haresfur
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Posts posted by haresfur
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13 hours ago, lindag said:
Is is worth it to seek out fresh bay leaves?
I have a tree or a tree with enough suckers that it looks like a bush and I'd say don't worry about it if you can get dried that aren't turned to a stale crisp. I think the flavour actually changes a bit when dried. I use both but mostly fresh just because I have them.
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Semi-dried tomatoes. Here they are before, sorry no after because I was distracted.
My Roma plants are being a challenge with a huge excess of leaves so that the tomatoes range from rotting on the ground to little green ones and everything in between with the ripe ones nearly inaccessible. Guess I can't complain because they are volunteers and seem immune from the brown leaf stuff that attacks my other plants.
So I took off anything that seemed remotely ripe or ripening and quite a few green ones on branches that came off in the process. Out of those I cut the ripest in half and scooped out pith and seeds and dried in the oven. The main recipe I followed had too high a temperature, 110 C and I dropped it to 70 C after a couple of hours.
The advice on storage was all over the place, with most recommending storing in oil in the fridge or freezer. I followed one suggestion to dip in vinegar (I used cider vinegar) to reduce the pH then store in oil in the fridge. I'll try to use them up in month anyway. With luck the olive oil will pick up a bit of the flavour.
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7 hours ago, liuzhou said:
If the name of the food originates from Hokkein, why does it retain the very different Mandarin pronunciation. Does Wikipedia explain that ?
It would seem that it came to Singapore directly from Mandarin, but the local Hokkein speakers changed the second part, meaning 'cooked rice' to 'pñg', leaving the first part in Mandarin. Yet , many outlets in Singapore use the full Mandarin.
This is interesting information about how the name morphed in its journey. You could always edit the Wiki
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6 hours ago, KennethT said:
Kaya toast is tasty and there are lots of places to get it. My favorite place is the original location of Killiney's Kopitiam - unlike just about everyone else, they toast the bread over charcoal which is nice. But personally, I think the best breakfast there is the chicken curry with roti prata!
That might have to be brunch!
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A new one for me is kaya: Coconut jam. Flavoured with pandan and commonly served as kaya toast and eaten with boiled eggs mixed with soy sauce and white pepper. Ya Kun Kaya Toast seems to have stores everywhere so that's breakfast sorted.
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6 hours ago, Tropicalsenior said:
Here in Costa Rica it is called cilantro as is the small leaf variety. But it is distinguished from that by calling it cilantro coyote because it grows wild here like a weed. I'm delighted when I'm find one that has popped up in my yard. I use it just as a seasoning and I much prefer it to the other variety. I've never thought of using it as vegetable. How do you use it, in stir fries?
As an interesting aside, culantro is not a word that you want to use in Mexico. It is slang for a part of the body of a woman and not used in a complimentary way.
Is the slang word in Mexico pronounced with a hard C? If not it seems like an easy mistake to make. I wonder what the herb is called there.
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Pasta primavera. All the veg except the onion is from my garden
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3 hours ago, KennethT said:
As I'm sure @liuzhou has as well, I've spent a decent amount of time in SG - basically, EVERYONE speaks English. There is no language to learn because there are so many different cultures there - if you were to walk around getting snacks everywhere, you'd have to learn like 20 languages! Which is why they all speak English.
More important that the actual words are where you plan to spend your limited time there! So much great food, so little time!
Oh I know that English is an official language and that I don't need to learn anything else to get by. But it is toe into learning about the culture. Just as there are a whole variety of coffee drinks in Australia, I think it will help me to know the kopi drinks in Singapore. I'm trying to memorize kopi siew dai. I don't expect to be able to get a flat white.
I'm now regretting not scheduling more that a recovery day between intercontinental flights but it will be a very long trip as it stands. Maybe I'll be able to go back and spend more time.
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11 hours ago, liuzhou said:
The de facto main language in Singapore is British English followed by Mandarin Chinese. Most schooling there is done in English.
菜饭 (cài fàn) is Mandarin and simply means 'food', in Singapore especially hawker food. It may be well economical, but the word doesn't hold that meaning.
It fascinates me how these words and phrases can change meaning as they change location. Of course as an outsider I don't know the nuances of "what it originally meant" vs "how it is used in SG now". Or for that matter if the words have the same origin at all.
It seems from Wikipedia that its usage in Singapore originates from Singaporean Hokkien not directly from Mandarin.
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36 minutes ago, heidih said:
Interesting. I have to say that most in Singapore speak English very well so the bits of language you learn may be more for personal use not necessity. Enjoy the beautiful food of the blended cultures and post some if you have time. I was ony there once after a nasty divorce. I purloined all the Amex points and ran off with my son for a week. It was great.
I am sure I can get by. This was in part inspired by a question from someone who lives there who wanted to improve their chit-chat in the hawker centres (and maybe get a better portion of food). So that brings me to one of the other tips:
Most commonly used when ordering "cai fan" aka "economic rice", because most of us don't really know the actual names of the dishes lol, and there are so many of them.
zhe ge is 这个 "this" in chinese
na ge 那个 is "that" in chinese[another commenter] Same for malay dishes. Sometimes, i just say ini and itu hahahaha this and that too
So now I know to look for cai fan
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On 3/15/2023 at 2:11 AM, blue_dolphin said:
Butter is my microwave nemesis. I know this well. I use a cover. I choose a low setting. I stop and mix often. And yet....BOOM!...it's everywhere!
It takes a little longer but my new induction hot plate has low settings that are great for melting butter and chocolate
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I am stopping over in Singapore for unfortunately only one night and have been reading up on the food, particularly hawker centres, and how to order it. I'm sure I would be able to get by with English and pointing but I find their crossroads culture fascinating and I always like to learn a tiny bit of the language wherever I go. So it is part practical, part cultural. I realize that I am not getting pronunciation from internet sources but I have started to compile information, that may be interesting to others here, in a text file.
What other food-related language in Singapore do you know? Obviously much originated with Chinese, Malay, and other cultures and I would be interested in similarities/differences in the language.
Rather than a total dump, here is what I have thus far on coffee and tea. Even more complicated than ordering coffee in Australia or at Starbucks!
Kopi (coffee with condensed milk & sugar)
Teh (tea with condensed milk & sugar)
Kopi o (coffee with no condensed milk, still has sugar)
Teh o (tea with no condensed milk, still has sugar)
Kopi o kosong (coffee with no condensed milk & no sugar)
Teh o kosong (tea with no condensed milk & no sugar)
Teh c (tea with evaporated milk & sugar)
Tak giu (Milo)
Diao yu (tea bag in hot water)
Ditlo - no water added to your coffee or tea
Kosong (no sugar, usually for beverages)
Siew dai - less sweet
Siew siew dai - less than siew dai
(Malay stall usually go with ‘kurang manis’ than ‘siew dai’)
Peng (Bing) (beverage with ice, Eg. kopi peng, teh peng)Teh tarik: Pulled tea. It is the national drink of Malaysia (Indian origin)
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Maggie was wonderfully inspiring and really made eG great. I miss the Daily Gullet. It must have been a huge undertaking.
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My first carbonara along with over-large greenbeans from the garden fried with toasted almonds. A friend gifted us this piece of home-cured porky goodness and I cheated and used parmesan instead of pecorino. Whole eggs since the most Italian recipe I found was adminant that you don't need to a dd yolks. I got a bit too much pasta water in but it was still creamy and not curdled so I'll call that a win.
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Might be really good for North African preserved lemons
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10 hours ago, rotuts said:
Ive seen pans in commercial kitchens
w the blackness problem.
I wonder if commercial gas cooktops
leave a residue when cranked up ' high '
ie when more heat gets the dish done faster
but combustion , for some reason is incomplete
at those max outputs.
it might be easy to test :
turn a burner to its max setting , hold a pan over the burner , maybe a bitt avoce
an see what happens.
Actually you will get incomplete combustion at lower levels when the flame turns yellow. High heat will generally keep the flame blue and oxidizing unless you boil over and get water into the burner
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This seems like as good a thread as any. I took one for the team and ordered some duck wings and duck tongue at the Korean takeaway:
Not a lot of meat, lots of bones so I understand why the owner said they like to sit around eating these and drinking beer. They were ok but I probably won't be ordering them again.
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On 2/9/2023 at 3:41 PM, liuzhou said:
油浸烟熏牡蛎罐头 (yóu jìn yān xūn mǔ lì guàn tou), smoked oysters in oil with kelp slivers 海带丝 (hǎi dài sī).
A new addiction.
Those were a lunch staple when I was doing geology in northern Canada. But I would just eat them out of the tin by stabbing them with my sheath-knife. Here they often come in plastic vacuum packs. I think I have one in my fridge.
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3 hours ago, KennethT said:
Did you season your Yixin teapot? Also, it's typical to only use that one pot for a single kind of tea. So, if you use it for oolongs, don't also use it for green or red teas, etc.
I believe you don't season tea pots - just use them and over time they become better - especially for unglazed pots. Rinse them out and call it good.
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7 hours ago, eugenep said:
Recently, I broke my $200 special clay teapot. It kinda looks like the pic below but much better looking. It happened in like 5 seconds when I dropped it in the sink and it was crushing. I got a cheaper one for $33 from amazon that should come in the mail today. I don't want to get another one and break that too.
Sorry you broke your special pot, but thank you for supporting potters by doing so
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8 hours ago, Kim Shook said:
The "L" in salmon bugs me, too. As does a friend's pronunciation of "almond" - she says the "al" as in the man's name "Al' and then "mond".
I was at a wedding in California where the bride's uncle told me he was an Amon farmer, then translated, "You would say almond." I told him, "You grow them, you get to decide how to say it."
eta: If I remember correctly, he used a hard A
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First greenbean harvest. Not sure what has been eating them - only on a few beans. I cut a couple open and didn't see anything moving so only composted the worst ones. The rest had the everloving heck fried out of them with slivered almonds toasted at the tail end.
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For sharpening with less fuss, I think the Spyderco Sharpmaker does a decent job. As a bonus I have been using light strokes on the fine rods for honing
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Absurdly, stupidly basic cooking questions (Part 2)
in Food Traditions & Culture
Posted
Someone on here (@andiesenji?) has a whole hedge. I wouldn't worry about them getting too big. They sucker so just chop off anything that gets too big. They also grow slowly, at least to start - took forever to get mine big enough to plant in the ground. A wattle fell over and took most of mine out a few years ago but I'm back to way more than I need.