Earlier this year we bought this Jasmine plant and surprisingly its doing well – thanks to wonderful weather and Alaska Fish Fertilizer. Early this summer I started thinking about propagating the jasmine plant and after a bit of googling found that jasmine plant can be propagated by taking cuttings and rooting them. So I started my propagating experiment during last week of August and to my luck still the propagated plant/cutting looks real healthy – though I haven’t seen any new sign of leaves yet.
Thought I should put this in my blog, so that it might help someone wanting to propagate Arabian Jasmine by stem cuttings. Here are the instructions.
- Make a slant cut where a branch meets the main stem of the plant.
- Wet the cut end of the stem and dip the cut end in the rooting hormone – I used TakeRoot rooting hormone
- Use a pot of wet Perlite mixed with peat moss and use a pencil or screwdriver tip to make a hole sufficient enough for the cutting.
- Stick the cutting into the Perlite/peat mix.
- Optionally you can seal the pot inside of a plastic bag with holes – this kind of makes a green house
- You don’t have to water but mist regularly such that the Perlite medium doesn’t get dried out.
- I have been told rooting should occur in 7-8 weeks. So need lots of patience here
Click here to read How to transplant a banana plant/tree?
Posted in experiment, gardening | Tagged Arabian Jasmine, Jasminum sambac, propagation, sambac | 1 Comment »
November 16, 2008 by sasi
With winter just around the corner its about time to think about winter care for those tropical plants – this winter care tips should work for curry leaf plant, banana tree, jasmine plants.
About a year ago I had a blog post on curry leaf plant and had a mention on CFL light bulbs for indoor plants. This year I invested on a plant light and a shop light fixture and my plants seem to be loving it.
I shopped around before investing on these and looked at some of the set up at worms way and similar stores and found these run close to $100.00
With the sour economy these days I wasn’t quite ready to spare $100.00 and ended up spending less that $20.00 at a hardware store.
Here is all you need for setting up indoor light for plants.
- Shop light fixture – this come readily with chain kit
- Plant/Aquarium light
- Mounting hardware – couple of eye hooks
- 10 minutes for mounting
Here is how the light setup looks after mounting on the ceiling.
Oh! did I mention my plants love this indoor lighting?
Here are some indoor care tips for curry leaf plant, banana tree, jasmine plants.
- Keep the plants away from windows – plants don’t like cold draft from windows.
- If you have heater vents on floor, keep the plants away from heater vents.
- Avoid over watering the plants – indoor plants don’t consume much water and make sure the soil doesn’t get dried out either.
- Occasionally spray salt water on the plants – this will keep any bugs away from the plants
- Spray neem oil mixed with water/soap or rubbing alcohol water mixture as soon you see sign of spider mites and/or mealy bugs.
Updates:
I bought a light timer to keep my plants on a regular time schedule.
Now the plant lights gets turned on/off from 6:00 AM to 6:00 PM – remember plants sleep, too
Posted in curry leaf, curry leaf plant, curry leaves, garden blog, gardening, indoor gardening, indoor plant care | Tagged banana tree, cfl light, curry leaf plant, jasmine plant, tropical plants, winter care | 5 Comments »
November 16, 2008 by sasi
Canned beans, eh?
That’s the question I had in mind when I went for my first grocery shopping about 12+ years ago here is the US. Yeah we use quite a lot of canned veggies here in the US – I think its a matter of convenience as these come precooked and turning them to quite delectable dish is a snap. On my recent visit to India I did find canned veggies/foods in the supermarket.
I am guessing folks in India are catching up
Back on the chick peas, in the past years we might have tried different brand of chick peas a.k.a. garbanzo beans and very recently found one that turns out really good for this chick peas curry.
The winner is Libby’s organic garbanzo beans
Unlike other chick peas from a can (Goya, Progresso, Trader Joe’s) Libby’s turns out with firm texture without being mushy.
Ingredients:
2 can Libby’s organic garbanzo beans washed and drained
4 tablespoons tomato paste (from a can)
1/4 roughly minced onion
1 freshly chopped tomato
1 tablespoon ginger and garlic paste
2 cloves
2″ Indian cinnamon
2 cardamom
1/2 teaspoon cumin powder
1 tablespoon coriander powder
1 teaspoon garam masala or chole masala per taste
t tablespoon dried methi leaves
2 tablespoons minced cilantro
2 tablespoons oil
1 tablespoon butter
salt & chili powder per taste
1 cup water
- Make a puree out of 1/4 roughly minced onion and tomato paste in a blender.
- In a pan heat 2 tablespoons oil. When the oil is hot, add cumin, cinnamon, cloves, and cardamom.
- Add pureed onion/tomato paste and sauté until raw smell goes off the onion – approximately 10 minutes.
- Add ginger and garlic paste and sauté for additional 3 minutes followed by the freshly chopped tomatoes.
- To this add garam masala or chole masala, chili powder, cumin powder and coriander powder. Let it cook for 2 minutes.
- Then add drained beans and salt – let it cook for few minutes
- Add 1 cup of water and bring it to a boil. Close the lid of the pan and let it cook at a reduced heat for additional 15 minutes.
- From time to time check for the desired consistency and make sure the gravy doesn’t get burnt.
- Once the desired consistency is reached, add dried methi leaves and let it slow cook for additional 2 minutes.
- Then add minced cilantro and butter.
- Mix everything together. Take the pan off the heat and let it stand for few minutes before serving.
Posted in recipe | Tagged chick peas, chole, curry, garbanzo beans, indian cooking, indian recipe, libby's | 1 Comment »
September 28, 2008 by sasi
Cupcakes – who doesn’t like ‘em
We tried out this cup cake recipe from allrecipes.com for our little ones birthday and it turned out real good. We were debating between a store bought birthday cake Vs baking cupcakes and clearly cupcake was a winner – cost wise it worked out as well 
For cup cake:
Ingredients: makes about 15 regular sized cup cakes
2 medium sized eggs or 1 extra large egg
1 cup sugar
1/3 cup brown sugar
½ oil – we tried with canola oil
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups shredded carrot
½ cup drained/crushed pineapple
1½ all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon ground nutmeg
a pinch of ground ginger
- Preheat oven to 350 F
- Line muffin pan with muffin liners.
- In a large bowl, beat together the eggs, white sugar, and brown sugar and mix in the oil and vanilla.
- Fold in carrots and pineapple.
- In a separate bowl, mix the flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger.
- Mix flour mixture into the liquid mixture until evenly moist.
- Transfer to the prepared muffin cups.
- Bake 25 minutes in the preheated oven, or until a toothpick inserted in the center of a muffin comes out clean.
- Cool completely on wire racks before topping with the icing.
For butter icing: tops about 40 cup cakes
From wilton’ website
½ cup softened butter
8 oz softened cream cheese
4 cups confectioners sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
wilton’ icing colors
- In a large bowl, combine butter, cream cheese, confectioners’ sugar and 1 teaspoon vanilla.
- Use a hand mixer and beat until the mixture is smooth and creamy.
- For mixing color in icing dip a toothpick into the color, then swirl it into the icing.
- Blend the icing well with a spatula.
- More information on coloring the icing can be found here.
Posted in recipe | Tagged birthday cupcakes, carrot cupcakes, cupcakes, icing, wilton | 2 Comments »
September 28, 2008 by sasi
Ah Fall is here. Its the nicest time of the year in St. Louis area with warm weather during day time (around 70 F) and breezy nights (in 50s). It is definitely time to prepare your curry plants, and/or container grown banana plant, and/or Jasmine plant for indoors. Here are few things you may want to consider before moving your plants indoors.
- Try to prepare plants for indoor conditions by acclimating them over a period of a few weeks before moving them completely inside. I prefer moving my plants to porch or garage. The idea is to move the plants from direct sunlight and giving them time to get used to limited light.
- Look for insects, spiders underneath the leafs. Treat insects by spraying the plant’s foliage with water, rubbing alcohol, and soap mixture over a period of few days before bringing it indoors. It is better to deal with insects outside rather inside your home
- Consider repotting – I personally prefer Spring months for repotting and transplanting tropical plants though.
Posted in gardening, indoor gardening, indoor plant care | Tagged banana plant, curry leaf plant, curry leaves, curry plant, jasmine plant, winter care for curry plant banana plant jasmine plant | 4 Comments »
September 15, 2008 by sasi
It has been quite some time now since I have posted a bread recipe to my blog
If you are in a mood for a fruity and nutty bread then this is for you. This bread has good amount of dried cranberries and pecans. You can also substitute walnuts in place of pecans and still will turn out great. I have tried this bread recipe without egg but adding an egg will definitely make it softer.
Ingredients: For 2 lb loaf
1 cup buttermilk or 4 tablespoons buttermilk powder + 1 cup water
¼ cup water
3 tablespoons honey
1½ teaspoon softened butter
2½ cup bread flour
¼ cup rolled oats or multi grain hot cereal (this gives a crunchy texture)
½ cup wheat flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon soy flour
1 teaspoon wheat germ
2 teaspoons active dry yeast
1 cup dried cranberries
1 cup chopped/toasted pecans – walnuts works as well
Optional:
1 egg
2 tablespoons flax meal
- Put all the ingredients in the bread pan (follow the instructions on the manual) and select the dough cycle.
- During first rest period, check for consistency of the dough and add water/flour as necessary
- Preheat the oven to 350 C.
- When the dough cycle ends, empty the dough into a floured surface and shape it into a loaf and let it rise in a greased/floured loaf pan for about an hour.
- Bake the raised dough in the oven for 35 minutes.
- Let the bread cool for about an hour before slicing.
You can view other bread recipes from my blog by clicking here.
Posted in recipe, baking, bread | Tagged bread machine, bread maker, buttermilk bread, cranberry, fruit bread, pecan, pecan bread, sweet bread, white bread | 2 Comments »
September 13, 2008 by sasi
Some time ago I wrote a blog post titled Getting the most for your gas dollar. When I started tracking my miles/gallon on my cars I was curious to compare what others who had similar model car get on their cars. Then when I was reading forums on wesabe.com (good web site to take control of your finances and provides budgeting tools, personal finance tips) I came across someone mentioning fuelly.com – exactly what I was looking for.
Fuelly is a site that lets you track, share, and compare your gas mileage. Simply sign up, add a car or motorcycle, and begin tracking your mileage.
To start tracking mpg on your cars/vehicles, you will need to register your car(s) with information like make, model, year and other information. Then periodically as you fuel up your cars you will need to enter these information in fuelly.com – think of fuelly as a log book
Once you got a couple of fuel-ups you can start seeing your reports when you login to fuelly.com – they give you a dashboard view. Here is a my dashboard at fuelly.com – can be accessed at http://www.fuelly.com/driver/the8thwonder/
Fuelly.com does have links to browse similar cars – that way you could see how others rank with similar car as yours
Also checkout Fuelly’ tips – http://www.fuelly.com/tips/
Posted in money, mpg, gas | Tagged better mpg, fuel, fuelly, gas dollar, mpg | Leave a Comment »
Long time ago I wrote a blog post on eWallet titled Password galore. I still use eWallet on a daily basis and recently I was on mission to find if eWallet could be run on a linux PC – recently I migrated a couple of old Pentium III PCs to Fedora PCs at home hence was on a mission
Looking at iLium Software web site I see that they support Windows/Mobile/iTouch/iPhone, but no Linux. But I use eWallet on flash drive every day (use U3 version) and it struck me that I could run it on a linux PC if I had wine installed (as eWallet is portable meaning none of the information is written on windows registry during runtime)
For folks not familiar with wine
Wine is a translation layer (a program loader) capable of running Windows applications on Linux and other POSIX compatible operating systems.
I have successfully tested eWallet on Fedora 5 and Fedora 9 and you will need wine installed prior to installing eWallet.
- Open up a shell and start installing eWallet using wine
- Follow the installation instructions and have eWallet installed on your linux PC.
- To invoke eWallet, run eWallet.exe using wine again. I had mine installed under .wine/drive_c/Program Files/Ilium Software/eWallet/ and I invoked it using
wine .wine/drive_c/Program Files/Ilium Software/eWallet/eWallet.exe
- Once successfully installed, you could use your Windows name/key pair (emailed upon purchasing eWallet software) to register eWallet on your linux PC.
As you could it was really easy to install eWallet on a Fedora system. I bet it should easy on any Linux system irrespective of the linux flavor
Drop me a note (using the comment window below) if you need any help with installing eWallet on a linux PC.
Posted in tech | Tagged eWallet, fedora, fedora 5, fedora 9, ilium, ilium software, linux, u3, wine, wine hq | 1 Comment »
For quite some time now I have been wanting to try the pasta cycle on my bread machine. Convinced my other half that we could try making Chapati dough on bread machine and glad that I did
You might wonder why make Chapati dough using bread maker while you can use your hands to make the dough. True, you can make the traditional method to make your Chapati dough but if you need real soft Chapatis (even using the regular wheat flour) then this is definitely for you.
Ingredients: for 5 chapatis
1 cup wheat flour – we used Hodgson Mill’s white whole wheat flour
Pinch of salt
1 tablespoon oil
1/3 cup milk
Preparation:
- Place all the ingredients in the bread pan and select the pasta cycle
- Depending on the consistency of the dough add in milk/flour – we always have a bit of trouble with our bread machine to handle 1 cup flour.
- As you could see in the picture, the dough is all “separated” out and needs help in making into a lump
- In general pasta cycle is about 20 minutes and at about 15 minutes through the cycle add in few drops of oil to the dough – this helps to maintain moisture in the dough.
- Once the pasta cycle is done, wrap the dough in a plastic wrap and set it until its ready to be rolled into Chapatis.
- When ready to be rolled, roll the dough as you would do to make Chapatis.
You can view other recipes from my blog by clicking here.
Posted in food, indian food, indian recipe, recipe | Tagged bread machine, bread maker, chapathi, chapathi dough, chapati, chapati dough | Leave a Comment »
Here are links to few interesting articles that I have heard on the radio and read on the web over the past 2 weeks.
God wants you to be rich: 5 faith-based rules
Quite witty article on MarketWatch.com -
link
Off-Shore drilling – Pluses & Minuses
We all hear more and more about off-shore drilling these days. Couple of weeks ago there was an interesting audio documentary on Science Friday program on NPR. This documentary covers realities of offshore oil drilling.
How much oil might there be?
When would it be available?
And what other consequences might offshore drilling have?
You can listen to the audio commentary from this link – no you don’t need a fancy iPOd for listening
http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200807185
ONQI – Coming to a grocery store near you
Reading a nutrition label doesn’t have to be a rocket science – that’s the whole idea behind the ONQI – Overall Nutritional Quality Index.
The Overall Nutritional Quality Index (ONQI) is an algorithm designed to generate a single, summative score for the “overall nutritional quality” of a food based on its micro nutrient and macro nutrient composition and several other of its nutritional properties (e.g., energy density).
The ONQI enables the “average shopper” to choose foods on the basis of overall nutritional quality with the ease and fidelity of top nutrition experts.
http://www.griffinhealth.org/Research/ONQIpages/FAQs.aspx
Posted in I heard | Tagged marketwatch, npr, off shore drilling, onqi, science friday | Leave a Comment »
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