KennethT

I'm curious as to the rice paddy eels (and other rice paddy aquatic animals). Are they farmed or wild? By this I mean, are the paddies stocked with baby eels or do they get there naturally? If naturally, how do they get there? Where do they go when the paddy is drained?

@scamhi Yes, Silky Kitchen. I haven't been there since pre-pandemic, but I enjoyed it when I was there. Also, their dumplings are fantastic, but I don't know how they would travel - the skins are thin and delicate. Every time I was there, it was packed with Chinese NYU students. I haven't tried Hunan slurp yet but am curious.

there's a hunan restaurant right around the corner from my new apartment. It's a family run place who come from Hunan province and their dishes are really spicy. Most of the staff speak somewhat broken English, but they try and are very nice... the first time I was in there, I ordered my noodles the normal spicy, and the young woman behind the counter got a horrified look on her face and begged me to get it "medium". I finally relented and I was glad I did - the medium almost blew my head off. Filled with tons of chopped fresh chilli that definitely were not a standard US chilli or a thai chilli which are the common ones here.... but it was really tasty...

Cheapest thing you can do for that is fluorescent lights... for a small # of plants you can use a CFL (compact fluorescent) using one of those clamp-on fixtures. If you need more space, use a 4' shop-light or something like that. Stay away from bulbs labeled "soft white" or anything like that which will have more red in the spectrum - for CFLs, they make "daylight" spectrum bulbs which are good, otherwise a cool white will be good because it has lots of blue which will keep plants more compact and keep them from getting leggy. The LED grow lights on Amazon are ok but will be a lot more expensive than a fluorescent for the equivalent amount of brightness. Yes, they're more energy efficient, but that won't make a difference for 1 or 2 lights... it makes a big difference when you're lighting up a warehouse.

Glad to see you didn't burn the crap out of yourself while making that chile sauce - it looks remarkably like the one that attacked me!

Yeah - the trunk was about 1-1/2 inches in diameter and woody.

Probably over a year. And, it was constantly heavily pruned at least once a week!

Time to change out the basil plant!!!

I pretty much have to if I do use an induction burner. My parents used to have the coil top electric burners and I hated cooking on it. Then they got the sealed infrared burners and I wasn't a fan either. I love cooking on gas and have done so for the last 20 years or so but it's not an option in the new apartment except for that I'm planning on getting a portable butane gas burner - but that's really just to have a cheap burner around on the off chance I need 3, or if I want to use a specific All Clad pan that I didn't get rid of.

My All Clad is not magnetic - anodized aluminum exterior bonded to an aluminum core bonded to a stainless interior.

what did you use for bread?

Exactly. In our new apartment that we're renovating from the ground up and designing the kitchen, we decided not to get a built in oven or range. It's only 2 of us, and the most number of people we'd have over would be like 2 people, so we'll never need more oven than our countertop CSO can handle. Plus, there's a nice deep corner that it will fit in that couldn't be used for much else. Instead of a normal oven, we put extra cabinet space.

Unfortunately no - we haven't started packing the kitchen yet... they're just gone. I don't think the place was called Shabu Shabu - but they also had that on the menu.

This is killing me. I've been thinking about this ever since I posted this and I still can't remember the place's name. Sad because we used to go there maybe once a month - they had a really good sake list also. It was maybe 15 years ago. I just spent the last few minutes googling and I still couldn't find it. One year around New Years they gave us a couple sets of nice chopsticks as a gift as we were leaving - we'd been using them at home up until pretty recently when they somehow got lost.

In about a month, I'm moving and will be transitioning from gas to induction (the apt building has no gas service). What pans do you use that give you the performance you like? I can't use most of my current pans (15 year old All Clad LTD).

I love sukiyaki but havent had it for years. There used to be a branch of a chain from Japan that specialized in it in my neighborhood but they closed several years ago. Haven't had it since....

Personally, in a kitchen with very little real estate, I like the flexibility of being able to do something else in that space if needed if I'm not using the cooktops.

I agree with this, but I would put in one caveat - the early immigrants into NYC at the end of the 19th century were predominantly from southern Italy where tomatoes are abundant so this has skewed our traditional notion of Italian food. But much of northern/central Italian food has very little tomato product in it so nowadays, as travel and expanded immigration have opened the rest of the world to us, many in NYC no longer consider tomato products as essential in Italian cooking.

Bumping this old thread - has anyone used this competitor to Edge Pro? https://wasabi-knives.com/collections/accessories

I like this idea but I wonder how it will impact cooking - like shaking a pan, sauteing etc... those silicone mats are pretty grippy

I agree - I've been there on 3 different trips and the 4th (to the Delta area) was originally planned to be during this past December... It's one of my favorite countries to visit... oh well...

🤩🤩🤩 Wow!!! Now I'm totally jealous! That's why I grow my own... once we move, I'll get started growing a chilli plant....

Might I suggest a few things about the summer rolls? While it varies from region to region in Vietnam, I really like a classic Southern style lime juice, raw garlic, fish sauce, sugar, black pepper, chilli dipping sauce. Some places in Central vietnam would make a dipping sauce basically of raw garlic and fish sauce. Others were just fish sauce and black pepper. I also like to add some vermicelli rice noodles to the summer rolls (which is quite common) and also a bunch of herbs. In Saigon, the best summer rolls I had had a whole bunch of herbs tucked in there... thai basil, rau ram (aka laksa leaf), garlic chives, sawtooth coriander, mint...

I can't stand gefilte fish... My mother doesn't like it either, but my father would go to town on them, even the ones out of the glass jar. Doesn't really make me an outcast though...

Wow! I never liked the hamantaschen in Hebrew school (store bought) but yours look great!