almost no contact with them. They call my book "The Indonesian Kitchen", and it looks like this:

But the differences between the two books, when you open them up, are trivial. No invitations - not yet, anyway - to fly to New York or San Francisco to help launch "The Indonesian Kitchen", but we've made up for that in London by having three launch parties in just over a week - as I mentioned in my last posting [below].

The evening at the Indonesian Embassy was a particularly good party - more than a hundred people there, and I spent most of my time signing copies of the book. I made a speech - just a little one - to the assembled diplomats, publishers, agents, old friends, the Anglo-Indonesian Society, and several people who I knew I'd met before but whose names escaped me ...

- while my lecture at Asia House, a few evenings afterwards (actually the annual Yan-kit So Memorial Lecture), led to many questions from the audience, and discussion at the reception that followed.

LAUNCHES of the new book -

please note that dates and other important details have changed ...

My new book, Sri Owen’s Indonesian Food, which in the  US  is to be called The Indonesian Kitchen, is to be published in early September by Pavilion. I will be celebrating the publication first here at my home in Wimbledon, London SW19, on Thursday 11 September, during my fund-raising pre-Symposium lunch. Then the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery is giving a dinner with an Indonesian menu on Friday 12 September, during the Symposium. The first official launch of Sri Owen’s Indonesian Food will be on 19 September at the Embassy of the Republic of Indonesia in Grosvenor Square, London W1. Then, on Thursday 25 September, I'm giving the Yan Kit So Memorial Lecture at Asia House, who have promised that my book will also get a launch party there. However, my next lecture and cookery demonstration at Asia House, "Curry and Prosecco", that was scheduled for 26 November, has had to be moved to April or May next year. But in connection with my new book, I'll be giving a talk and cookery demonstration at Divertimenti on 5th November, and at Books for Cooks on 3rd December.

Oh dear - more than eighteen months since I added anything to this diary. It has been rather a hectic time - just not quite hectic enough for me to feel compelled to blog direct from the battle zone. Most of 2007 I was getting ready for the Oxford Symposium in September, or I was writing my next book. Roger and I shut ourselves away in our usual place in the foothills of the Dolomites, and in seven weeks (May and most of June 2007) the text was pretty well complete. That of course was only the start. Back in London, the photo sessions, with Janie Suthering to help me cook and present the dishes, and photographer Gus Filgate in command of the lights and lenses, went splendidly. The illustrations are not just lovely to look at, the food they portray tasted as good as it looks on the page. We have all worked together on several books, and we make a rule that there are no artificial aids to beauty - when the dish has had its picture taken, we sit down and eat it. My publisher, Pavilion, have throughout been enthusiastic about the project and highly professional.

While the book was being got ready for the press, the excitement  kept me going, but by September of last year it was clear that my heart problems needed urgent and fairly drastic intervention. In mid-October, I had a quadruple heart bypass, performed by a brilliant young woman professor of cardiac surgery. I was in hospital for only a week and within a surprisingly short time was on my feet again. More than six months later, I can't say I feel fully recovered, but I am leading an active life, and intend to go on doing so. Watch this space!

A very very belated happy 2007 to all. I can only apologize for not  
writing in my journal since the 10th of December. My excuse is that I still  
cook a lot, and give numerous dinner parties. The latest one was on  
22 January. I haven't had a chance yet to say anything here, even  
about this very succesful occasion, until today. It was a kind of  
rehearsal for a sit-down lunch I'll be cooking for members of Asia  
House in London (http://www.asiahouse.org) on 27 March 2007. This  
lunch for 40 people will be preceded by my talk on Curry - in fact  
the title of the event is 'CURRY AND PROSECCO', the prosecco being  
donated by my wine producer friend in the Veneto, Gianluca Bisol  
(http://www.bisol.it). As soon as the Asia House Programme for March  
and April comes out I will post the Curry Talk programme on this  
website also. I'll be donating 10 copies of my book "New Wave Asian"  
for sale on 27 March by Asia House. And as the talk is partly based  
on my contribution to a new book called 'Curry', published by Dorling  
Kindersley, this book will be also on sale there. I am only one of  
the contributors to 'Curry', the others being David Thompson on Thai  
Curry; Corinne Trang on the curry dishes of Laos, Cambodia and  
Vietnam; Vivek Singh, of the Cinnamon Club in London, on the curries  
of North India; Das Sreedharan on South India; Mahmood Akbar on  
Pakistan; Roopa Gulati on the 'Outposts', including curry in Britain;  
and Yasuko Fukuoka, who has written a short chapter on Japanese  
curries. I find all the Indian and Thai recipes by all these top  
restaurant chefs are incredibly good, while the other three writers,  
who are not chefs, are also very readable and their recipes, too, are  
very good. I should not be shy to say that my part of the writing,  
which includes recipes from Myanmar, Malaysia, Singapore, the  
Philippines and Indonesia, is as good as the others!

For the lunch at Asia House on 27 March I will include a  
recipe or two from Myanmar and the Philippines, but naturally I'll cook  
more Indonesian dishes. After all, as I've said in this website of  
mine, (see About Me), I remain true to my original purpose when I  
wrote my first cookery book: my mission is to show everybody in the  
west how to cook Indonesian food properly. I will write more about  
this forthcoming lunch at Asia House in the next few days.

Now, still on the subject of Asia House, I would like to post here an  
announcement about the Yan Kit So Memorial Award. Do read this, and  
send your comments or questions if you wish - especially if you are  
setting out to write a cookery book for the first time. The bursary  
you can win from Asia House is indeed quite generous!

A few days ago, another dinner party - this time among my guests were some of the trustees of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. I have been a trustee myself for the past year, and it was partly a welcome dinner for a trustee who lives abroad and had come to visit Oxford and London for a few days. Naturally we talked about next year's Symposium, which will be held on 8 and 9 September 2007. We agreed that we should tell as many of our friends as possible about the dates and the theme for this Symposium - you'll find all the details on the website. At the moment I'm just starting to test new recipes for my forthcoming book on Indonesian food. So I took this opportunity to serve my foodie guests with some of my planned recipes. I started the menu with an old Indonesian recipe made with tofu (beancurd). The Javanese name for this dish is gadon tahu, and traditionally it is cooked wrapped in banana leaf. But for this dinner I cooked the tofu mixture in individual ramekins. I won't go into all the details of the menu, but I was rather pleased with the soup I made for my guests, and I asked them to tell me what its two main ingredients were. All I would say was that the soup combined one fruit and one vegetable.

 
The prize for the person who gave the correct answer would be one of my published books. I like to serve this soup in coffee cups; it is spiced very lightly with the seeds of one green cardamon, a pinch of mustard seed, and a teaspoon of chopped ginger. I took a quick snap of one of the cups before I served them. The green bits on the top are chopped Chinese chive. Each of the five guests tasted the soup as if it had been a fine wine, and each gave a different answer to my question. I wasn't surprised when the only correct answer - parsnip and apple - came from one whose day job is as a consultant engineer in the oil industry, but who spends most of his spare time in his garden, growing fine and unusual vegetables and fruit - like this splendid turban squash, for example, that he brought me as a present.

 Of course I wasn't surprised when he said he would wait for my new Indonesian Food Book for his prize. I do hope now that I can meet the deadline for the delivery of the manuscript, and that the publisher will publish it in the autumn of 2008. Naturally I won't print any of the 'new' recipes in this weblog, but I will talk about the book and print some snippets of the text from time to time to whet my readers' appetites. As well as recipes, there will be plenty of background material about social and cultural life in Indonesia, and other interesting stories about some of the unusual ingredients.