KennethT

Breakfast is served about 7-8 hours after dinner (there's always a wide variety of snacks available in the back - but sadly no sambal ikan bilis buns). Stir fried chicken in oyster sauce with noodles - these noodles also have some cabbage and shiitake mushrooms hiding. I ordered this in advance off the "inflight menu" My wife got: Pork congee

It varies depending on your flight's point of origin. From NY, there aren't that many selections from the book the cook service - maybe 7? Ranging from several western choices to Asian stuff. For flights originating from SG, there are a ridiculous # of choices - maybe 15 or so? This is in addition to the choices available on the "inflight menu". You can order from book the cook maybe 3 months before your flight (I think) but about 3 weeks before you can also view the inflight menu and make your choices from both. I don't know if you can look at the full menu online, but if you go to Singapore Airlines website you can find out a lot more detail.

Singapore Airlines JFK-SIN non stop, premium economy (there's no coach on this flight) - we took off not long ago - around 10:30PM NY time. My wife and I both got their "book the cook" where you can order in advance.... "Braised E-fu noodles with chicken". Very tasty - surprisingly, the Chinese broccoli was nicely cooked and the noodles were not mushy. The salad at top left is a cold shrimp, baby greens with capers and lemon. Dessert is a bread pudding in a nice caramel sauce. My wife got a steamed chicken with dried lily flower. If you didn't order in advance, your choices were either Thai red curry chicken with rice or braised beef in red wine sauce with potatoes.

Green or green-ish tomatoes are used quite a bit in Indonesia as a sour component. It is raw (but with a bit of hot oil poured on top) in sambals like dabu dabu from Manado in Sulawesi, and other times cooked down to a puree in stews.

what are teh sauces that came with the branzino?

Thanks for doing this on such an eventful trip!! Your flight must have been REALLY close for Sing Air and the Singapore Airport to delay your bags - both that airline and airport are the most efficient I've ever seen. We use them all the time going to SE Asia as they have a direct flight from NY to Singapore - which I'm looking forward to in a couple days - to Indonesia. I hope we can find as good looking mangoes as you seem to have had. How were they? Were they very sweet? We've had some that looked like that and were very ripe and juicy but were completely flavorless. I've seen the fried brown cakes in your last market visit as well when we were in North Sulawesi - over there they were made with palm sugar and had a nice spiced flavor - mostly cinnamon and some clove. Very nice on seeing the proboscis monkeys! I hope we see them when we're in Sabah come Christmas time. In addition to being in Kota Kinabalu for a few days (primarily for scuba diving), we'll then head to the east side of Sabah to Sepilok and the Orangutan and sun bear rehabilitation and conservation centers. There's also a proboscis monkey sanctuary in the area so we're hoping to be able to see them all.

This is the link to how I learned - https://hot-thai-kitchen.com/pad-see-ew-new/ I've found that most of her instructions are well thought out and lead to good results. ETA: She has this broader topic: https://hot-thai-kitchen.com/rice-noodles-101/ which covers how to cook most rice noodle types.

Wow! Everything looks great! What kind of noodles are you using? Are they dried or fresh? Usually sticking is because the noodles are too wet, regardless of wok seasoning....

Of course! But rather than geckos which I think are desert lizards, I'd need the tropical kind - like a monitor lizard, but they can get really big and I don't think I'd want it snuggling in bed with us.

That is hilarious!!!! Although maybe not that far off in the future. I'd like to build a living plant wall on one 14 foot high wall of the living room, complete with small waterfalls. I figured it would be nice to have a couple tropical birds in there too, but I don't think my wife would go for them!

A while ago, @Senior Sea Kayaker asked for a photo of my indoor garden. Sorry for the delay - I've been moving things around in anticipation of going away next week. Finally got it together.... Left to right-ish: curry leaf tree, mint (heavily pruned), rau ram, lemongrass (in the back), turmeric (I just used some leaves), kencur, kaffir lime, and sawtooth coriander.

Both. They have blocks that are ready to slice and presliced. I prefer the unsliced as we like our sashimi a bit thicker than their standard thickness. Last night, they only had 1 block of unsliced yellowtail so we settled for one presliced. Their fish quality is very good with a great price. The NZ King salmon is like fish butter.

Wegmans sashimi - yellowtail, New Zealand King salmon and yellowfin tuna

Not necessarily true - years ago, I was looking into growing wasabi hydroponically indoors and I found a few already doing it in the US. So those are true wasabi root not grown in Japan. I don't remember the company names though - but I do remember that they either only or primarily sold to restaurants.

Ah! That makes sense. It's funny, when I was reading your post, the first thing I thought of was miang kum, which we had in Chiang Mai (where it originates) and it was amazing - but even better is the sweet/salty sauce it comes with which is thick palm sugar syrup with shirmp paste, dried shrimp, galangal, etc. I think a drop or two on top of what you've got would be fantastic, although it makes it a bit more work to make the sauce.

Is anyone else concerned about bacterial buildup in the center of the roast while cooking for that amount of time? When you have a large roast, it would probably take more than 4 hours for the center to get out of the danger zone. It would spend a long time in the "bacterial multiplying like crazy zone" - around body temperature. I'd be curious about everyone's thoughts about this - I haven't done much SV for quite a while but I do remember this being a concern.

These look amazing, but I"m sure I'm not the first to think that you'd never see this in a night market in Thailand or anywhere else in SE Asia - I've never seen raw fish served anywhere, which would be obvious when you see the fish markets and all the fish laying around in 90 degree heat! The usual cooking method for fish is "cook the crap out of it to make sure everything is dead".

Is that albacore tuna?

I like @Senior Sea Kayaker's idea. I was actually thinking that if you had a good homemade chicken stock, you could brown the ground beef well and then deglaze and simmer in the chicken stock. That should add the browned, beefy dimension to the pregelatinized stock.

Ground beef may get decent flavor but it will be short on the collagen/gelatin you'd get from bones/connective tissue. Making stock in a pressure cooker makes it go much faster but doesn't really help with the time to brown which is important for a good beef stock. I've used the BTB beef stock and it's pretty good. If you don't use much, I think it's a good alternative to making your own unless you have tons of time.

According to the website, the only ingredient is "shrimp". there's definitely no salt added, but I don't remember if there was any stp added. I defrost in water and then rinse several times and give a final gentle squeeze at the end. I've never noticed any off flavor and I love their texture.

I get IQF Argentinian red shrimp from Wild Fork Foods online.

Many years ago, we used to go to Lupa maybe once a month or so... back then, we felt the best thing to do was to order some salumi (especially their house made stuff like the head cheese) and some pasta/appetizer. Every time we decided to try a secondi, we regretted it. We actually felt exactly the same way when we would go to Esca. But then again, back then, prices were significantly less than what they are now - at these prices, it would be hard for me to justify the price/value proposition. But how was the Bitter End? I used to go there a couple times a month back in the days that we used to play gigs at other spots on that stretch of Bleecker and I'm happy to see it's still open.

This has become a big deal in NYC too. This weekend, we walked past a place with this and they had a line around the block.

We really enjoyed the donkey burger in Beijing. Very crispy bread with tender meat. I could make this a regular thing if it was around here.