Anybody ever grow Bitter, Wax, or Serpent melons?

[imafan26]

I went to a Filipino restaurant one time. It is a little hole in the wall. It was later in the afternoon. Ordered Pinakbet...they could not make that, ordered sari sari, did not have that either, ordered sinigang... it wasn't available either. Finally asked what do you have?
A lot of the Filipino dishes use the same ingredients. They were out of eggplant.

[pepperhead212]

That's too funny, imafan! You wonder how a restaurant could run out of an ingredient essential to so many dishes.

As much as I love Asian foods, Filipino food is some that I never got hooked on. As you noted, so many use the same ingredients, and one of the ingredients is vinegar, and not in small amounts. The sour in much of SE Asian is from lime juice, as well as tamarind, and the seasoned rice vinegar (Chenkiang) is delicious in Chinese foods, and all is in balance with the sweet. This is why I don't use much hot sauce, just to sprinkle on foods for heat - I just don't like vinegar in a lot of dishes.

[pepperhead212]

Here is the first one, almost ready to harvest. That is actually a tomatillo plant that this seems to be growing on. The vine is several feet long at this point!
DSCF0839 by pepperhead212, on Flickr

[pepperhead212]

Here's that bitter melon, 4 days later. It's only 6.8 oz., so I could have left it on longer, since the description says that it gets to 1.2-1.6 lbs! But I wanted to try it small, first, as some are best then, and I'll try others larger. This variety grows slower, and was considerably later than the Chinese type of melon I grew before, but this is about the time in the season that those would stop growing, and not pick up until it got cooler, maybe late August. I'll find out of this keeps growing, or not.
DSCF0883 by pepperhead212, on Flickr