As a person who grew up in East Java, I love to eat vegetables with peanut-based sauce. There are different dishes using this peanut-based sauce. However, our son cannot (yet) eat peanut safely. We are still as carefull as possible avoiding certain food. The last he ate green Kiwi, we ended up camping in the hospital's emergency room (it was happy ending but tiring day, though, especially after a busy working day). However, gold Kiwi, is amazingly ok for him. Peanut is still a NO but pistache is ok.
Anyway, away from home town, I missed some of my home town local dishes. However, many of the dishes uses ingredients that are difficult to find here. And some dishes contains things that our son cannot eat (yet, note, we are still hopefull that he will be clear of all allergy one day), for example peanut. Nasi pecel is basically steamed rice served with boiled vegetables, fried tempe or fried tofu, some other extra things and served with peanut-based sauce. However, there is also nasi pecel served with sambal tumpang. This sauce (i.e. sambal) is not made from peanut but from tempe, which is basically fermented soy bean.
So, when a friend of us visited us, play with our son, I made this for our meal. Our son enjoyed the meal, he also did not refuse to eat the vegetables. But, anyway, eating vegetables and fruits has never been a big problem to him. He refuses now and then certain vegetables or fruits but when we stay persistent to try them again another day, usually he would give a try and although not always love the vegie/fruit he will not fight too hard to refuse.
The taste of the sauce is a nice compliment to the boiled vegetables since it also contains coconut milk. If you do not like coconut milk or avoid the fat content of it, you may want to try to replace it with soy milk instead. I have not tried it, but I did use soy milk or cow milk sometimes as a replacement of the coconut milk.
Here is my version of the sauce. Note that this is simplified version since the ingredients are not as easy to find as much stock in my kitchen as when I was back in East Java. You can find the more complete version in the internet.
Ingredients
6 tempe (fermented soy bean cake, *I used around 200 gr of tempeh for the sauce and I fried the other 200 gr as sliced fried tempe)
4 pieces of tempe semangit (which is basically very old tempe, almost going "bad", *I did not use this, since it is difficult to imitate here)
4 pieces white tofu (*I used 1 pieces of big firm white tofu, cut into cubes)
500 cc coconut milk (*I used only 200-250 cc coconut milk)
boiled vegetables (*I used kangkung/morning glory, taoge, long beans)
5 lime leaves (*I only used 2-3 leaves)
2 Indonesian bay/salam leaves
Spices, ground
5 cloves garlic (*I used 1 big red onion)
5 cloves shallot (*I did not have this on stock, so I skipped)
1 lemongrass, use the white part (not grounded but only crush it)
2 cm galangal/lengkuas (*I used 1 tsp galangal powder)
2 cm kempferia galangan/kencur (*I used 1 tsp powder)
250 gram bird eye chilli and red chilli (*I did not use it but add it separately)
1 tbsp dried shrimp/ebi
salt to taste
white pepper to taste
palm sugar/gula merah (*I used arond 2 tbsp)
How to make
1. Prepared the boiled vegetables and put aside
2. Cut the 200 gr tempe and fried it (you can put it first on the mixture of crushed coriander seeds, salt and pepper before frying), and put aside
3. Cut the tofu and fried it and put aside
4. Put the rest of the tempe (for the sauce), garlic and shallot in the food processor and crush it
5. Heat a pan and put in the crushed tempe, garlic and shallot mixture
6. Add the rest of the grounded spices
7. Add the coconut milk, adjust the consistency using a bit of water when necessary (the end result should be thick enough)
8. Cook until it boils
9. Serve steamed rice, with boiled vegetabes, fried tempe and tofu, and put the sauce on top of the dish.
Enjoy!
