KennethT

Just a note - grachai is fingerroot, not kaempferia...

I've grown basil for a long time (not recently though) - but I've found that it sprouts and grows with very little effort - I've never had to add heat to it, just room temp was fine in the past.

We got 4 of similar to your giant green one here last weekend - they were still hard. I put 3 in the "root cellar" and 1 on the counter to ripen. It was ready last night - it was amazing!

3 of my Indonesian chilli seeds have sprouted! These are from the cabai keriting - long, skinny and slightly curly and medium spicy with great flavor. Fingers crossed that I can get them to maturity...

It seems that I've been intermittent fasting (16-18 hours) every day for practically my entire life without even knowing about it! I only eat breakfast while on vacation and there's something worthwhile eating, otherwise I skip it. I do drink water and green tea (no milk or sugar). I have lunch around 1PM and dinner around 7 or 7:30PM so I'm usually done eating by 8 or 9PM at the latest if we have some popcorn while watching a movie. I find that once my body is used to it, I don't miss eating anything in the morning - I'm not hungry, I don't feel tired, don't need a snack, etc. BUT, if I go on vacation and eat breakfast for a week, once I come home, I find that I get starving around 9 or 10AM. So, to get back on track, I have a small snack when I become really hungry - enough to tide me over until lunch - usually a handful of cashews or something like that. The next day, I'll make sure I have the snack (if necessary) maybe a half hour later than the previous day, and so on until snack time coincides with lunch time, then I'm back on schedule and don't get hungry until around lunch time from then on.

Red chilli chicken tacos made with Padilla de Oaxaca, chipotle and puya chillies, fire roasted tomatoes, roasted garlic and red onion. Served with homemade guac, pickled shallots and shredded sawtooth coriander.

Finally had time to make some bison mapo tofu... With stir fried morning glory (we were in Chinatown yesterday)

Thanks. It completely skipped my mind that every region basically speaks their own language and that Bahasa is commonly almost a 2nd language.

so lado means chilli in Bahasa? I thought it was cabe or cabai?

My wife and I fell in love with Padang food while in Jakarta - it's really popular there. What I didn't realize was how labor intensive it was! The Padang restaurants should be charging a fortune! This weekend I had a bit of time so I decided to try to make one of my favorites, ayam balado - balado chicken. I don't know what balado means, if anything. I do know that Malaysia has something similar, they call belado. (Anything can be balado-ified - we saw potatoes balado, eggs balado, fried fish balado...) The chicken is first simmered in a watery broth of ground spices like ginger, garlic, turmeric, ground coriander, etc and then removed and drained. The chicken is then shallow fried in a lot of oil, then removed and drained. Then, in a little bit of the oil, some mashed red chillies (typically 2 or 3 kinds so it's not so spicy), shallots and tomato are stir fried in the oil, with some of the chicken simmering broth added midway through and then fried until dry at which time the chicken is then refried in the chilli mixture and then finally served!!! Just in case there's not enough flavor there, it's commonly served with one or two more sambal - either sambal merah (red sambal) or sambal ijo (green sambal). We were addicted to the sambal ijo and since I finally found (at least temporarily) a source of green tomatoes, I decided to try to make it also, even though I didn't have the right green chillies for it - but the ones I got were ok.

I just planted seeds for 2 different types of chillies that I brought back from Indonesia... fingers crossed that they sprout!

I haven't cooked a full meal in quite some time. It was nice getting into it again.... Malaysian chicken kapitan curry

They are fresh, hand pulled, wheat noodles. Sometimes called biang biang noodles...

I have the same issue but I'm finding that things are going in the right direction. As many Gen Z'ers are looking to reduce alcohol consumption (typically replaced with cannabis), there's been a big renaissance with non-alcoholic "spirits". I've had both a non-alcoholic whiskey and gin that were quite nice and in my neighborhood there's at least one fully non-alcoholic cocktail bar which I havent tried yet but am curious about. Who knows, maybe sometime soon, even "normal" restaurants will start to feature well made, interesting non-alcoholic cocktails that aren't fruit based.

A branch of a local chain, Xi'an Famous Foods, finally moved (back) to my neighborhood.... Rougiamo with lamb and lots of cumin and fennel seeds. Hand ripped noodles with pork. I love the flavor of their cumin lamb noodles (their specialty) but for some reason it always gives me indigestion.

I'm curious as to your findings. There was a period of time when ads for these rolling sharpeners were clogging my instagram feed. I was curious but never bought the bullet. I imagined that it would more hone than sharpen.

Where are you from? Many cultures use clay pots, so I'm curious.

Most US devices have a voltage range of 110-120V. Most of Mexico has 127Volts. So in order to avoid risking overvoltaging your device, you would need a reducer transformer. Typically, they reduce by 15 Volts, bringing the Mexico voltage to 112V which is within the range of your device.

I find that even non fuzzy rice cookers can do a good job with basmati, but you just need to add more water than normal rice, or jasmine rice. In order to properly lengthen and cook, basmati rice needs to be boiled prior to steaming, as opposed to jasmine rice which needs much less boiling. In many Indian restaurants, the rice is boiled in a large quantity of water and then drained, then left to steam for a while. You can duplicate this in a normla rice cooker by using a bit more water than normal, so the rice cooker will boil until the water's gone and then switch to steaming for the rest of the way. So, in my old crappy crockpot/rice cooker, when using 2 go of rice, for jasmine rice, I fill to the 2 mark and then just slightly over - about 2-1/4 to 2-3/8. For basmati, I fill to almost the 3 mark - so about 2-3/4 to 2-7/8 and it comes out consistently well.

No old wives tales or local folklore in Costa Rica?

When I was a kid, my father had a garden. Back then, mostly the available seeds were Burpee hybrids like Early Girl, etc. but the corn he grew was incredible - basically, we picked it a half hour before dinner time - I'd shuck it on the back patio and it would go immediately into some simmering salted water. There were a few times we'd pick it in the morning and let it sit until dinner time and it was not nearly as sweet. Those sugars converted to starch really fast! I basically can't eat corn nowadays - the memory spoiled it for me!

Capacitive moisture sensor

My turmeric plant just sent up a new shoot!

Yes, I'd use paper towels above and below and press lightly.

That's half the produce section of the market....