KennethT

I make gai lan all the time. No par boiling required. I do it with a couple of different sauces - either a Thai style or a regular Chinese-ish style. All of them have in common the fact that it's best to remove the leaves from the stalks. The leaves get kind of leathery when cooked for more than a few seconds, while the stems need a bit more time. I slice the stems on the bias about 1/4" thick or so. Large leaves I'll cut in half and leave in a pile. I always cook it with garlic - maybe 3-4 cloves? I'll start stir frying the sliced stalks and chopped garlic using medium heat. Once the stalks are mostly done ( you can watch the cross section to check progress) I'll dump the leaves on top, crank up the heat and throw on the sauce. Toss around till the leaves are mostly wilted (they'll continue on the plate) and the sauce is reduced. Sauce A) 1/4C water, 1/2 t salt, 1/3t MSG, 1/2t sugar, 2/3t chicken powder (mine isn't very salty). Sauce B) 2T soy sauce, 1T oyster sauce, 1/2T Golden Mountain sauce, 1T fish sauce, 1/2t sugar and maybe a dash of water I'll add some chopped Thai chilli to the garlic if using Sauce B.

also, check your dough hydration. I'm no pizza maker but I've read enough about it. Super high temp ovens need a different hydration than regular ovens even at max temp.

I made it - it was a byproduct frying shrimp heads to crispiness before going into an Indonesian sambal. I strain and refrigerate the oil. I've never seen it in a store - in fact, the only time I think I've ever seen it at all was as a menu option for pad thai in Bangkok.

I love shrimp head oil. My belacan vegetable from last night was fried in it!

Nyonya chicken curry with belacan bok choi.

Best surf 'n' turf ever.

A tasty abomination.... Teochew Bak Kut Teh with Argentine red shrimp and mung bean noodles!!!!!

Singapore Nyonya chicken in black nut curry, ayam buah keluak, with a fast acar (Nyonya pickles).

Went down to Chinatown to pick up some pantry items and stopped at Tasty Hand Pulled Noodle.... Pork dumpling soup with fat noodles (hiding). As usual the broth is practically unseasoned but remedied by copious soy sauce, some chilli oil and a splash of black vinegar. Stir fried knife peeled noodles with chicken.

So it turns out that my kencur that I brought home from Indonesia (and now all 6 have sprouted and are growing nicely) have anti-cancer properties!! https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-discover-that-a-southeast-asian-ginger-has-anti-cancer-properties/

Yunnan style bison with 5 herbs (3 from the garden)

Ha! Anyway, my research has been focused on indoor, controlled environment growing... this wouldn't work indoors.... hehe...

Thanks. Are the wires coated in any way? Like stranded wire with the plastic coating? Or is it solid wire?

Wow! Can you go into a bit more detail of what you did, wire wise?

Trying my hand at more south Indian food - trying to get close to that fish head curry meal we had in Singapore. Mahi mahi in slightly sour curry with roasted potatoes. Both made with my home grown curry leaves.

Fascinating. Kind of like a Viet/Thai hybrid. Those sausages definitely look Vietnamese... like nem. I'm glad the bread for the banh mi was good - to me, that's what makes it. Although from my research, they don't use rice flour in Vietnam - it's wheat flour with some kind of "dough improver" built in - some say it's like Vitamin C powder. I think the pale meat like substance is not a liver or chicken but a product in Vietnam called Chả lụa which is some kind of emulsified pork sausage. It's a common component of banh mi in Saigon (along with a few other meats). It's also a common addition to banh cuon: in the upper right.

@blue_dolphin Shiso (the green/red kind @liuzhou mentioned) is commonly used in Vietnamese food as well. In Vietnamese, it's called Tiá Tô. In Southern Vietnam, like Saigon, it's a common part of the bush of herbs served in every pho shop and with things like banh xeo.

I love daun salam (Indonesian bay leaf). It's very different than the standard Bay leaf. I can get the dried leaves pretty easily but fresh or frozen ones are impossible which is a shame because fresh and dried are quite a bit different. I've never seen the dried leaves used in Indonesia - always fresh but that's not surprising since it's tropical. I've been wanting to grow a daun salam tree but the starts are impossible to find in the US. Also, the seeds are more like a berry and must be planted fresh, so while seeds are available via Ebay and Etsy (shipped directly from Indonesia), I've heard that most of them are not viable and never sprout. It's also currently illegal to bring in either seeds or starts without a phytosanitary cert, which is hard to come by - they're typically only done for expensive houseplants where it pays to go through the effort and expense of the cert. I'll be back in Indonesia next summer - before then, I plan on writing to the US head of plant imports in Indonesia - maybe he can find a place willing to get a cert for a plant start that I can bring home?

Singapore style sambal grouper with cucumber salad. This is the last of my premade sambal 😥.... Time to make some more soon!!!

My eyes must deceive me - it looks like there's corn in that chicken dish!

@Sdogg Food/drinks taste different at altitude than they do on the ground. So the food might have been properly seasoned on the ground, but to taste the same at altitude, it needs to be aggressively seasoned. Some airlines' caterers adjust for this but evidently not all.

Medium plate chicken with some Shanghai bok choy. Shanxi noodles buried underneath.

This is not our typical lunch but I haven't had that much time to cook in the evenings after I get home from work lately, so.... Singapore Nyonya chicken curry using my homemade curry powder and home grown curry leaves and kaffir lime leaves. The smell of this dish took me back to walking around Penang, Malaysia (before we got sick, hehe). The combination of the fermented shrimp paste (belacan) and dried spices is just so Malaysian to me. And for all those Authenticity Police (not that there are any of them here that I know of) who would say, "hey, where are the pools of oil?" which is a trademark of a well made curry, I present, Exhibit B: At least a quarter cup of oil, skimmed from the surface prior to plating/serving.

Yes - I've also had a similar dish (made with mutton) in a Xinjiang restaurant in Beijing.

@liuzhou What do you think of this video? It shows this dish as done in a restaurant kitchen but even the ingredients are a little different...