KennethT

I actually had this dish at EMP when they first transitioned to a fine dining restaurant... but they made it with crab...

I don't think I've ever used garlic powder. But I've always liked using the sauteed garlic - it gives a nice, mild garlic aroma and flavor... and yes, I meant just sweating a bit... it's an extra step and a bit more work, but I always thought it was worth it.

I'm frustrated... I spent the better part of the day working on my A/C unit, trying to keep it from venting the tent air outside... several hours, a half roll of duct tape, and two bloodied knuckles later, it's still venting -albeit slightly more slowly... tomorrow I'll get back at it to see where else the air can be slipping through....

I love pruning my lime tree because I always get a flush of this a few days later:

Until I read this post, I didn't realize Driscoll's was international... I knew that they spanned the US - but had no idea of their sales elsewhere... Good to know that we in the US aren't the only ones shortchanged by Driscoll's crappy fruit...

I usually briefky saute aromatics like garlic, ginger and onion before adding to the bag. Their flavor release is better once they've been softened a bit.

I loves me some conch fritters!

Leaving this mass of steel in your oven is a huge waste of energy and time as it will take much longer to preheat your oven any time you use it.

This is part of my fascination with controlled environment agriculture. Yes, it's bound to be more expensive than farming on inexpensive land in more remote areas, but I can grow much more per square foot - maybe 5-6x the yield per square foot, and use about 1/10th of the water doing it as it as all recycled. Also, I don't need to use chemical pesticides - whatever small amount of pests I may get I can handle effectively using Integrated Pest Management - which is basically using predatory bugs to eat the bad ones. My crops are also less affected by disease, and there is almost no risk of E. Coli poisoning or other diseases that hit the cilantro used by Chipotle, for instance, and got many people sick. Also, I can have crops turning year round - I can have the full output when it's freezing cold or burning hot outside - neither affects me. Finally, I can do it in urban areas close to (or surrounded by) my market, so transportation costs (and its effect on the environment) are essentially negligible. It doesn't make sense to do this type of ag for field crops such as wheat or corn, but for higher value crops like arugula, herbs, tomatoes, etc. I think it is definitely feasible.

For those of you following along with my controlled environment saga, I opened up the A/C and it looks promising that I will be able to solve my problem. I neglected to mention that I got this A/C on Ebay, remanufactured - for about half the price of a new one, shipping included - which is saying something since the box it came in weighed 96 pounds, so the shipping costs are not so trivial.... Anyway, in the remanufacturing process, both the evaporator and condenser coils look great and brand new, as does the compressor motor itself - but the foam that seals off the area is either slightly damaged or missing entirely.... a short trip to the home depot should relatively short work of fixing my airflow problems, I assume.... until I try it and find that I have created more problems.... ha!

Right - this model supposedly uses the condensate to help cool the compressor, and even though it has a drain plug, according to the manual, unless it's being used in extremely high humidity, it should evaporate all the condensate and vent it out of the exhaust tube... I checked it out - it only seems like 6 screws are holding the case together - I'm going to take it apart this weekend... shouldn't be a big deal to play around with....

Yep, I definitely got plants from Laurel in the past... nothing but good things to say...

@shainGreat photos... what are they?

It's a Whynter ARC-12SD... I took a quick look inside when I removed the filter, but I think in order to completely seal off the compressor/evaporator areas, it's going to take a bit more than duct tape. If I get some time this weekend, I'll open up the cover completely and see what I see... In truth, I'm probably going to have to hack the control board anyway since my test crop, alpine strawberries, seem to like a nighttime temo of 50 to 55 degF, but the firmware of the A/C only lets it get to 61, and in practice, I find it actually turns off around 62.5...

They definitely look like wafer cones, and are very different from tuiles. A long time ago, I had wanted to do something similar, and in my research, it seemed that the wafer cones are made in an industrial type process - I don't think it's possible to do at home. Nothing that I've seen comes up with that "styrofoam" type texture....

Thanks for your thoughts. When the A/C fan only is running (even high speed), there is no problem... only when the compressor turns on. Also, I checked the flow at both inflow and exhaust tubes... the exhaust outflow is much stronger than what's coming in from the inflow. I was thinking about adding some smoke to the inside of the tent to see if it was vented out, but the A/C has a filter which I wonder will filter it out so I won't see it anyway. Plus, the negative pressure is EXTREMELY strong - all 4 walls and ceiling are sucked in...

I've been rethinking this statement... I received my portable A/C unit - first of all, the thing is huge - it takes up about a third of the tent! It's the smallest "dual hose" portable A/C I could get... I wanted a dual hose version since, supposedly, it wouldn't vent much of my tent's air to cool the compressor - it uses an intake hose, which takes air from the outside, so it shouldn't create a negative pressure situation. Oh well.... a few seconds after the compressor turns on, you can see the walls of the tent being sucked in - there is certainly negative pressure inside that tent! More quantitatively, I ran a test - last weekend, the humidity in the apartment was a bone drying 11%.... So, I made an ultrasonic humidifier for the tent, and controlled it to keep a constant humidity in the tent between 60 and 70%, which at 75degF would create a perfect amount of VPD (vapor pressure deficit) in the plants. When the A/C turned on, the humidity in the tent dropped to about 30% within 2 minutes - obviously, this was not caused by the dehumidification that A/Cs do, but rather, the influx of dry, 11% humidity apartment air into my tent.... A few minutes later, when the A/C turned off again, it took the system about 10 minutes to get back up to the proper humidity, at which time it was about the time for the A/C to turn on again!!! My biggest concern is actually not with the humidity, however, but CO2... since I'm going to be enriching the tent with CO2 to make the plants grow faster and utilize all the light they are receiving, every time the A/C turns on, it will be venting my CO2 out into the apartment... which is both a waste of CO2, and not desirable since I'd rather not live in a heavily elevated CO2 level... not that that level would get to the point that it is dangerous or uncomfortable, but still.... MacGyver is back on the job... waiting for a few more parts to come in tomorrow... pics to follow.....

I also read The Martian, and enjoyed it quite a bit - but I kept wondering why he didn't grow his crops hydroponically - after all, it was NASA who did much of the development work on the subject many years ago, precisely for trying to develop ways to economically grow vegetables in space. But, the reason he didn't do it is because he probably didn't have all the various nutrients he'd need for a well balanced hydro system - because they weren't planning on living on Mars for that long... their mission was only for a few weeks, so it would be pointless to try to grow food since they'd be leaving by the time it was ready for harvest. But I wonder if they had a hydro garden on the Hermes, since they were living on it for a few years. I know all about the rain issues in SF... my wife just got back from a seminar in Napa - her inbound flight was delayed a few hours because of storms in SF, and it basically rained every day she was there! I kept joking how the weather was nicer here in NY than it was for her in SF....

They're everywhere here in Manhattan... I have 2, each within 2 blocks of my apartment (although 4 blocks apart from each other). While we have some new, good quality mexican places that are more authentic than Chipotle, Chipotle is cheaper - unless you want to go to the outer boroughs like parts of the Bronx, far away in Brooklyn.... then those Mexican places are really good, and cheap... but here in Manhattan, good and cheap are almost always mutually exclusive...

Where do they get Miso paste there? I've never heard of it being used outside of Japan or maybe Korea...

Yikes!!! After only 30 minutes with the light on, the inside temperature went from a stable 77.8degF (with computer and fan running) to 94.5degF!!! And that was not the temp after it had stabilized, it was still going up! Now I really don't think a peltier based A/C is going to cut the mustard....

@davebHilarious.... It's hard to tell if it's safe unless you know the real temperature of your refrigerator... this can vary based on how it's set, how many times you open/close it per day, where that beauty was located, etc....

Spaceship garden is coming along... Right now I'm testing how much the light increases temperature....

@Thanks for the Crepes - Actually, my wife loves and encourages it... she loves when I get my mad scientist thing going on... we're a little nutty...

You could make a "couples" tanning booth... it's roomy enough for 2!