Unpacking boxes from the move (still...a month later) continues to provide many thrills and Christmas-morning-like moments of discovery and wonder. Then again, I am pretty easily amused.
I found some of my favorite clothes that I used to wear to work and out places, but hadn't thought I'd need on our 3-month-trip-turned-permanent. Yay.
Went through heaps of files, got rid of 63 lbs. of paper (yup, I weighed the box to get a quote from a document shredding company).
And found a stack of letters from my childhood penpals written 20 years ago.
There was a girl from Scotland, a boy and a girl from the Philippines, and then more letters from one of her cousins who was my friend's penpal and had written to me too. But the girl from the Philippines was the most faithful writer, and her notes were full of encouragement and talk of being friends forever. She always had the cutest stationery, too (a lot of it looks Japanese) and I was always all embarrassed of my boring notebook paper (though sometimes I had managed to get it in pretty colors). We used to write when we were 10-14 or so, but lost contact after that.
And then I found her on facebook!
Her name had changed slightly, as many of ours do, and she wasn't in the Philippines anymore, so I wasn't sure if I had the right person, but sent a note anyway. She wrote back incredulous, and we sent messages back and forth all day long. Then I called her and we talked for an hour that day, and again for over an hour yesterday.
It was so much fun to realize that after all these years on opposite sides of the world, we both now live in the US. She speaks and writes American English like a pro, we are the same age, and we have had some similar enough experiences in life (such as living somewhere you aren't from, which I wrote about in earlier posts) to really connect. I'm waiting to hear back on some business trips I may be taking early next year, because if that contract goes through, two of them are in suburbs of her city and we could actually meet in person!
It's strange to me that back then, before cell phones and computers and stuff, we couldn't have known that we'd be chatting back and forth like this - instantly and for free. I look at the pile of letters now and feel kind of nostalgic, like I got to participate in a bygone tradition that "kids these days" may never know.
Signing off smiling and feeling blessed.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Around the House
A friend told me this past week, after a month of business travel and obligatory restaurant meals, that he couldn't wait to get home and have a plain old sandwich from his own fridge, as he'd noticed his pants getting tighter in the waist.
I tend to have the opposite problem. When I eat at restaurants, I often make a game of taking home enough leftovers for the next day's lunch, but all the time I've been spending in my own kitchen lately is making me feel a little...well, cuddlier. I haven't disturbed any equilibrium as far as the bathroom scale is concerned, maybe it's just psychological. And since it's all healthy and it's doing my soul good just to simply have the time to do it all, I'm not stopping. Plus, leftover nights are fabulous lately!
Here's what I've been up to this past week or so:
Pumpkin:
I cooked up the good-sized pumpkin we had on our porch, mashed it up for baking, and roasted up taco-seasoned seeds for "the big game" that night. Those went FAST! Got a good 5 1/2 quarts (22 cups) of mashed pumpkin out of it, which I froze in quart-size ziplocs for easy thawing and baking and soups and curries and stuff (I bought extra coconut milk at the Far East Market to try this dreamy soup and maybe substitute it in my pumpkin pies for Thanksgiving, oohh). If you were doing the math, there were 2 cups left over, which I kept fresh and made into my favorite muffins in the world (next to the GIANT ones from Minneapolis' Hard Times Cafe, of course). Baked half the batch, and kept the other half of batter in the fridge for more soon!
Pot Roast:
Old-fashioned pork roast with potatoes, onions and carrots in the crock pot, with a little gravy mix packet (cheating!). Leftovers got a good dose of curry powder and a dollop of plain yogurt to become a Japanese-style curry, served over rice. I usually make that curry with a beef stew base, like B. and his family used to have in Japan, but this worked out just the same.
Salsa:
Roasted a load of fresh jalapenos, anaheim chiles and habaneros for two more batches of homemade salsa. When you roast them, they keep in the fridge for a good while, so I just used enough to complement the amount of tomatoes I had on hand to put in, and then got some more fresh tomatoes later in the week when we started running low. I had tried salsa several times before and never got these kinds of fabulous flavors - roasting is definitely the key.
Broccoli soup:
I got taken in by one of those little ticker ads at the top of my gmail inbox. I remember seeing a link to a recipe for Broccoli Cheddar Soup, and then later that day I was grocery shopping and found a bunch of broccoli on sale. Hmm. Not one to tempt fate, I picked up a healthy-sized bunch and found the recipe. The soup itself was good, but it was the mustardy croutons that made the day - what a great complement. Served it up with some toasted sandwiches and we ate it all.
Jambalaya:
B. looked up from his computer the other night and said, "I feel like something warm for supper, like a soup, with sausage and tomatoes and stuff." How's that for inspiration? Just so happened I had everything I needed for this jambalaya (except that I substituted rice vinegar for the wine and held the mint because that sounded a little strange to me - I meant to try it sprinkled on top just to see how it meshed with the other flavors, but forgot because it was so good as it was. I think there's a few bites left over that I'll have to try so I know if I should go for it next time). I stewed it in the crock pot all day long with brown rice and some corn muffins on the side. It turned out so creamy and the flavors were so well-integrated that I'll definitely be making this again.
Pesto:
The overnight temperature dipped low enough one night to start freezing the basil, though the other woodier herbs were fine. So I brought in the whole batch and made pesto, keeping one small stalk to replant. It's in a bud vase right now, and has already sprouted some healthy roots. I made pesto once before, and being the purist that I can sometimes be, decided it would be more of an experience, a rite of passage, a bonding with Italian grandmothers out there (no, I'm not the least bit Italian, but I do aspire to be a fabulously feisty granny!) if I chopped it all by hand. So of course I followed a recipe titled "How to Make Pesto Like an Italian Grandmother". The idea is to add stuff in at different times so it comes out slightly different textures and retains some of the flavors of individual ingredients, rather than an American-processed-food-style homogeneous paste. It turned out tasty, but still a little chunky for my liking. It's just really hard to chop it all fine enough with my dull old knives. So this time, I employed the elbow grease of a food processor, but still followed the recipe for what order to add things, and just pulsed it long enough to where it looked like I would have stopped chopping by hand for each step. The result was a really scrumptious mix that doesn't take much to spruce up a meal and keeps in the fridge for a good while.
Brazilian Beans & Rice:
A few years ago we spent two weeks in Sao Paulo, Brazil, staying in some friends' home and doing as they did. Part of that was an everyday lunch of beans & rice. I loved it - the simplicity, the routine, and the explosion of garlic and onion flavor. In the move I recaptured some ice cream buckets full of beans, which were preserved airtight and still great. (Actually, I've had them a whole lot longer than the year in storage. They were part of some friends of ours' parents' Y2K stock of foods you're supposed to keep on hand in case of crisis but never eat in real life, so that makes them more like 10 years old. Which I hesitate to say because you'll think I'm not really a "foodie" but like I said, once they're dried and sealed airtight, they pretty much keep forever.) Our Brazilian friends used pintos, but I used black beans. Soaked them overnight and cooked them on the stovetop for a few hours (next time I'll do the crockpot just for the forget-about-it factor, because they boiled over once and I had to remove all the stove rings and clean under there). Added some garlic, onion, salt, pepper, and cut-up smoked sausage for flavor and let that simmer together on low for a while, and Boom! Was it ever good. Had some of the leftover beans in breakfast burritos this morning, with scrambled egg, cheese, homemade salsa, sauteed spinach and onion, and a dollop of plain yogurt. I might be a little biased, but there's just no better way to start your day.
Senegalese Chicken Yassa:
A chili-lemon chicken stew similar to this one (though the actual recipe I used was on a printed page and I'm not sure where to find it online). Once again, the crock pot ruled the day. I added some tomatoes and spinach for the color and nutritional value, served it over a 5-minute pot of cous cous, and sprinkled my own serving with shredded coconut (B. opted out of that garnish). It was divine. A flavor really unlike what you normally taste here. I seriously think I was born on the wrong continent.
Looking forward to Thanksgiving:
To go with that coconut-creamy pumpkin pie I mentioned, I found a recipe for a tempting twist on sweet potatoes, for anyone who's sick of the old marshmallow-topped sugarbomb variety.
I tend to have the opposite problem. When I eat at restaurants, I often make a game of taking home enough leftovers for the next day's lunch, but all the time I've been spending in my own kitchen lately is making me feel a little...well, cuddlier. I haven't disturbed any equilibrium as far as the bathroom scale is concerned, maybe it's just psychological. And since it's all healthy and it's doing my soul good just to simply have the time to do it all, I'm not stopping. Plus, leftover nights are fabulous lately!
Here's what I've been up to this past week or so:
Pumpkin:
I cooked up the good-sized pumpkin we had on our porch, mashed it up for baking, and roasted up taco-seasoned seeds for "the big game" that night. Those went FAST! Got a good 5 1/2 quarts (22 cups) of mashed pumpkin out of it, which I froze in quart-size ziplocs for easy thawing and baking and soups and curries and stuff (I bought extra coconut milk at the Far East Market to try this dreamy soup and maybe substitute it in my pumpkin pies for Thanksgiving, oohh). If you were doing the math, there were 2 cups left over, which I kept fresh and made into my favorite muffins in the world (next to the GIANT ones from Minneapolis' Hard Times Cafe, of course). Baked half the batch, and kept the other half of batter in the fridge for more soon!
Pot Roast:
Old-fashioned pork roast with potatoes, onions and carrots in the crock pot, with a little gravy mix packet (cheating!). Leftovers got a good dose of curry powder and a dollop of plain yogurt to become a Japanese-style curry, served over rice. I usually make that curry with a beef stew base, like B. and his family used to have in Japan, but this worked out just the same.
Salsa:
Roasted a load of fresh jalapenos, anaheim chiles and habaneros for two more batches of homemade salsa. When you roast them, they keep in the fridge for a good while, so I just used enough to complement the amount of tomatoes I had on hand to put in, and then got some more fresh tomatoes later in the week when we started running low. I had tried salsa several times before and never got these kinds of fabulous flavors - roasting is definitely the key.
Broccoli soup:
I got taken in by one of those little ticker ads at the top of my gmail inbox. I remember seeing a link to a recipe for Broccoli Cheddar Soup, and then later that day I was grocery shopping and found a bunch of broccoli on sale. Hmm. Not one to tempt fate, I picked up a healthy-sized bunch and found the recipe. The soup itself was good, but it was the mustardy croutons that made the day - what a great complement. Served it up with some toasted sandwiches and we ate it all.
Jambalaya:
B. looked up from his computer the other night and said, "I feel like something warm for supper, like a soup, with sausage and tomatoes and stuff." How's that for inspiration? Just so happened I had everything I needed for this jambalaya (except that I substituted rice vinegar for the wine and held the mint because that sounded a little strange to me - I meant to try it sprinkled on top just to see how it meshed with the other flavors, but forgot because it was so good as it was. I think there's a few bites left over that I'll have to try so I know if I should go for it next time). I stewed it in the crock pot all day long with brown rice and some corn muffins on the side. It turned out so creamy and the flavors were so well-integrated that I'll definitely be making this again.
Pesto:
The overnight temperature dipped low enough one night to start freezing the basil, though the other woodier herbs were fine. So I brought in the whole batch and made pesto, keeping one small stalk to replant. It's in a bud vase right now, and has already sprouted some healthy roots. I made pesto once before, and being the purist that I can sometimes be, decided it would be more of an experience, a rite of passage, a bonding with Italian grandmothers out there (no, I'm not the least bit Italian, but I do aspire to be a fabulously feisty granny!) if I chopped it all by hand. So of course I followed a recipe titled "How to Make Pesto Like an Italian Grandmother". The idea is to add stuff in at different times so it comes out slightly different textures and retains some of the flavors of individual ingredients, rather than an American-processed-food-style homogeneous paste. It turned out tasty, but still a little chunky for my liking. It's just really hard to chop it all fine enough with my dull old knives. So this time, I employed the elbow grease of a food processor, but still followed the recipe for what order to add things, and just pulsed it long enough to where it looked like I would have stopped chopping by hand for each step. The result was a really scrumptious mix that doesn't take much to spruce up a meal and keeps in the fridge for a good while.
Brazilian Beans & Rice:
A few years ago we spent two weeks in Sao Paulo, Brazil, staying in some friends' home and doing as they did. Part of that was an everyday lunch of beans & rice. I loved it - the simplicity, the routine, and the explosion of garlic and onion flavor. In the move I recaptured some ice cream buckets full of beans, which were preserved airtight and still great. (Actually, I've had them a whole lot longer than the year in storage. They were part of some friends of ours' parents' Y2K stock of foods you're supposed to keep on hand in case of crisis but never eat in real life, so that makes them more like 10 years old. Which I hesitate to say because you'll think I'm not really a "foodie" but like I said, once they're dried and sealed airtight, they pretty much keep forever.) Our Brazilian friends used pintos, but I used black beans. Soaked them overnight and cooked them on the stovetop for a few hours (next time I'll do the crockpot just for the forget-about-it factor, because they boiled over once and I had to remove all the stove rings and clean under there). Added some garlic, onion, salt, pepper, and cut-up smoked sausage for flavor and let that simmer together on low for a while, and Boom! Was it ever good. Had some of the leftover beans in breakfast burritos this morning, with scrambled egg, cheese, homemade salsa, sauteed spinach and onion, and a dollop of plain yogurt. I might be a little biased, but there's just no better way to start your day.
Senegalese Chicken Yassa:
A chili-lemon chicken stew similar to this one (though the actual recipe I used was on a printed page and I'm not sure where to find it online). Once again, the crock pot ruled the day. I added some tomatoes and spinach for the color and nutritional value, served it over a 5-minute pot of cous cous, and sprinkled my own serving with shredded coconut (B. opted out of that garnish). It was divine. A flavor really unlike what you normally taste here. I seriously think I was born on the wrong continent.
Looking forward to Thanksgiving:
To go with that coconut-creamy pumpkin pie I mentioned, I found a recipe for a tempting twist on sweet potatoes, for anyone who's sick of the old marshmallow-topped sugarbomb variety.
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