Today's Breakfast: June 7, 2014

This morning we woke up very early to do the longest leg of the Spartan Tri-fecta.  I had planned out our pre-race schedule so that we wouldn’t miss our start time (9:30am).  Originally, we were supposed to wake up at 5am, but I turned off my alarm twice and over slept until 5:50am.  Good thing my Dad knocked on our door. I popped up like Jack-in-the-Box and we were out of the house we rented by 6:15am.

We went to The Breakfast Club, a place Nick and I found through Yelp a few years back and Christopher frequents when he’s down at school.  They have great food and very friendly service.  It’s one of those places that even though we only go there once or twice a year, it feels like they know us.  Queue Cheers theme song. We wanted to fuel up before the race so we made sure to get big breakfasts and drank lots of water.

Monterey Spartan Beast 2014 Video Compilation

Nick got chicken and waffles.

I had a corned beef hash omelet with home fries and biscuits and gravy.

So clean!  Our team name is "Chin-fecta" as a play off of the Trifecta.

12.7 mi, 28 obstacles and 8.25 hours later, we finished!  There were some REALLY steep ridges that we had to trek through.  That was the hardest and scariest part for me. The obstacles were challenging, but the terrain was just torturous.

After a grueling day in the sun, Christopher had a tan/burn around the his bib number that was written in black marker on his arm.

 

Tonight's Dinner: June 4, 2014

We are out of bread so this is the last of the sandwiches for us.  I was pretty tired from work and unpacking so Nick made dinner.  He cooked some bratwurst with sliced onions and topped it with Havarti cheese.  It was so delicious.  The only bad part about it was that since Nick did the cooking I had to do the cleaning!
 

 

I had a friend over to show her around the house so that she could stay and take care of Emmy for us over the weekend.  I made her dinner, but we were so busy talking that I totally forgot to take pictures.  I roasted some chicken marinated in Sichuan sauce because I know that it turns out well and did a mushroom and zucchini stir fry over rice.  

Tonight's Dinner: June 3, 2014

Tonight we had another sandwich.  I shook up some boneless chicken thighs in a large ziplock bag with cornmeal, salt, pepper, and garlic and onion powder.  In a shallow pan, I pan fried the chicken to make into a sandwich.  We don’t pan fry very often, but I wanted to test out our gas stove.  It’s so much easier to keep a steady fry heat!  On the side I made a combo of corn cut off the cob and spinach.  I also sliced a portobello mushroom and marinated it in Italian dressing for Nick.  The chicken was a little on the salty side for my taste, but Nick really enjoyed it. 

Tonight's Dinner: June 2, 2014

I’ve been a busy bee on overdrive.  I’ve been so tired the last couple of weeks that one day I felt my head bob while sitting directly in front of my manager.  Thankfully she was concentrating on something else and didn’t see.  This move has taken a toll on me.  I found the box with our Vitamix so I’ve started juicing again to give myself more energy.  We are finally starting to see the house come together even though the boxes seem to be never ending.  I know that we like to cook, but we had enough to fill up our big kitchen even though we came from a tiny one.  What is taking so much time is rewashing all of the dishes, platter, cups, etc after being wrapped in newspaper and then trying to decide where everything should go that it can be easily accessed in the thralls of cooking.

Even though the kitchen is still in disarray, I was able to get a little bit of cooking in.  We had various versions of sandwiches all week because they are easy and don’t take a lot of time. Tonight I marinated two turkey breasts in soy sauce and garlic and onion powder for 30 minutes while I continued to put things away.  I also caramelized shallots and garlic to put on the bread. 

 

 

Tonight's Dinner: May 28, 2014

Christopher had gone abalone diving with a friend over his birthday weekend so we wanted to cook them up. (They were frozen.) We all really enjoy abalone, but none of us had actually cooked it before.  Christopher's philosophy was that none of us knew how to cook abalone, but since Nick and I know how to cook we had a leg up on him.  My Mother-in-Law advised to cook them in a soup for a long time or cook it very quickly.  All of the things that we read online said the same thing.  I was originally going to put one of the abalones in a crock pot and cook it over night in chicken stock, but then came across an abalone chowder recipe that looked doable and delicious. There is still one more abalone, so I might throw that in a crock pot and stew it over night to see how that works out.  I have to find our crock pot in the house first.

After chopping up the abalone into pieces, we ended up putting it in a food processor for the chowder.  Oh how it hurt us to see it ground up, but it really did make it better for the soup. We were all cringing. We also cut up slices to pound down and quickly pan fry.  We dredged the slices in a flour and spice mixture that Nick concocted and then threw them into a hot frying pan for a few seconds.  It would have been nice to bread the abalone, but it was already getting late and we wanted to eat.  The dredging method worked out just fine.

Emmy is very interested in watching my brother eat French bread.

Tonight's Dinner: May 25, 2014

After unloading my parents garage of all of the furniture that I had purchased off of Craigslist, Nick and I set off to start unpacking.  We made a sizeable dent in the stacks of boxes.  Long gone is our nice and neat empty house.  We have newspapers and flatten boxes all over the place.  Luckily, we borrowed a bunch of boxes from Nick's boss and he agreed to take them back along with the extra boxes that we acquired along the way.  So once those are gone, a lot of floor space will be cleared up.  I'm also laying out all of the newspapers in neat piles so that it fits in our recycle bin.  This means, however, that after unpacking all of our dishes, I have to sit there and flatten out the individual sheets so that they aren't in a crumpled mess.  The whole process is extremely time consuming and I hope we never move again.

We had planned to have a BBQ at my inlaw's place for Memorial Day.  I managed to pull together a Sichuan chicken marinade even though I couldn't find our soy sauce and had very little of the Sichuan noodle sauce left in the jar.  I added some water to the jar and shook it up to stretch it out between my two bags.  I marinated the chicken for about five hours while we were unpacking. As always, there was plenty of food and thankfully, my Father-in-law had a nice bottle of wine open. My feet were so tired and I needed a little loosening up.

I took a picture of these mushrooms because they were huge.  We ended up cutting them into thick slices to faster grilling.

Wild salmon

Korean bbq short ribs.  These are my favorite.

Grilled pineapple.

Tonight's Dinner: May 24, 2014

The last week and a half has been BUSY.  Between getting the keys to the house, setting up initial cleaning, carpet cleaning, last minute packing, and moving, there hasn’t been much time to cook anything.   If I had free time it was spent sprawled out on the sofa resting.  I've tried writing this post five times and had to cut it short due to lack of time.  I can’t wait to be all unpacked and back to normal life.  I’m getting really tired of takeout and I can’t find anything.  The house looks like a disaster.  It’s now Friday and we have the bulk of our kitchen gear unpacked and cleaned, but we haven’t tackled much of the upstairs. We are in need for organizational storage units.  My closet is coming together, something I’m over the moon about, but the rest of the master bathroom is still in boxes or on the counter.  I bought some nice baskets at Ikea, but need more. I told Nick that I feel like I have ADD when it comes to the house.  I start something in one room and then see something else that needs to be done in another room and then forget about the first room until I go back in.  Hopefully things will be all settled by the end of this weekend, but I don't know if we have that much energy.

For dinner on the night of move in, both of our families got together to visit the house.  At this point, the house was still pretty neat and tidy as all of the boxes were stacked and we hadn’t moved all of the furniture from my parent’s garage yet.  We headed to a new Korean chicken place called Pollo Pollo near our house that the Fongs have been raving about.  The food was really good and this might be our new "spot"... after I recover from takeout boredom.

Pickled celery (top left) and the other two are different types of daikon.

Kimchi rice

Extra spicy combination seafood ramen soup.

Regular fried chicken.

Medium spicy fried chicken.

Burn your nose hairs fried chicken.