For the fun of it, I got a quarter cabbage to experiment with last week. I cooked one
breakfast on Saturday, but there's plenty left. OK, I have established that there's a
continuum of cabbage dishes, from that one (包菜炒粉/麵, “cabbage fried rice noodles”) via手
撕包菜 (“hand-torn cabbage”) all the way to phat si-io (pad see ew, “fried soya sauce”). How about a bit of an
experiment? Hand-tear the cabbage as intended, but use different noodles (Guan miao) and the sauce for phat
si-io. The ingredients are similar:
The result? Edible, but not ideal. Guan miao isn't appropriate: I need noodles that absorb
more liquid. As it was there was too much juice. I had added some tauge when I saw it happeneing, but it wasn't
enough:
In addition the cabbage was too coarse and too thick, making it tough, and the result was
too sweet. In Phat si-io the cabbage is cooked at a high temperature, caramelizing the
result, but that didn't happen here. too sweet
Independently of all that I had put in 5 whole grains of Szechuan pepper, which proved to be
(just) more than enough. I need to experiment more with Szechuan pepper.
I'm still not sure if that's a good place, but it's certainly better than letting them
wither in the kitchen. But I still have half of them left, so I'm not done yet. And
coincidentally this was the first time in years that I have done anything in the garden.
And looking at the photo times, the whole effort took less than 6 minutes.
It's still very dry, but over the last week we've had about 20 mm (count them, 20 mm)
of rain. Has it made any difference? Here the neighbour's pond on 8 September and now:
While writing yesterday's diary this morning, discovered that I couldn't upload any images
to DigitalOcean. It just
timed out. Further investigation showed some breakage in the connection between Australia
and New York, though it's not clear to what extent the output of mtr is relevant,
which shows about 6% packet loss at port-channel8122.ccr92.jan02.atlas.cogentco.com.
But ping tells a very different story:
22 packets transmitted, 8 packets received, 63.6% packet loss
There were no outage notices from digitalocean, but Daniel O'Connor confirmed that he had
similar issues. It seems only to relate to access from Australia. Put in a ticket, but of
course by the time they responded, the service was back to normal.
After yesterday's experiment, tried the original pad see ew (or is that phat si-io? I
think so) again. About the only difference was that I used up the remainder of the cabbage,
this time cut finely. And that worked fine.
Clearly it's a mobile phone display. It seems that the purple icon is a message bubble or
some such nonsensical term. What good is it? None whatsoever, unless it's to annoy me.
How did it appear? No idea. How do you get rid of it? All the “help” I could get didn't
work, pointing to things that don't exist. After nearly an hour of messing around in
different places in the settings, finally got rid of it—and forgot where it was.
About the only thing learnt was that Android finds new ways
to annoy me, the menu structures differ from phone to phone, and the settings are hidden in
all sorts of places you wouldn't expect.
Another thing that has occurred since upgrading hydra is that the editing keys
(Emacs-like) have gone away and
been replaced by something stupid. How do I reinstate them? This time it was simple, with
the help of Google Gemini:
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-key-theme "Emacs"
And that worked. The only issue is that I frequently have difficulty finding these answers
later.
Jane Ashhurst along to visit today, causing Yvonne some
logistic problems: both she and Martin Godwin (the farrier) were due this afternoon, and
both were delayed to various extents. But in the end all went well.
This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have
a horror of reverse chronological documents, so
all my diary entries are chronological. This page normally contains the last two days,
but if I fall behind it may contain more. You can find older entries in
the archive. Note that I often update a diary entry
a day or two after I write it.
Do you have a comment about something I have written? This is a diary, not a
“blog”, and there is
deliberately no provision for directly adding comments. It's also not a vehicle
for third-party content. But I welcome feedback and try to
reply to all messages I receive. See the diary overview for more details. If you do
send me a message relating to something I have written, please indicate
whether you'd prefer me not to mention your name. Otherwise
I'll assume that it's OK to do so.
