Rainbow Fried Rice

One of my morning routine is to prepare breakfast for my mom and myself. Just like usual, I like to cook from what I have in my fridge. So, this morning I made fried rice because I have some left-over steamed rice in the fridge plus other ingredients I just bought the other day. So here it is the Rainbow Fried Rice!

 And here is the ingredients:
- 2 cloves of garlic, minced
- 2 cloves of onion, sliced
- a handful of sugar pod peas, halved
- a handful of Iceberg lettuce, chopped
- a handful of cilantro leaves, coarsely minced
- Some bell-pepper, chopped (mix color of green, yellow, orange and red)
- 5 hot chilli pepper, diced (optional)
- 2 eggs
- a piece of Bakwa (Chinese sweet & salty pork jerky), diced 
- 3 plates of steamed rice (it's best if refrigerated overnight)
- 3-4 Tbs salted soya sauce
- 2-3 Tbs sweet soya sauce 
- salt
- 3 Tbs vegetable oil

Local Indonesian Salty and Sweet Soya Sauce

How to :

1) Heat the oil in the skillet and sauté the garlic until fragrant, stir in the onion and chilli pepper, stir until brown and to be followed by the eggs.

2) Then, stir in the Bakwa (pork jerky), add about 2 Tbs of salty soya sauce, stir until it's fragrant and the eggs cooked. (I happened to have some Bakwa left in my freezer, my sister bought them from Singapore about 3 weeks ago. I like it because the flavor and the sweet taste of it enrich the taste and flavor of the fried rice, but certainly you can substitute it with other meats, sausages or even shrimps.)

3) Add Bell Pepper, stir until it's cooked.

4) I also added some leftover fresh-Iceberg lettuce from the other day. Stir well.

5) Now, you can add the rice in. Using a stainless frying spoon, try to break all the lumps of  rice by pressing the spoon onto the rice until it blends with all the ingredients. 

6) Stir in cilantro leaves and add more salted soya sauce and salt.

7) Last but not the least, add the sweet soya sauce, stir well for another minute. And there you go, the Rainbow Fried Rice is ready to be served! Put some cilantro leaves as garnish.

Propagating Cilantro from the roots

Since I started gardening a month ago, I learned a lot from other fellow gardeners and my own experience; mostly from my ignorance. It's like the shout-out "Welcome to the real world!" There's some successes and also failures in both germinating and propagating seeds. I have even started to experience and handled my mango plant which is infested with anthracnose and mealy bugs. There's excitement, hope and frustration at one or the other time, but most of all it has been a positive experience for me. I am glad to have failed, thus I can learn from my mistakes.

Last week, I bought some fresh cilantro from a wet market on my way home from sending-off my niece to her school. Upon arriving home, I chopped the leaves off and kept them in a box in the fridge, and I took the roots and put them in a cup of tap water overnight in an effort to extend it before I had time to plant it in the soil. The next day they started to grow new leaves, and after 3 days the new leaves had grown to approximately 2 cm, but then I noticed that the roots were getting flaccid and the water got a little forthy. I was very intriqued of what had caused it. Was it the rainwater I added to the tap water after 2 days? Well, just like what I did to save my tomato plants, I decided to go ahead and transfered them into the soil and placed the container at the rooftop along with my other plants. I thought, in this way it will save the roots... and they would start to grow... but I learned another lesson...

The next day, I noticed that it's not growing as I had expected, but the leaves were starting to wither and turned flabby. At first I thought it was probably the Sun being too scorching during daytime, so I decided to move it inside in the evening. Later that night, out of curiosity, I dug out the roots and sure enough the roots began to rot and turned to mush.

5th Grade Science : Roots are very important as it is the mouth of the plant and it also anchor the plant in place. Thus, the existing symptoms showed that there's something wrong with the roots that made it slowly dying off. I wasn't sure of what had caused it. I thought it was the chlorinated and fluoridated tap water, which is usually avoided by most organic gardeners. But then I found that Cilantro roots can rot if it is over-watered.  So it must be because  I transitioned it in the water for several days, which had apparently caused the roots to rot.

Whatever it is, I am not going to let it happen anymore. Yesterday, I bought some fresh cilantro, so I could propagate the roots again. And this time I replanted them in the pots right away! They started to grow!