Rainy Day Dog

This is what happens when her Daddy takes her out:

This is what happens when her Mommy takes her out:

Tonight's Dinner: February 26, 2014

Tonight for dinner I was on another mission to clean out our fridge of veggies. I’m always super gung-ho about buying veggies, but then they end up sitting in my fridge.  Even though I frequently cook with vegetables, I always seem to have so many sitting around.  I think this is because, like many things in my kitchen and pantry (eggs, olives, pasta, and cream of mushroom to name a few), I get panicky if I don’t have at least some sort of vegetable in my fridge.  The problem with this is that unlike the other items that I like to always have in stock, vegetables perish very quickly and our dinner schedule often changes.  I’ve been trying to buy veggies that keep a little longer like cauliflower, broccoli, bell peppers and potatoes, but often times I’m swayed into purchasing leafy greens because they are so pretty and packed with vitamins.  

I also want to clean out some things from our freezer before my next Costco trip.  That being said, I decided to make a soup.  To me, soups, stews, and pasta sauces are catchalls for extra veggies and freezer food.  It seems like we’ve been having a lot of pasta lately and it was raining so a soup was the best choice.  Superfast and pretty tasty, I made a zucchini, gai lan, cilantro, green onion and wonton soup. As a base I just used some chicken bullion.  Recently, I’ve shied away from chicken bullion because of its unnatural ingredients, but it really does add some nice flavor without having to use chicken stock, which I’m fresh out of.  

Tonight's Dinner: Feburary 25, 2014

After a day of staying home in bed recovering from mild food poisoning, we went out to dinner with Nick’s cousin and sister.  I thought that I was well enough to eat, but I couldn’t eat as much of the all-you-can-eat Korean BBQ as I would have liked.  After the second round of meat, I started to feel dizzy.  My stomach didn’t hurt, but I think it was the influx of protein in my system after not having eaten all day.   It was a strange drunk feeling that I could feel behind my eyes.  My stomach is still pretty rumbly even now.  After dinner I pretty much hopped in the shower (you smell like the restaurant after Korean BBQ) and then got in bed.  I had slept pretty much all day, but was asleep for the night at 9:45pm.  

We had three rounds of meat, which seemed like a lot, but our cousin said that the last time he was there with another friend they had five rounds!  They give you a pretty good helping of meat too!

All the accoutrements are on the left.  The red stuff in the long silver bowl is a rice cake in kimchi sauce and the other is kimchi fried rice.

Fried potstickers

This tofu soup reminds me of college.  My roommates and I would go to a 24-hour Korean place during finals and eat lots of tofu soup and "study".

Scrambled egg in a hot pot.

Round 1: Sliced beef, pork belly, and marinated boneless short ribs.

The process.

Round 2: bbq chicken, kimichi pork, marinated beef

Round 3: boneless short rib, marinated beef, bbq chicken.

These were our options.  So many choices!

They brought out a cold cinnamon juice after.  I'm not sure what it is for, maybe digestion?  It smelled pretty good though. I didn't have any since I was already feeling queasy.

Tonight's Dinner: Feburary 24, 2014

I’m not going to lie, this dinner made me sick and I had to stay home from work the next day.  I’m not keen on left overs, but we had so much left over of the chicken and vegetable curry that I wanted to eat some of it.  I had some of the curry the day that I made it so I think something just went wrong.  Maybe it was the ramen I put it in.  Shortly after I ate the curry in ramen,  Nick commented that he could hear my stomach growling.  I was talking too much so I didn’t notice it.  By 3am, I certainly did notice. 

Tonight's Dinner: February 23, 2014

The last few days have been crazy busy starting from Thursday all the way to Sunday.  It is the time of the month at work that gets crazy with invoices and reporting, plus getting ready for the baby shower while also fitting in time to hang out with Nick’s group of friends and family.   I’m mentally exhausted.  Even though I was in bed by 9pm last night relaxing with hydrating gloves and socks (should have put on a face mask too), I need a stay-cation where I can clean the house and lay around on the floor all day.  Complaints, complaints, as my Mom would say. 

My usual lazy Sunday ritual was postponed by a trip to the San Jose Tech Museum to see the Star Wars exhibit. It had been on our calendar for weeks, but it seemed to creep up on me.  We met up with Nick’s sister and cousin for breakfast at a local diner and then headed down to SJ for the exhibit.  The museum only took us about two hours to go through, but since we had made the long drive, we wanted to hang around a bit.  We headed to Santana Row, where I found the most amazing reflective jacket at Lulu Lemon, but as with all of their items, it was well out of my budget.  Though it’s not my dream to look like a moving traffic cone, I would like to not get hit by a car while running at night. 

Nick got a pancake breakfast.

I got a chicken-fried steak with eggs.

The four of us shared a "side" of hash browns with gravy.

We fit in a Tsunami pod! It was rather cramped and hot, but we got in there.

After walking Santana Row, we headed to 85c, which is apparently an extremely popular bakery and coffee shop in Newark.  I had never heard of it before.  The line for the bakery was out the door and we had to wait 20 minutes for our coffee.  Since I’m pretty sensitive to caffeine and it was already late afternoon, I got an orange juice, but Nick said that his coffee was really good.

By the time we started to head back home, we decide to cap off the day with happy hour $1 oysters from a local restaurant called Wences.  We called my in-laws to meet us there since it’s one of their favorite spots to eat.  Holy moly, I had a lot of oysters.  I still cringe when thinking about how sick one made me a few years back, but I love them so much that I’m willing to risk the seafood poisoning.  We had initially ordered three dozen oysters on a half shell.  After having a regular dinner, I was gluttonous and ordered six more for dessert while everyone else had a giant cookie and coffee.  I was definitely a happy camper.  I may take myself next Sunday to have oysters all to myself. Muahaha.

Three dozen oysters going down the hatch.

My plate after round one.

My cousin and I both got fish tacos for dinner.

Nick got a piece of grilled salmon over mashed potatoes and broccoli rabe.

My father-in-law got the same as Nick, but with swordfish.

My mother-in-law got sea bass with clams and muscles.

My sister-in-law got the prime rib special.

Cookie in a pan

My dessert of six oysters.

Monkey Madness

I have been preparing for a friend’s baby shower for weeks now.  Between crafting and food prep, my car looked like I was living out of the trunk.  I’m pretty sure that people were judging me as they walked by when I was trying to Tetris-style my grocery bags into the trunk.  

This is just the nonperishable stuff.  I added more decorations and food that morning.

I decided to go the easy route and do a taco bar, which was really simple to prepare and set up. The party was a success and my friend said that she had a great time. I don’t have that many pictures because we were busy the whole time, but the decorations were cute and the food was pretty good. Thankfully, I had a lot of help from friends with setup and food prep. 

 

A friend also helped me make delicious shredded chicken taco meat to go with my ground beef.

The mother-to-be's sister made the diaper cake.  I also had a box of Hershey's bars that I colored in "he" since it is going to be a boy.

Snicker doodle cupcakes with cream cheese frosting. I made the monkey from scrapbook paper.

My friend helped me with the paper plate bananas. That's right!  The bananas are made of yellow paper plates.  I thought she was going to smack me with her beer bottle because I kept asking her to make more. I also covered an old popcorn gift basket container with scrapbook paper.

Unfortunately, people arrived early so I wasn't able to take a picture of the scrapbook paper garland and pom poms that we put up all over the house.  I also put out cute jars of blue-raspberry and pina colada licorice, blue and white salt water taffy, and blueberry yogurt pretzels. I didn't get any pictures of those either, but I put the licorice and pretzels in ice cream sundae glasses and the salt water taffy in small mason jars if you can picture it in your head.

 

Nowadays, a shower isn't a shower without some pom poms.

One of the activities was to design a terry cloth bib for the baby.  All of the bibs turned out really well. The Mother-to-be has a lot of artistic friends!

A game that we played was to get your baby to be the first to melt from the ice cube.  Once they baby is freed from the ice you have to be the first to yell "my water broke!" I used my ice cube to cool down my water glass.  The babies were creepy looking. REALLY creepy looking.