KennethT

That's fantastic. Once I get my current plants into their permanent home, I'm going to either plant some ginger, or more likely some galangal. Ginger is pretty cheap and easily available, but galangal is a lot more expensive and I have to get a ton of it so I wind up freezing a bunch, but I've never been happy using it once frozen. Also, once we're completely settled (that'll be a few months) I'm planning on building an ornamental plant wall, and either plant some heliconia psittacorum (they're in the ginger family but not edible but I love the look of their flowers) or some torch ginger which are pretty and edible.

here in Manhattan, NYC, we have great water, but for my plants I need to get rid of the chlorine. I use a hydrologic small boy - it's a dual stage filter that removes sediment and chlorine as well as a bunch of other stuff. It's working well so far. https://www.hydrologicsystems.com/collections/dechlorinators/products/small-boy

and medieval torture devices. The plant of a thousand papercuts (plus a bit of sticky resin). It makes me wonder about an experience I had in Thailand years ago. My wife and I were offered free foot massages from our hotel. The first thing they did was wash our feet with a broth of lemongrass, galangal and kaffir lime leaves, scrubbing our feet with lemongrass leaves scrunched up like a sponge. I don't remember getting papercuts on my feet - it actually felt really good, and smelled good enough to drink (until my feet got in there!)

I just finished repotting my lemongrass plant. 1 small plant wound up completely filling a 1 gallon fabric pot - it was completely root bound. I separated the plant into 3 plants - which was like wrestling a tiger made out of razors - I've got small paper cuts all over my arms! Now, the 3 plants are in a 3 gallon pot - I really need to get back into cooking just to use some of this - it's growing faster than I can use it!

That's a BIG jar of capers!

I live in what is arguably one of the most culturally diverse, high quality food neighborhoods in NYC, possibly the US and maybe the world - NYC's East Village. Within a few blocks of me is a decent representation of food from almost any country (or region) you can think of, all of whom will deliver to my door (actually, the front desk in the lobby due to covid restrictions). With that being said, after roughly 6 weeks of eating almost nothing made by my own 2 hands aside from a salad (due to packing/moving/unpacking/and rehabbing the old place so I can get as much of the security deposit back as is possible after living in a place for 15 years), I was so happy last night to finally make a homemade dinner - and one I've been especially jonesing for - a Nyonya chicken curry called Ayam Buah Keluak - chicken in black nut curry. Well, sort of - I have no access to the keluak (the black nuts) that I'm aware of, and I certainly don't yet have the week it requires to process the keluak so it's not poisonous. The curry has no coconut milk - it's made with water or stock, and a paste made from the SE Asian kitchen sink - lemongrass, galangal, chillies, curry leaves, shallots, candlenuts, tamarind just being the beginning and one of the dominant flavors - shrimp paste, called belacan (pronounced bla-chen) in Malaysia/Indonesia. I make a large batch of the rempah (the spice paste) since it's time consuming, then portion and freeze - I usually get about 8-9 meals for 2 out of 1 batch of rempah, and had 2 meals worth left in the freezer. I also don't have the new kitchen fully set up yet - there are still boxes everywhere, as well as a partially assembled kitchen cart (thank you Wayfair for sending 2 of one piece and 0 of another) so it took twice as long to make as normal, but I am already loving being in this kitchen. I don't even have my induction hobs yet (there's no gas service in this building), but I did get a 15,000BTU butane powered camping stove that I used for the first time last night. Holy crap that thing is powerful! It is a lot more powerful than the largest burner in my old apartment. Most of the time I had it barely on to keep a perfect simmer, but was able to crank it up when stir frying the veggies in my carbon steel wok.

I've never used the fruit - from what I am to understand, there's very little juice in a kaffir lime, and what juice there is is very bitter. But the zest and sometimes even the rind are a common ingredient in curry pastes. I am growing my tree for the leaves, but it started flowering a while ago (the flowers smell amazing) and while I pinched 99% of the flowers to stimulate more leaf growth, I let one flower stay on just out of curiosity. I've seen kaffir limes sold in the Thai store, but they're always pretty old so I had no idea what a really fresh one was like.

For those with kaffir lime growing experience, how do you know when the limes are ready to pick? Also, once ripe, for how long will they stay good on the tree?

Is there a flavor difference or a reason to use the pale garlic chives as opposed to the normal ones?

Where do you get the andouille and tasso to make the jambalaya?

Fascinating - I've never seen a matzoh like that. I'm no baker so I can't answer your question but I'm sure there are others here who are very knowledgeable...

Welcome! There are quite a few of us here from NYC...

Did you ever have the dumplings at Lan Zhou Hand Pulled Noodles (they were on Bowery)? They were some of the best I'd ever had (their hand pulled noodles were good too, but those dumplings...) and they also sold them frozen 50 for $10.... I'm sure the quality of the pork wasn't the best, but they were so tasty, I'd never know.... I miss them.

This got me thinking - I have his "A Return to Cooking" or some title like that - I used to love that book - commonly with dressings at that time, he'd use 1/2 evoo and 1/2 canola - at the time he said that canola was neutral and thinner in viscosity than the evoo, so he used half and half to get the evoo flavor but used the canola to thin it a bit. That's all I remember him saying about canola at that time. That book is currently buried among the packing boxes, so I don't think I could dig it out to look it up right now if I had wanted to!

oh yeah, I used to get it at the old Essex market on the off chance I could get down there. Great quality and much cheaper than almost anywhere else... probably because of the large Latino clientele. I was wondering how the prices have changed since the Essex market moved into their new (and fancy) digs.

I get my peanut oil in either chinatown or koreatown... those peanut oils are really peanutty, a lot less expensive than the mainstream supermarket brands, and come in gallon jugs which I like because I use it for deep frying.

Sorry this is so late, but I love cilantro stems. they keep much better than the leaves. I've had them stay good when wrapped well in the crisper drawer of the fridge for like a month. I use them a lot in SE Asian dishes where I want a brightness - typically, I'll cut them into a fine dice then turn it into a paste in the mortar... But if you're going to keep them that long, make sure to get rid of ALL the leaves (I just cut the tops of the whole bunch off with the knife) because as they turn they stink and will infect the whole bag with that rotten cilantro smell. Yes, cilantro is tough to keep - but I've also noticed that most sellers (near me at least) are selling them when they're already on their last legs - so it doesn't last much longer. If I need to keep them, I'll put the bunch in a glass with an inch or two of water in the bottom and put in the fridge like flowers in a vase, then loosely drape the grocery plastic bag over the top. I get a bit more life out of them that way. Once I am done cleaning out the old apartment I am looking forward to planting some cilantro here in teh new one - this apartment is mostly north facing so shouldn't get direct sun whose heat will make the cilantro bolt faster than you can turn around.

But I, too, have never found a canola oil that didn't have that fishy smell - especially when used in cooking (rather than raw like in salad dressings). Maybe every purveyor of canola that I've tried has old stock? For my high heat cooking I use peanut oil (if I want that peanut flavor) or grapeseed oil which has a high smoke point and is completely neutral. And, in my neck of the woods, is a lot less expensive than rice bran oil.

while I keep certain oils in the fridge - namely sesame oil because it's expensive and goes rancid easily and any created oils - like a garlic or shallot oil made from frying garlic (or shallot) in the oil, but otherwise, they're kept in the cupboard pantry - even though my kitchen, too, is kinda warm. I find that cold oil is hard to use - I wind up putting a lot more in the pan than I would have meant to, and a large bottle takes a long time to warm up slightly so it's less viscous.

How do you make the honey lacquered duck breast? Do you have one of the few ovens in a Chinese residence or was it picked up from the supermarket?

Something I thought interesting is that when I was in Saigon, I saw almost no cilantro being used (lots of sawtooth coriander though) EXCEPT in banh mi.

Incubus! Blast from the past!

I, also, am not overly fond of the stem-less glasses. I like to swirl it in the glass (one of my favorite things about wine is the smell of it) and I can't do it as easily in the stemless glass.. maybe I just need more practice?

Many years ago I remember reading that a company was developing a food wrap made from chitin (the same stuff of insect exoskeletons) but I hadn't seen anything about it since then.

@FranciI've read that Meyer lemon trees are easier to grow than the standard lemon.