A Rice Cake On My Dashboard

Hello Asean Hive Community

Recently I am so into a dollar lunch saga every time I post in this community, and to be honest... This post can be written as part of that saga too. However I have decided to tell a story from different angle, although all the food I share here is less than a dollar lol.

Everyday I drive my car to my working site. Sometime I work at my office, sometime I work at project sites and maybe visitng my clients. So there are many days I end up driving from one place to another for hours.

The recent one, last month, I have driven more than 400km in a day. I left my home at 06:00 AM and arrived at my home at 10:00 PM. We came to several places in several cities.

if I do not plan my diet during those days, I might end up eating at convenience store such as this Lawson outlet. I am not saying this place is expensive, the price is pretty much fair actually because here in most Asean Countries, excluding Singapore, if you pick random food stall or food outlet in some region, you might end up rigged paying ridiculous price.

However eating ready to go food for a long term could cost your health. So if you are in my position, and considering I am not a young one in twenties, you need to manage well which ready to go food you should take.

Recently many ready to go food with Korean cuisine as their product. They are actually selling very well however I do not buy those things. There are two reasons why I avoid it.

The first one is the price is a bit tricky. I would dare to say they are overpriced but mostly after I say that some korean food lovers come to debate me. Believe me kiddo, they are expensive, even they sell with low or small price, the portion is tiny.

Second most of Korean food are known for their signature taste, hot and spicy. I like spicy food however I realize very well that it can go wrong and could end up by making us having to go to toilet frequently. If I go to project sites or some remote area, there are no toilet there. You need to make use of river and some bushes.

Delivering your gems in bushes while some Cobra might get irritated having a human dropping his pant and sending out smelly thing on their nest is a very not wise move.

I prefer to have a ready to go food from local cuisine like this. Their price are more reasonable and as a fellow local, you can know which one is better for a long hours travel. Sadly young people dislike local outlet like this, they prefer to go to Korean or Japanese one.

So this is one of my favorite stalls to get a local or traditional ready to go food or meal. I can not eat cup noodle, so I won't buy them. I tend to get some digestion problem if I eat them, I do not know but It is safer for me to eat instant noodle than cup noodle.

This one is selling fritters and rice cake. There are many people selling fritters on street, but I prefer to get them from this outlet or other outlet that I see they make those food properly.

What I like from these kind of outlets are their rice cake. In Indonesian we have bacang, lontong, arem arem, lemper and some other, sadly if we translate them to English, they become rice cake. I believe Malaysian, Philippines, Thai and other have issue too, all become rice cake lol.

This is what I like the most, Ba Cang. Usually they have beef variant and chicken variant. The real Bacang uses pork, but most people here are Muslim so in most place we can not sell pork openly.

There are Bacang which made from sticky rice too. I prefer Ba Cang which is made from ordinary rice. Not sticky and not too full after eating it.

However the problem in eating bacang is that you will have your hand full and sometime messy or dirty from holding it. So eating bacang while driving is not recommended.

So when I drive for long hours and I do not want to stop for having some lunch, I prefer to buy Lontong or Lemper. Both are rice cakes, so it is hard to say this properly in English. Lemper and Lontong basically identical, the different is that Lemper is made from sticky rice. I like sticky rice if I am not traveling outside, so I prefer having Lontong if I want to drive long and do not wish to stop by for lunch or dinner.

If your Lontong is filled with meat, it is called Arem Arem. So arem arem is lontong too, but for vegetarian, you better ask directly if this lontong is vegetables only or not, because some sellers fill lontong with meat too, to justify the right in selling them higher.

So do you eat rice cake too when travelling for long hours?

Anyway thanks for stopping by, and have a nice day all!!

Thank you for coming and reading my post. I live in Jakarta, Ex-Capital City of Indonesia. I used to live by making money online, that's why I like being here, on HIVE, and in #PIMP - (Paper In My Pocket) community.