Training Chopsticks

I got these for Kate a while back, and I've been wanting to get a picture. (They're cute! And pink!) At this point I'm not sure if they'll really help her learn how to use regular chopsticks, but we shall see.



She wanted to get some pho. That's my girl!

Christmas Pizza

My mom sent us her old KitchenAid mixer (thanks Mom!) and we have been having great fun with it. In the days before Christmas I was busy making pretzels and delivering them to people, and on Christmas day we had this tree-shaped pizza for lunch.  It just came to me in a flash of inspiration.  I think this may be a new tradition!



This was the tricky part--getting the dough into the right shape.  I had to make the star separately.



Decorating...



and baking. (The cheese was a bit thin--next time we will be better prepared!)



Andy will be happy to take care of all the olives.



Kate gets the star!

Non-Traditional (my kids have never liked mashed potatoes)

Our day of thanks included Indian food, Kandle Park, and pie. Relaxing, and tasty!

(That's my no-sugar apple pie, sweetened with honey, that I pretty much only make once a year.  Not a lot of honey--less sweet, more apple.  I like it that way.)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Operation Tamale: the first attempt

I don't think I've ever mentioned here that Doug served a mission in Texas (San Antonio, English speaking). His first encounter with tamales was not with frozen, store-bought tamales, or even restaurant tamales, but fresh, handmade tamales in a family's home.  It must have been a memorable experience.

We had some neighbors from Mexico, here in our apartment complex, and the mom said that she would invite us over when she made tamales so we could learn how it was done.  Unfortunately, the day that she sent the kids over to tell us it was tamale day just happened to be the day that we were going to the fair.  And then they moved.  Alas.  So we did not get to learn tamale making from Mrs. Medina.

This Monday, while Kate was off enjoying the Presidents' day holiday at her friend Maddy's house, we made our first attempt at our own chicken tamales.  Doug had previously purchased the corn husks and masa, and looked up recipes online.  (We didn't follow just one recipe, so I don't have a specific one to link to.)



Initial assembly.  Rolling them up in the corn husks is a lot like using a bamboo mat to roll sushi.  Practically the same.  My sushi-rolling experience definitely came in handy.



All wrapped up and ready to steam.  They weren't holding together very well, so we tied little strips of corn husk around them.   I think they look kind of cute that way, like little corn husk dolls.



And after steaming! They were a bit crumbly put tasted pretty good. Not bad at all for the first try.  If anyone out there would like to share their tamale-making expertise, we'd appreciate any tips!

Rolling in Dough

Yes, I'm still here! Just very distractible. As usual.

We had Glory and Sky over for a pretzel making party this last Thursday. I had mentioned it a few weeks before--"Hey, we should all get together and make pretzels!" and Glory kept asking about it, so we finally got ourselves organized. Pretzels happened!

(recipe here)



Kate had been to her first gymnastics class at the YMCA that morning. Hence the hair.



Getting the dough rolled out can be harder than it looks!



Andy enjoys having visitors.



Some of the finished product. Yum!



Hyun Ju (Glory and Sky's mom) was going to come too, but someone came over right then to fix her computer, so she had to go back home. She came over at the end and had a pretzel, and said, "These are better than the ones you buy at the mall!"

A couple of days after that, Doug and Kate made homemade noodles. I was working on something else, and Doug offered to scrape together something for lunch. He did a carbonara kind of thing with pancetta, and we ate it with porkchops and broccoli. (This is not the sort of thing that I come up with when I "scrape something together." Doug is very resourceful.)



Kate gets to help turn the crank. Fun!

Christmas Eve 김

Andy's first taste of kim. (Actually his second taste--we gave him one piece and he chomped it down, so Doug got the video camera.)



After this he wanted some more!

Dino Pancakes

Doug made these for Kate.



Apparently ricotta cheese is the secret ingredient that helps them keep their shape. There was a little left in the fridge that needed to be used up, so Doug added it to the pancake batter. Kate ate them up, so I guess they were good!

Soup of the Evening

Friday night we had a ward activity (at church) with a soup dinner. Lots of different kinds of yummy soups. (I had two helpings of Sarah's borscht. I don't think I've ever had borscht before.) One person there had brought a muffin tin to eat out of, and put a different scoop into each space. I thought that was a clever idea and definitely easier than trying to juggle multiple bowls at the serving table. I'll have to remember that next time.

Our contribution was black bean chicken chili. Here's the recipe!



Black bean chicken chili

1 can (12 oz) black beans
1 can fire roasted tomatoes
1–2 chicken breasts (depending on size)
1 cup frozen corn (we use Trader Joe's fire roasted corn)
3(ish) cloves garlic
1 tsp cumin seeds (or to taste)
1 tsp coriander (ditto)
1/8 tsp cayenne
lemon pepper
salt
2 Tb olive oil

Cut chicken into bite size pieces (dice). Grate garlic.
Heat oil in soup/sauce pan on medium heat. Add dry spices (not salt or pepper), stir fry for 10 seconds or so, until they brown. Add garlic, stir fry for 30 seconds or so until it starts to brown.
Add chicken; cook until chicken is opaque.
Add beans, tomatoes, corn. Add about 2 cups of water (add more water if needed until desired consistency is reached). Stir, cook until water is reduced a little, spices are mixed, and chicken and corn are done.
Add salt and lemon pepper to taste.

The fire-roasted tomatoes and corn really add a lot of flavor. The tomatoes we use are from Hunt's. This time Doug used dried beans and cooked them in the crock pot with some mojito marinade. We usually just use canned beans with nothing added.

We like to stretch our soup with basmati rice. Yum!

It dawned on me that of the five recipes that I have posted thus far, three of them are soup. Yep, we like soup.

Pretzels

We haven't made pretzels for quite a while. It's a rather time-consuming production. But a couple of weeks ago we went to the mall (looking for maternity clothes--didn't get anything) and split a soft pretzel, and when we got home Doug decided that we needed more pretzels. And of course I decided that we needed pictures.

Here's the recipe:

(oven at 425 F)

Dough:
2 tsp dry yeast
1 cup warm water
2½ cups white flour (+ up to 1 cup more)  (King Arthur Bread flour is really good)
2 Tb vegetable oil (note: if you're doubling the recipe, 4 Tb is 1⁄4 cup.)
1 Tb sugar

(We almost always double the recipe, and use honey instead of sugar.  Probably less than a tablespoon.)

Baking soda bath:
6 cups water
6 Tb baking soda

Coarse salt for sprinkling

Bake at  425° F for 8-12 minutes

Dissolve yeast in water. Add flour, oil, sugar. Beat well to make a smooth batter. Gradually stir in enough additional flour to make a soft dough, only slightly sticky. Turn onto floured surface, knead until no longer sticky, dusting with flour as necessary. Turn dough into greased bowl; cover and let rise for 1 hour. (You can do this part in a bread maker on the dough cycle, too. It takes a bit of attention to get the extra flour added properly and get the texture right before the kneading cycle ends.)

Punch down dough, turn out onto floured surface. Divide into 12 balls (or whatever you want), roll into a long rope, and shape as desired. Thin pretzels will be crispier and thick pretzels will be bready and chewy. Place onto well-greased baking sheet (or parchment paper).



The rolling-out part was rather tricky for Kate, but she enjoyed playing with the dough.



My "over-achiever" pretzel.

When the pretzels are all shaped, let them sit to rise a little more. Put 6 cups of water in a (non-aluminum) pan, with 6 Tb of baking soda. Heat until simmering. Turn down to maintain a gentle simmer. Preheat oven to 425° . (Update: Lately I've been turning on the oven and putting the water on to boil before I start shaping the pretzels, since the rolling-out part usually goes fairly quickly and I've discovered I don't like the texture quite as well if I let them rise too long.)



Lower pretzels into baking soda bath, simmer 10 seconds per side, then remove carefully and drain briefly. You can try using two slotted spoons. (Doug says there ought to be some sort of handy kitchen gadget for this.) Place boiled pretzels back onto well-greased baking sheet (or use greased parchment paper, or non-stick foil with cooking spray--but you need something because they will stick). I usually dunk two at a time, will do four at a time if they're on the smaller side.



Sprinkle pretzels with coarse salt.

You can just bake them without doing the baking soda bath, but you'd be missing out.  I never skip this step.  In addition to a  nice chewy crust., it just gives them a little something extra in the flavor. 

Bake 8-12 minutes, till golden brown.  I often turn them over for the last couple of minutes. 



Kate brushes the finished pretzels with melted butter. This is not part of the recipe, but it sounded like a good idea.




Doug shows off his traditionally-shaped pretzel.



Eat warm. Yummy!

The vicissitudes of life and the vagaries of Trader Joe's

We like Trader Joe's. A lot. We used to have to go all the way to Federal Way to get to one (which didn't happen very often), so we were thrilled when they opened a store nearby. Unfortunately, their business model calls for them to regularly evaluate their inventory and discontinue products that are, for whatever reason, not selling as well as others. And this time, one of our favorite products got the ax.

We did not see it coming. There were no warning signs, no portents or premonitions. We just noticed that we were running low (as you can see in the picture), so on our next shopping trip we went to pick up some more--but upon reaching that familiar spot in the aisle, we scanned the shelves in vain. No Mojito! Where's the Cuban Mojito Simmer Sauce? That tangy blend of orange and lime juices, accented with garlic and spices? We inquired; we received the fateful news. Discontinued.

Alas! This stuff is great. Wonderful in black beans and many other things, in our house it is particularly known as the condiment of choice for carnitas. Kate loves mojito on carnitas. (She used to call it "hito," and when she asked for more she'd say "mo' hito!") The first thing I thought upon hearing it had been discontinued was, "Oh no, what are we going to tell Kate?"

Doug emailed Trader Joe's, and they said that it just wasn't selling well enough, but that if enough people complained they might consider bringing it back. I can see that it might not have been a big mover--I mean, how quickly can you go through a jar?--but we did buy it pretty frequently. If we'd known it was going away, we would have stocked up!

We did find a substitute recipe that we'll have to try. I don't know how well it would keep in the fridge, though. Perhaps we could freeze it in small batches.

Olive You!

I suppose every child figures out how to do this without any prompting. Yum!



And here's Kate with a pomegranate juice popsicle. We got these popsicle molds at Target a couple of weeks ago (they're cool--the cross-section is star shaped) and we've been using them a lot. Quite a lot. Sometimes Kate will sit in her high chair and eat three popsicles in a row. (At first she was calling them "postickles.") We've always had trouble getting her to drink enough, so we figure this is not a bad thing.



She realized she could see her reflection in the camera lens, so she's making eyes at herself. Ha!

Eating your age

Kimberly in China recently posted on her blog about the Chinese age system. The year that you're born is your first year, and your age goes up at each new year. (They do celebrate their birthdays but they don't get older on their birthdays.) They do it the same way in Korea, and there's also a food tradition involved.

Dduk (sounds a lot like "duck," with what's called a "tense" d at the beginning) is rice cake made with glutinous rice flour. It comes in a lot of different forms. One form is little white oval-shaped pieces, that are cooked in soup called dduk guk. This is the traditional dish for the lunar new year in Korea. They say that when you eat dduk guk on the lunar new year, you get a year older. They call it eating age. (This of course leads to the expected jokes, like "So if I don't eat it I won't get any older?" and "What happens if I have two bowls?")

So yesterday I made dduk guk, and I thought I'd share the recipe here.



You probably won't be able to find dduk outside of a Korean grocery store, but if you're lucky enough to have one in the area, this is what it looks like. (Packaging varies.) The stores around here keep it near the produce section.

Other ingredients are:

beef (thinly sliced, if you can get it)
beef broth
garlic
green onion
soup soy sauce (called 국간장, or regular soy sauce in a pinch)
sesame oil
black pepper
eggs

I have this cookbook called A Korean Mother's Cooking Notes that explains how to boil some beef brisket with garlic and green onion for two hours. I didn't do that. I just used a carton of beef broth from the store and added a little more water.

Put the broth on to boil with little of the garlic and some of the green onion, and a couple tablespoons of the soup soy sauce.

Cut up your beef into thin strips, mix with garlic, a little sesame oil, a little soy sauce (this is actually supposed to be regular soy sauce, not soup soy sauce), some of the green onion (probably mostly the white bits), and black pepper, and stir fry it. (This all a "to taste" kind of thing. I put in lots of garlic. And lots of black pepper.)

Beat up the egg and add the rest of the green onion (mostly green bits). The book just calls for one egg, but I used three. My sister Betsey likes to use a lot of egg, too.

Rinse the dduk. This is supposed to keep the slices from dissolving in the soup. I'm not sure how it does that, but I guess it works.

Drop dduk slices into boiling beef broth. When the slices float to the top (which doesn't take long), turn the heat off, then add the egg mixture and stir it so the egg cooks in stringy bits.

Put in the stir-fried meat. (This can be added earlier, if you want.) Add a little more sesame oil to the soup, if you like it.



My dduk guk is thicker than what you'll generally see in Korean restaurants. It turned out really well. This batch was particularly tasty. I think it was the beef broth and all the garlic, and the dduk was a really good consistency, too. (It's easy to overcook, and then it gets slimy.) Kate was not impressed, though. I got her to taste the broth a little, and she said it was good, but she wasn't interested in actually eating it. Apparently I have been remiss in my food-acclimatization duties.

"More medicine!"

This is not a post about medicine. This is actually a post about cinnamon. We have recently discovered that Kate really likes cinnamon, but she keeps calling it medicine. I suppose "cinnamon" and "medicine" might sound kind of similar, if you're not too familiar with either word. We have been correcting her, figuring it's probably a good idea to understand what medicine is and is not, but it hasn't sunk in yet. Tonight she asked for "more applesauce and medicine."

In the meal where the cinnamon was first introduced, Kate was having applesauce and horchata (a Mexican rice drink), which both go well with cinnamon, but she was also having a bit of a lime drink that Doug shared with her, and she wanted cinnamon in that too. She still sometimes asks for "lime juice and medicine." We try to tell her that lime and cinnamon don't really go together, but as they say, there's no accounting for taste.

Christmas food

This is one of the things that I got for Doug for Christmas. Salt! Not just any salt--Danish Viking-Smoked Sea Salt. We don't know if this means it's smoked by Vikings, or perhaps on Vikings. Doug thinks it's pretty cool. We've been enjoying trying it on things. A little goes a long way. We liked it in our bacon lentil soup, and on salmon.



I ordered some Wallace and Gromit Wensleydale for Barb and Kyle (completely forgetting that they were going to Ohio for Christmas, but it worked out okay. It was delivered the day before they left). Doug also brought home some for us, from Tacoma Boys. It's expensive, but hey, it's Christmas. We have gotten it once before and liked it. It has kind of a grainy texture and a nice flavor, and it's really good with pear.

We got Ratatouille for Christmas (from Betsey!) and were disappointed to discover that there's no commentary on the DVD. Bummer! I was looking forward to hearing Brad Bird. We also borrowed Stardust from Scott this past weekend. I enjoyed it a lot. I thought it was very nicely self-contained and well realized. But it doesn't have a commentary either. What's up with that?

Tonight we are going to go over to Rebecca's and play Settlers, and snack. Sounds like fun. Happy New Year!

Bacon Lentil Soup

By request, here's the recipe, with comments from Doug.

(modified from The Soup Bible, edited by Deborah Mayhew, New York: Hermes House, 1999)

Bacon Lentil Soup

Ingredients:
Bacon (1 pound), sliced into 1 inch lengths. (Pepper Bacon is good for this)
1 medium or large onion, roughly chopped
2 carrots, thinly sliced into rounds (I usually use more like six, and just chunk them)
1 large potato, roughly chopped (or more as desired)
(other vegetables: fresh string beans, parsnip cut as carrot or Trader Joe's Fire Roasted Sweet Corn)
1 cup lentils, sorted and washed (we usually use red lentils--they cook faster)

(Edit: We've discovered that we really like this soup with a leek in it, in which case we leave out the onion.)

Heat a soup pot, add the bacon. Cook, stirring occasionally, until fat is rendered and bacon is crisp.
Add onions, stir thoroughly. Cook until onions begin browning.
Add hard vegetables (corn, carrot, parsnip), stir thoroughly. Cook for 5 minutes.
Add softer vegetables (potato), cook for 5 minutes.
Add lentils. Add enough water to cover all ingredients (about 5-6 cups) and bring to a boil.
Reduce heat and simmer until vegetables are tender and lentils are mushy.
Salt and pepper to taste.
Serve with bread!

We like to remove the bacon from the pot after it's cooked, then add it back to the soup at the very end. That keeps it from getting too mushy. The vegetables still pick up a nice flavor from being cooked in the bacon fat.

I've also made it with black beans instead of lentils.  Also yummy!

Li'l Punkin

Doug got this little pumpkin/gourd thing for Kate a few days ago, and I drew a face on it with a Sharpie marker. Kate loves her little pumpkin. She went to sleep holding it the first night. She's got a thing for pumpkins right now. We've been playing scribblevision on Noggin and putting pumpkin heads on everything.

Yesterday we went out to Scholz Farm (Doug didn't have his classes at Green River, so we had a few hours free in the morning). Kate got off to a bad start when she tried to feed the chickens, stuck her hand through the fence, and got pecked. And then did it again. Poor kid. I was hoping to get some good pumpkin patch pictures, but it was really sunny (bad shadows) and Kate was a bit overwhelmed. We did pick up these two little Indian corn ears. (What are we calling Indian corn these days? Native American corn? Decorative holiday corn?) She was very impressed by the corn and was waving them around and talking to them, and held them all the way home.



Once we got home, we hit a snag that neither of us had anticipated. She didn't want to just hold the corn, she wanted to eat it. Kate knows what corn is, and she likes it. We got inside, I took her coat off, and right away she held up the corn and said, "Want to eat it, Mama!" I had to tell her that it wasn't eating corn, but she kept poking at the ears and saying, "Open it, Mama!" We did have some soup with corn in it for lunch, so that helped satisfy her. Doug had made this soup the day before--it's a bacon lentil soup with veggies in it, and he added some of the frozen fire-roasted corn from Trader Joe's (this stuff is so good). Kate mostly just picks the corn out and eats it. The soup also has carrots in it, which she normally likes, but boy, when there's corn around, that's all she wants.

It was such a beautiful day yesterday! We were outside briefly without jackets on (and then I decided that if we were going to stay out for a while I should get Kate's denim jacket for her). We painted letters on the porch and threw leaves in the air, and poked at puddles in the parking lot. Here's a picture of Doug putting Kate's shoes on in the doorway.

My camera is off at a local shop getting cleaned. When I called they said there would be a 24-hour turn around time, but then when Doug dropped it off for me they said 48 hours. So I am now camera-less.

Kate saw me working on these photos and wanted to color. Here's her contribution:

Recalling Korea (longing and nausea)

A couple of weeks ago we went down to Lakewood for a Korean dinner with our friends Don and Jill Tracy, who had never had Korean food before. I made this layout and just felt compelled to do all the journaling in Korean (on my tablet). I was waxing nostalgic.

My very favorite meal is a good kimchi jjigae bek pan ("bek pan" is the rice and side dish part), but to be really, really good it has to have kim (roasted laver seaweed) as well. Restaurants generally don't provide kim in their side dishes, so when I'm going to have kimchi jjigae I get my own kim and take it along. This always seems to amuse the waitresses. (Look! It's an American eating kimchi jjigae! With kim!) I tried giving Kate some kim before and she didn't like it, but this time she decided it was good and ate several pieces.

This is not where the nausea comes in (though much as I like Korean food, my stomach often does feel a little weird afterwards, especially if I haven't eaten it in a while). Yesterday we got out our home movies from Korea, which we hadn't watched in years. When Doug and I were teaching in Chonan, we borrowed a video camera and shot a few hours' worth of footage. It was fun to watch our ten-years-younger selves and remember all the fun things that we did, and our teeny apartment with the black-tiled bathroom, and Doug's hilarious bit with the green syrup ("My mama always said that one should always put melon syrup on one's pancakes"). Unfortunately, with the hand-held camera shake, I can only watch a few minutes before I start feeling queasy. Motion sickness is not generally a pervasive problem for me, but there are certain things that get to me. It's a shame. I'm sure I'd watch these videos more often if they didn't make me want to toss my cookies. Maybe one of these day we'll get them digitized and I can post short clips of the good parts.

I've been thinking about Korea a lot. Something will come up--a smell, a feeling in the air, a stand of cosmos flowers in somebody's yard, and it takes me right back. Sometimes I miss it so badly it hurts. Actually as the weather has been warming up, my desire to go to Korea has been waning somewhat, thinking about how beastly hot and humid it gets there in the summer. The urge seems to strike mostly in the Spring and Fall. Fall in Korea is just so heart-achingly beautiful. I always get kind of wistful in the fall, anyway.

I've been lucky--after my mission, I got to go back to Korea twice. Many people never get to go back at all. But it's been ten years now, almost, and the itch returns. I've been trying to figure out how we could go back again. When Doug and I went and taught in Chonan, we'd only been married about six weeks when we arrived. People were surprised that we would do something like that so soon after getting married, but really, when else are you going to do it? We had both recently graduated (Doug had finished his M.A.), had no house, no jobs, no kids--sure, let's run off and see the world! We did, and it was great fun. And after Korea, we got to spend three years in Newfoundland. I miss Newfoundland a lot too, though I don't dream about it very much. But settling down (sort of), accumulating lots of stuff and obligations and two large and complex computer systems, not to mention a child, makes uprooting and taking off a rather more daunting prospect.

I find myself drawn to stories about families who get to raise their kids in more than one culture. There's something very appealing in the idea, an increased richness of experience, a different understanding, perhaps a focusing of priorities, after seeing what things are important to people in different places. I recently ran across the story of this American girl (at least I guess she's American--Belgian father, American mother) graduating from high school in Korea. Rural Korea, even. There's also a video at the bottom of this page. She just sounds so astonishingly Korean to me. I am intrigued. I would love for my kids to have an opportunity like that. Maybe not actually attending a Korean high school, knowing what they go through, but, well, it is intriguing.

I've felt a sense of urgency, for some reason, to go, go, do it now before life gets even more complicated. But I have to keep telling myself that Korea will still be there. It changes, but it will still be there. I'll get back somehow, eventually. Maybe to stay for a while, maybe just to visit--long enough to walk the mountains, to explore, to eat, and of course take lots of pictures. Someday.