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Wow! That is really windy!!! Do you have some kind of tractor that you can use to try to pull the deer stand back upright?

I somehow neglected to take photos of breakfast the next morning - my wife had 2 poached eggs and I think I had pancakes with (gasp) maple syrup!! Really, they couldn't make some palm sugar syrup!?! How much did it cost to bring maple syrup over there!?! We got the ok to be able to dive the house reef that morning. There isn't a lot to see there, but I looked at it as a chance to practice my buoyancy, and they were using the opportunity to get us to help them do some reef cleaning - aka picking up trash that finds its way in there... Reef with puffer fish Colorful reef shot More reef aquarium..... Lunch after the dive: This was the wonton noodle soup... I think they said that it was from Shanghai or something... dishes on the side had soy sauce and sesame oil. Do I have to say what this was? For context, here's some shots from the beach.... Most of these surrounding islands are uninhabited or barely habited.

I keep saying I need to snip the flowers, I always do in the garden....but they ARE so pretty lol. I suspect you're right about the roots. I need to get a bigger pot but then it wouldn't fit in the window and that presents a whole 'nother problem with Newman wanting to eat the plant lol.

A tiny update..... We had a HUGE day of winds--and when a Kansas person says it's windy, it's windy. It was around the 15 of December. Winds steady at 50 gusting from 80 to 100 mph some places. Ronnie went out to our property and found this: Blew the new deer stand right over. And it was anchored very securely. Not securely enough obviously. I forbade him from trying to set it upright by himself so we have some work to do at some point. Yay. Sigh.

Chilly weather calls for Chili. Chicken chili with cannellini beans, Rotel tomatoes, canned diced chilies. Topped with sour cream, scallions and cilantro. I bought an avocado but mi esposo ruled it was not ripe enough. He put it in a paper bag in the fridge and says it'll be ripe before we run out of leftover chili 🥑

Looking at the whole plant and pot, I wonder if it has gotten root bound, in which case, it will always be a little wilty because there can't be enough root mass to support the plant. I really like fabric pots since it's impossible for it to get root bound - instead, the fabric air prunes the roots, which encourages more branching - you wind up with a giant super dense ball of roots. I always cut my basil flowers - they're so pretty, but I always thought that if I didn't, the plant wouldn't do as well.

This looks delicious and cheesy. OMG one of my favorites. How many years have I said this around here???? But someday I'm going to get a real truffle I don't care how expensive it is lol. Decided to not get back on the low carb wagon for a few more days. I HAD to have spaghetti and venison meatballs--had some balls leftover from when our friend was here that I froze. Also did some Italian sausage links and salad. There is pasta under the mountain of basil. My grocery store turned kitchen basil plant is still going strong. I had to stake it up yesterday it's gotten so tall. I'm adhering to @KennethT's instructions and watering it --2 cups of water every day (that's all it will hold without overflowing) but the leaves still look wilty. Tastes delicious though..... Drug my very unused air fryer out and did some Cornish game hens the next night (that was more on the low carb plan that we should be doing). Cheesy cauliflower and deviled eggs to go with. I felt a little......bad...disturbing the hens....they looked so......er....comfortable? Pizza and salad the next night--I mean I had dough in the freezer and sauce and meats to use up so yeah.....and another salad Last night the last of the venison pounder steaks with fake cauliflower mashed potatoes, carb free gravy ( I don't know why I keep trying this...Ronnie doesn't love it) and green bean casserole.

Ha! Yeah, we thought that was hilarious - but definitely not the first time we've seen something like that. I don't know how she could sleep with that smell though... I guess you can get used to anything. Yeah, it's funny how certain things are so common in one place, and then in another so close by, it's like they've never even heard of it. Lime juice (it's really a limeaid, but called lime juice) is so common in Singapore and Malaysia. The fact that it's so rare in most of Indonesia is interesting. I guess it's kind of like sweet tea or grits being a big thing in the south US, but no one has ever heard of it (except on TV or in books) in NY.

I think I've walked past a place in NYC that makes it, but I've never tried it. Next time I'm in Chinatown, I'll try to take one for the team... for research purposes only, of course.... Funny - I never noticed it when I was there, but looking at the photos now, it seems like all the trees in the pots are dead... I can't imagine them being dormant, like we get in winter - how would the trees know when winter was? It's always hot, the amount of sunshine varies by like +/- 20 minutes all year since it's so close to the equator... maybe they go dormant during the rainy season? I've never heard of trees that did that but who knows... Everywhere else was so green.... I think it had sweet soy sauce in it - that would be common in Indonesia, but since the hotel catered to mostly Europeans, who knows, it could have been balsamic vinegar!!! Ha! But we didn't try it, so I don't know for sure.... Ha, more like 3 planes! For those outside of NYC, LA, SF or Seattle, probably 4 at least!!

Gives new meaning to sleeping with the fishes...... Not that I know anything about any of this but that surprises me.

I wonder if anyone here in the states makes this? Oh that's just awful Just curious...are the trees without leaves dead or? Seems odd to just leave them if they're dead...... This made me drool. I can't get the picture to post but the cute little "bowl" on her plate is for a dipping sauce or? LOVING this. I'm having a vacation in my kitchen and I don't even have to shower or take a plane

This threw me for a loop. I am more familiar with a different kind of dive hotel . . . Thank you so much for taking us along on your travels. Now you just need to figure out how to send rendang (or even gulai) through the internet. 😋

After lunch, we were told that they'd be able to take us on a dive of the house reef around 3PM.... Spotted stingray.... Batfish This looked like a hawksbill turtle For dinner a few hours later: We both got the prawn spring roll.... Nasi campur - next to the rice ball are two corn fritters, on the stick are two chicken sate lillet (really dry) and two pieces of chicken with some fried tempe with sweet soy sauce and some tempeh chips This was kinda like a Thai red curry with chicken Ice cream - it was a little icy, like it had melted a bit and then refroze - not surprising as it had to survive going from the store to the car to the boat then a 30+ minute boat ride, then to the pier and then finally to the kitchen all in 85-90degF.... Fruit platter - pineapple, watermelon, dragonfruit

Fried rice with leftovers (deboned pork ribs, long beans on oyster sauce, red bell peppers), vegetables (shiitake mushrooms, zucchini), flavorings (fish sauce, shallot, garlic, ginger), and an egg to bind. Should hold me until dinner.

Breakfast the next morning - at this point, we were hopeful we'd be able to go out for some dives - there was a plan to leave at 7:45 for a 2 tank dive (1 dive at 8, the next after a 1 hour surface interval on the boat after we surfaced, so probably around 10-10:30). Good pineapple and dragon fruit Mie goreng (fried noodles) with chicken sate covered in a sweet-ish peanut sauce. I forgot to take a photo of my wife's poached eggs. Unfortunately, the morning dives were cancelled as they were not given permission to move the boats by the harbormaster... Instead, they offered us the ability to snorkel the house reef, which was really nice. Due to the constant currants, you shouldn't just jump in the water to snorkel as you'd drift far away and then it's a lot of swimming up the current to get back. So they took us in a zodiac a ways away and dropped us off so we could just have a nice drift snorkel back to the pier. This shows some of the coral garden and a puffer fish More coral and a green turtle - when the camera breaks the surface, you can see the turtle's head pop up to take a breath I had thought this was some kind of grouper, but was later told that it was a lipstick fish I was so impressed by the coral gardens in this area. So many different types of hard and soft corals - most with only minimal bleaching if any at all. After the snorkel, it was basically time for lunch. View from our table This is the beef wrap. The menu said that it was beef with "capsicum" which I assumed to mean chillies, but no, just bell pepper slices. Another nasi goreng.... More tiramisu... And a creme brulee....

The rest of the afternoon was spent unpacking, getting our dive equipment set up, etc. As we were seated for dinner, we had a few wild guests join us... I got the tuna tatake for an appetizer - only realizing midway through that most fish in the area is not kept on ice in the market so probably not the best idea, but I never got sick, so whew! Prawn spring rolls I was hoping that the hotel would have a lot of traditionally grilled fish, but no.... Fried squid, a single prawn (I think it was fried also) and more grilled tuna. Served with a tomato/shallot/chilli mixture and a sambal goreng (normal fried sambal). The beef rendang, which was probably closer to gulai than rendang but it was pretty good - definitely not like a true Padang rendang though. On the side is a very small piece of eggplant covered in sambal - that's about as much vegetable as we get here!!! We forgot to take photos of dessert.

The dive hotel sent a car to pick us up from our hotel just before noon, and then proceeded to take us to the marina to meet the hotel's speedboat. After pickup up a few other groups, we got to the hotel around 1PM, so they brought us to their restaurant for lunch before check in. The hotel is small - maybe only 20-25 rooms set up as separate cottages along the beach on an otherwise uninhabited island. Since you're pretty much stuck there and there are no other options, the room rate includes full board - breakfast, lunch and dinner. Breakfast had menu choices plus a buffet with fruit, cereal and pastries. Lunch was main dish plus dessert while dinner was appetizer, main dish then dessert. Lunch menu - they put prices on it just in case someone isn't getting the full board thing I guess... I got (no surprise here) the soto ayam (chicken soup): My wife got the fried rice, which she'll get for lunch every day.... It came with a couple pieces of chicken sate. Dessert menu: They didn't have any mango, so I got pineapple with sticky rice... and tiramisu which was very light and had no alcohol At one point, one of the guests said with some kind of slavic accent (there was at least one couple that were russian who we spoke to, but several other couples had similar accents but we never wound up talking to them so I don't know where they were from) that a tiramisu typically has cherry vodka in it but he understood that they wouldn't put alcohol in it since many people there are Muslim.

Tomatoes are pretty common in Indonesian food - but mainly as an acidic component - so I've never seen them used ripe. They're either just barely red or even still slightly green, or used completely green as it is a component of the sambal ijo - which is green chillies, green tomatoes, shallots and garlic. Tomatoes served as garnish is probably for the tourist thing. I have no idea about the leaf cones - again, I suspect that's for the tourists - I've never seen them in local restaurants, but have seen them in restaurants geared towards (and priced for) tourists. non-cake bread is my little joke. Much of the bread in SE Asia has a texture that resembles cake. It's rare to find bread that has actual bread-like texture and crust. The seaweed butter is a compound butter but I have no idea if they used fresh seaweed or rehydrated dried seaweed - there were no hard pieces or anything like that, but to tell the truth, if I had my eyes closed, I wouldn't even know it was there. It tasted like normal butter. I think they were using it just trying to be fancy.

Monday: roasted sweet potatoes, broccolini and delicata squash with miso ginger sauce and black sesame seeds We have started getting weekly delivery from our community fish share again because this year they gave up their requirement that you had to accept the “fish of the week” and are now offering a la carte from what’s available. This week we chose tuna and salmon. Last night we had the tuna seared with soy dipping sauce, rice and a cucumber-pepper salad.

Sliced chicken breast , tapenade, butter lettuce in pita bread. Orange pistachio muffin, adapted from livingwithcarlee.com, muffin was very moist, I made a half batch which yielded six., rather than four. Orange zest and freshly squeezed Cara Cara orange provided the orange flavor hit. Although frosting was not included in recipe, I made a melange of various ingredients I had in fridge.

Of course we do!

Do you accept international visitors?!

Yes, thank you for all the detailed information, and your beautiful posts. I have a few questions (selected carefully from many I could ask!): Way back here: The tomato slices look rather like what we'd see in the northern US states at this time of year (i.e. not very ripe or flavorful), and I don't think I'm seeing much by way of tomatoes in your other pictures although I may have spotted some in a market photo. Was that mostly window-dressing for tourists, or have you encountered tomatoes in the cookery elsewhere there? How were those tomatoes, if you remember? The leaf cones that rice comes served in are pretty and seem ubiquitous. Do you know if they're considered reusable? Does anyone reuse them, or are they a one-and-done sort of thing? What do you mean by "non-cake bread"? Finally, for now: what is the seaweed butter like that went with a non-cake bread above? Is it like a compound butter? Salty? Small chunks of seaweed -- and soft, or hard? I'm eyeing some of my seaweed packets and thinking...hmmm!

Spaghetti and meatballs with a rich tomato sauce… rich because it has left over wine in it. The sour cream is not traditional but I saw it in the fridge and I thought “why not”

I may take you up on that! And yes, please write a review of the book. This part really strikes home for me, where you said: This is the thing I keep telling myself I have to do. If I don't have prep work done by, oh, midafternoon then I'm going to be eating one of my planned-overs (tonight it was chili) or a grilled sandwich. I can't be messing around with washing, chopping, roasting, mixing and so on when it's almost dinner time already. I do need to work on that advance prep business, and her creative ideas might be good inspirations.