KennethT

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...

Have you checked the bedroom?

That's a wildly (get it!) reported issue/problem. I don't know if they have plans to do anything about it.

I'm not familiar with the Big Mac, but personally, I'd put the pressure reducer after your RO system and before the Big Mac. You could also put a check valve before the RO system to keep anything from getting back to your cold water supply.

It's everywhere. I see it in my business, and I hear it when I talk with both my suppliers and my customers. When my wife and I were in Indonesia last month, we wound up chatting with a German couple - the man was saying the exact same things about his business and what he hears from his suppliers and customers as well.

This is really sad, but not uncommon. Practically all businesses worldwide are facing similar issues.

Dabu dabu is a sambal originating from North Sulawesi, Indonesia, and is one of the few "raw" Indonesian sambals. The only other one I can think of is sambal matah, from Bali. It's funny, I've heard that sambal dabu dabu is popular all over Indonesia, but I didn't realize it made into Malaysia as well. There are a few areas in Sarawak that are on our list of destinations but we haven't made it there yet. In any case, the traditional dabu dabu is pretty simple - green and red tomatoes (they should be unripe and a little sour), shallots and a LOT of chillies. Everything is chopped (that's what dabu dabu means) and then a little bit of hot oil is poured over the top - not enough to cook it but to bring out the flavors. I used a combination of coconut oil and rice bran oil. The Minahasa people (those who live in North Sulawesi) pride themselves on having the spiciest food in Indonesia. One time I had this while we were in Manado and I could barely eat it, it was so spicy. This mango version is very non-traditional - I never saw mango anywhere near a dabu dabu while there, but we like it so I add it anyway. I used 5 long red chillies (my local store calls them Holland chillies or something like that, but they're similar to a prik chee faa in Thailand) that were deseeded and mostly deveined, plus 2 Thai chillies, 3 plum tomatoes (I can't get green tomatoes here), 2 shallots and 1.5 Ataulfo mangoes (one of the mangoes was only half good).

Barramundi with mango dabu dabu.

I like the Key West wild shrimp, but I'm an even bigger fan of the Argentian red shrimp. I'm curious what you think of their smoked salmon and gravlax once you have them. I'm assuming the smoked salmon is cold smoked, not hot smoked, right? Once you defrost them, how long do they recommend they'll keep in the refrigerator? Although, to be honest, it's been so long since I've bought smoked salmon or gravlax that I don't know how how long those would last either.

I don't know if making the roux would be that much of a non-starter, but to me, much more complicated would be making the ingredients that most people down there buy at the market - yes, andouille as posted above, but also sourcing tasso ham (a highly seasoned and smoked ham mostly used as a seasoning agent than a protein) as well as a good hot sauce, like Crystal. I know there are Tabasco lovers out there but as one of my favorite jambalaya joints used to do, they kept their stash of Crystal behind the bar for people that asked for it, even though the bar was seemingly sponsored by Tabasco with their neon signs all over the place.

I wouldn't be surprised if Citarella had grouper, but I'm sure it would be a lot more expensive than WF and it's a bit out of my way to go there on a regular basis. Plus, I like having everything frozen - it gives me more flexibility. Sometimes I wind up getting home from work later than I originally expected so we wind up ordering in otherwise we'd be eating and cleaning up at bed time. Buying it "fresh" (possibly previously frozen) means it needs to be used ASAP so it gives me less leeway.

I was (and still am!) exhausted after taking a long walk this afternoon, so it was fortuitous that Jamrock Jerk happened to be in our neighborhood and we passed it by. You could smell the smoke a block away!

Is O'Brycky's (sp?) still around?

I haven't grown any rhizome myself yet, but supposedly you can do either - harvest the whole thing and save a seed piece to replant or just break a piece of the rhizome off and let the rest keep growing.

I love their grouper and order it often. I can't get it here any other way.

They're not bulbs, they're rhizomes - like ginger. So yes, as the plant grows, the rhizome will extend, making more rhizome. If you think of a big clump of ginger from the grocery store, it kind of looks like a hand - each finger is new growth with one piece of it being the original "seed".

I leave mine in the bag and let it sublimate. CO2 is heavier than air so whatever gas escapes will sink to the floor. As long as there is some kind of decent ventilation, it's fine.

A quick update about some recent projects.... Actually found some decent looking grocery store mint and Thai basil, so those are now in the rooting process.... Also saw some good looking turmeric that I'll try to sprout. Not that I want to grow it for the rhizome, but more for the fresh turmeric leaves which are used in a lot of Indonesian/Malaysian/Nyonya preparations and are impossible to find here. I just noticed a kaffir lime that has escaped my sight. I usually try to pinch off the flowers as I grow for the leaves but this one must have been hiding. Since it's already gotten to this stage, I guess I'll let it go to maturity... the question is what to do with it? The only thing I know to do with it is use the zest in making Thai curry pastes from scratch (no other country's pastes use it as far as I know) but I almost never make Thai curry pastes from scratch.... Maybe I'll just wind up giving it away.