KennethT

Bumping this thread... does anyone know of any casual but good places in Oamaru? We'll be spending our first lunch and dinner there, immediately after landing in Christchurch after 30 hours of flying and a few hours drive - so no long tasting menus.... We were thinking we'd pull in, grab something for lunch, then take a nap, get dinner then watch the blue penguins come in around sunset (around 9-9:30 this time of year) and go back to bed! We're looking for standard NZ fare - fish/chips, local lamb, venison, etc....

I was thinking about a cheap butane burner - but since we'll be flying internationally to get there (about 30 hours each way), I don't think I'll be able to bring a can of butane with me, and we have limited time on the ground so I wouldn't want to use a lot of time hunting for one. I had visions of a New Zealand rack of lamb (pre-sliced into chops) that I could grill on the engine, but after seeing a few videos of guys cooking steaks, I don't think I'll really get any browning - the exterior just looks kind of grey which isn't very appealing.

I figured as such and before posting did an "exhaustive search" - but my search skills are sorely lacking on this site...

In about a month, my wife and I will be traveling and will be doing some road trips (Southern hemisphere - so summer). One of the days of our travel will be Christmas day, when, chances are, no roadside cafes or stands will be open and we will be driving practically all day. The scenery is expected to be beautiful and I figure it would be a great time for a picnic. Originally I was thinking about getting some sliced meats or sausages and cheeses and bread and having a simple picnic, but it occurred to me that I've got a good source of waste heat going to, well, um, waste. If I bring some heavy duty foil, I figure we can make something quite nice while we enjoy our scenic drive. Has anyone done anything like this? If so, any help you can provide so I don't have to reinvent the wheel so to speak?

@Shelby What are mallards like? I'm sure I've never had one - the only ducks I've ever had were farmed. They look really small for ducks - since you can fit 2 on a CSO pan... and really lean!

Me three.

I've had fish/seafood on some flights in SE Asia and they've been quite good. I was surprised how good the calamari and shrimp dish that I had on Singapore Airlines (in Economy) was... both were perfectly cooked. In about a month, my wife and I will be heading to New Zealand, via Singapore - yes, it's really out of the way, but the flight was less than half the price of going via Air New Zealand. Singapore Airlines has a new thing - not only do flights leaving out of many airports have a "book the cook" where famous chefs design a meal - this makes like 8 choices, on top of the 3 choices for the standard inflight menu. You choose your dishes in advance - up to 2 days in advance or something like that. The last flight we did over teh summer we did that, but the problem was that we had no idea what the inflight menu would be... Now, you can choose between book teh cook and the inflight menu - they tell you those choices in advance as well... So that's like 11 choices for each meal, in Economy! (well technically it's Premium Economy, but on the direct flight from NY area to Singapore they only have Biz and PE).

minus the broccoli!!! They should have use chinese broccoli, which tastes nothign like regular broccoli (thankfully)... Also, a great combo with fresh peppercorns is grachai - sometimes translated as wild ginger or lesser ginger... doesn't really taste like ginger though. You can get it shredded and frozen... a little bit goes a long way - but the combo is magical!

I hadn't heard of Yat Lok. We went to Yung Kee based on @hzrt8w's recommendation here: He was really helpful in planning our trip at that time. Love the gratuitous goose shot btw...

When I was in Hong Kong, there was a very well known restaurant that is best known for their roast goose. They're a cantonese place so of course they also have the steamed fish and other roast meats, but that goose was to die for. We actually (inadvertently) went there twice! The prices of the cooked goose served in the restaurant was significantly less than what a whole raw goose costs here in NY...

Dimmers are not an issue - the lights I've been experimenting with are 24V DC, and I found a great driver which is dimmable by varying the resistance across 2 terminals - very easy for me to integrate into an automated control system, or just with a variable resistor. Are the 120V COBs dimmable? I'd assume not since the driver is built-in... I was planning on having the tree lit with different lights than the rest of my plants because the new apartment is a loft space, so I'd rather not have blinding lights on while we're sleeping! So if I was to give the tree 16 hours of light, I'd have the lights turn on around 6AM and turn off at 10PM which will coincide nicely with our normal schedule.

Thanks a lot! This is the current lime tree setup (recently pruned): I am sick of the purple light in the living room - hard to see during the day, but at night it's really annoying. For the new apartment, I've been experimenting with these for general ambient lighting: It's a quad row LED strip light about 2 feet long, attached to a 1.5"x2'x0.5" thick piece of aluminum to act as a heatsink. Each 2 foot section uses about 24W... I am testing 3 of these sections in my bedroom and the lighting is equivalent to a 300W halogen torch lamp but much more even and pleasant. I thought about using them as a plant light, but when I measured it with my PAR meter, the PPFD is only about 100 umol/m2/s at a distance of 18"... so even 2 of them wouldn't make enough light as a sole light source for the tree. One problem is that it has a beam angle of 180deg, so I'll try using an acrylic half round over it to see if I can get better results. I think my biggest problem is that I don't really know how much PPFD the lime tree really needs. There's tons of data about what other plants like lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, etc. need in terms of DLI (cumulative PPFD), but I can't find any for a dwarf lime tree, so in the absence of data, usually more light is better than less! Plus, if it's too much light (like you can get with lettuce which has low DLI requirements), you can always move the light further away which will dramatically decrease the intensity. I'm thinking that I may try to use one 150W COB per fixture (rather than the 2 that you have) - that will be less heat for the heatsink/fan to have to get rid of, and I can use two of them to distribute the light around the tree more evenly.

https://ny.eater.com/2019/5/29/18638988/kawi-momofuku-hudson-yards-david-chang-restaurant-review-eunjo-park

Are you guys going to try Kawi in Hudson Yards before you leave? I haven't been there (or anywhere in HY) but it's supposedly the best thing there...

I've been thinking about this... according to Modernist Cuisine, a lot of the aroma of grilled foods comes from fat dripping off the meat, hitting the hot coals beneath, vaporizing and rising up and settling on the meat. The Philips is smokeless because the heat source is not directly beneath the food, so whatever drips off lands in the drip tray, never to be vaporized. So by extension, this would mean that the grilled flavor is less pronounced on the Philips than on other grills. Do the users find this to be true or do you think the difference is negligible?

@dcarch Do you remember what the spectral output of the COBs you used were? I will be moving soon to a new apartment which doesn't get any direct sunlight (it's north facing) so I want to give my lime tree a lot more artificial light than I've been giving it for the last few years. Your COB devices seem to have worked really well so I figure I'd steal your idea... most COBs I see are labeled "warm white" or "cool white" which isn't really a spectral output but more of a red/blue ratio... I'd appreciate any help I can get so I don't have to reinvent the wheel. BTW - after using the lights for a year, are there any changes you'd make? Thanks!

I'd love to take you up on your offer (especially because I live just across town from the Javits), I'm going to have to be going to work a lot this weekend, which is out of the city... damn!

As one typically does...

The other night at a Hunan place - it's not like most Americanized Hunan, but straight from the region - the owners and all employees are from there and are proud to only serve Hunan food... Rice noodles with chicken. I first ordered it spicy, but the very nice young woman at the counter got a horrified look and said that no one would ever eat it that way. She convinced me to get medium, and I'm very glad because it was at the edge of what I could tolerate. Holy crap. Home made shrimp/pork/chive dumplings. These were amazing. Washed down with a hawberry drink.

Absolutely... I forgot about the chicken skin!! But my father always made them with lots of onions... because he loved onions...

My father would call onions cooked in chicken fat "gribenes"... I think I took several years off my life when eating it as a kid...

When I looked at the octopus dish quickly I thought it was a mouse!

I think the "t" in schmaltz comes from the Yiddish.... as well as the notion that schmaltz is associated with rendered chicken fat. There are some kosher restaurants in NYC (in the section that used to be almost exclusively Hassidic but is now more and more gentrified) that has a pitcher of schmaltz on every table - like maple syrup in a diner.

Very interesting - funnily enough, I've never really thought about this... I've always worried about the guy 2 seats over coughing up a lung which will then get recirculated over to me... Do you sanitize the arm rests before you sit down during the boarding process?

or Hotel California