I ran out of sweet chilli sauce (because you can put it on almost everything) so made a fresh bottle. When I was making my curry, I actually thought it was fun to make pictures along the way, so I did the same with my sweet hot sauce today.

As you can see, only a couple of ingredients this time:
– 1 small onion
– 1 clove of garlic
– an empty bottle (I used an empty soy sauce bottle)
– herb vinegar (you can also make this with rice vinegar)
– sugar
– a chilli (I used one of my super hot 7pods)

The body of the sauce will mostly be the vinegar and the sugar. The ratio vinegar:sugar is about 1:1.5. So I put about 1.5 cup of vinegar and a bit more than 2 cups of sugar (yes, that’s a lot of sugar!!).

Chop the onion and garlic in small pieces en fry them quickly with some oil. Put everything together (chili in small pieces) and mix everything. I use an immersion blender to mix and chop all the things extra fine.

Then in a small pan and heat. After a while, taste! The sharpness of the vinegar should be out.

Finally, put it in the bottle. Perfect for on: Everything!
 

After a holiday in Thailand I have been experimenting a bit with making my own curry paste. I use this as basis for my curries. Today I made some photos along the way.

First, some ingredients:

– 3 or 4 small onions
– 2 cloves of garlic
– some Coriander
– some dried bay laurel leaves
– a piece of ginger
– lemon grass
– some mushrooms
– a sweet potato
– a carrot
– a zucchini/courgette
– 500ml coconut milk
– 1 table spoon of coriander seeds
– 1 tea spoon of cumin
– 1/2 tea spoon of cove
– 1/2 tea spoon cinnamon
– some chili!
– 200-300 gram of chicken sliced in small pieces and marinated with 2 table spoons of soy sauce
– 1 table spoon of thai fish sauce
– 1 table spoon of lemon juice
– 1 table spoon of sugar

Crush the coriander seeds, cumin, cove and cinnamon.Put everything in a blender / food processor and add the onions, garlic, ginger, coriander, lemon grass ( I already cut this in small slices) and blend until you have a nice paste.

Cut the vegetables in small cubes.

Put the paste in a pan with 3 table spoons of vegetable oil and stir on high fire for about 5 mins. Add some water when it gets too dry. You can also add the laurel leaves, sugar, fish sauce and lemon juice. I sometimes also add half a block of chicken bouillon to give it a bit of salty kick ( up to you ).

Add the vegetables without the mushrooms (I always add them the last) and leave for another 5 minutes, but on a medium heat.

Then you can add the coconut milk and leave again for a while. Then add the chicken (with soy sauce )

and the mushrooms. Taste a spoon of the sauce ( be careful, HOT ) and add sugar/salt/pepper/chili as you wish.

Wait until the chicken and sweet potato are done and then serve with some white rice. Hmmmm

My beetle (Tenebrio molitor) population grew over the last two weeks to the count of 26. I think most of the pupae transferred to beetles in the last week so they are not really capable of laying eggs yet. Still, I transferred all beetles now to a new box where I keep them for 3 weeks and leave the initial (with the bedding) box as it is. In case beetles laid eggs in there, they should hatch in some 2-3 weeks (the eggs are not visible).

I still have about 50 pupae that will transfer to beetles in the next 2 weeks and since that is a pretty large population of beetles I decided to get rid of the mealworms I still had. I now have a bit of a bigger box for the beetles and will transfer the bedding every 3 weeks to smaller boxes for the eggs to hatch.