Tons of Huntington!

I went to the Huntington, with the Huntingtons. These pictures are for those of you not yet convinced to get out to Cali this winter. Its November people! Those are T-shirts we are wearing, and we were too warm. How's that 30 degree day with the minus 10 windchill feeling about now? Here are just a few of the attractions at the Huntington:

Monarch catapillars

Small Worlds of Great Beauty to Destroy



Nerdy Men in Pith Helmets to Stalk

Knowledge! Carnivorous Plants!


And then there was a cool picture of HRH- the Mrs. Huntington looking shocked, but i stupidly deleted it. Imagine it here.

Finally, for those of you I haven't seen in ages- new hair. Side part! Quasi Bangs! Now you can recognise me at the airport. Or as Frances put it, "Ooh look at me all fancy with a scarf and books! I'm soooo coooool".

OMG! WHAT IS IT?!?!

A coworker found this in his yard. Already dead, but we think it might be faking. Its a bug, but it looks kind of like a fetus and kind of like evil. Its huge too, look how it dwarfs the quarter. The pictures are small so you don't have to look at it too closely.

Honey I Ate the Kid....

While I was on vacation the plants kept a-growing (Thanks Thuy!). The basil and thyme and sage and salad greens are all approaching regular plant size, or at least micro green-ness. The tomato shot up a bit, and I transplanted the second tomato into its own cubby with the poppies and spinach, on the theory that tomato one was winning.
Thuy's plants are also coming along as well. (Sorry for the blur- this is not my usual camera) She has mini planters with tomato, sage, spinach and nasturtium, and some peas went home with her. I think they get a little more natural light where she is.
Finally, in a horrifying ritual of paternal cannibalism, we ate the first fruit of our labor! A tiny pea pod with one tiny pea inside of it. It was damn good, albeit slightly unsatisfying split between two. I'm keeping on with a quest to increase yield- I think we're going to try sub irrigation methods next.

What we did in Thailand.

We ate street foods.

We rode in pink taxi cabs and lime green tuk-tuks

We hung on Ao Nang beach.

We made a wish.

We took a cooking class.

We drank fruity beverages and beers.

We got dinner at the so-called "night market" in Krabi town which was more of a "late afternoon/early evening market."

We discovered that the vegetarian festival is not just a sissy veggie eating thing, but also a time to practice possession by the gods, dance barefoot on firecrackers and ritually puncture your cheeks with swords.

We snorkeled.

We visited a very shiny temple, on a very hot day and saw the emerald buddha wearing his rain gear.

We eated seafoods.

We shopped, and Jacob picked up some protective amulets at the amulet market.

Did I mention we ate lots of food?

The Further Adventures of Ms. E: Nepal week 2

A shrine. There are lots of religions and lots of shrines in Nepal.

So this week was significantly less eventful, at least s regards big adventures. There was some rain, some protests, and some Jacob having to do work things to get ready for our trip to Thailand. Also I've had stomach cramps on and off since about Tuesday- so I've spent a lot of time chilling at the apartment, having a "staycation" over a "docation". It's still been nice- aside from stomch pains, I've been enjoying the bootlegged dvds and books and lolling around.

However, we did go to Thamel- the touristy part of town for a fun jaunt. Highlights include:

picking out fantasy novels for Jacob's education in the genre,In return for me picking out some fantasy novels for Jacob, he introduced me to Tungba. Tungba is a big container (on the left) of fermented millet, which you pour hot water (in the pink thermos on the right) over in order to make a hot mildy alcholic drink. Jacob thinks it's delicious. I think it tastes like if you mixed hot apple cider and milk together. I also think a good English name for Tungba would be "Tea Beer".

disparaging the overall dorkiness of all tourists who tend to dress for all contingencies of weather while in the middle of the downtown (hats with neck flaps? Hiking sticks? Rugged sandals and those pants which zip into shorts? Come on! Its so embarassing.)

Here is a interestingly worded sign, a typical storefront in Thamel and some dirty dirty hippy backpacker type. It ecapsulates the neighborhood quite nicely.

Getting an overload of rainbow colored hippy goods on sale to tourists. Its a little like being in Santee Alley- the stores just repeat in a confusing blur along circular streets- you quickly loose any sense of direction you were pretending to have. Mask store, felt store, jewlery store, rug store, patchwork skirt store, singing bowl store and then, yes! Back to mask store again- but is it the same one, or new one?

Buying a Kashmiri silk rug from Jacob's buddy's brother. It's gorgeous.

My rug, sneak preview.

Also fun this week we went to the North Korean state-owned restaurant- one of five rumored outposts maintained by the goverment where all the waitresses are supposedly groomed at elite North Korean hospitality colleges. After our kimchi, dumplings and BBQ pork we were treated to the surreal "show" which included deafening performances by singers, accordian players, drummers, keyboards, dance routines, costume changes and all accompanied by a huge karaoke machine. We assume the songs were paens of praise to the dear leader. All the performers were also the waitresses. And there were sequins galore. Totally bizarre and Jacob is correct in pointing out that it is not to be missed if you are KTM. I hear rumors that there is another branch in Cambodia.

And that's about it for now.

Traffic in KTM is crazy. I took a picture of this intersection because they had stoplights and sidewalks here neither of which are usually part of the equation.

Recap: First Week in Nepal

I've been in Nepal a week now and I guess you could say I've started to get my "mountain legs". Travel to Foreign Lands is always discombobulating, and in Nepal there are such things as the traffic (Kathmandu begs for urban infrastructure, streetlights and sidewalks would be amazing), the food, and the sheer overwhelming strangeness of the day to day - nothing in my head prepares me for the sights and sounds of Asia.

That said however, since about Thursday or so I've stopped visibly flinching when Jacob suggests leaving the confines of the apartment. But let me take this in order:

On Sunday the 14th I arrived in Nepal after about 20 plane hours, and 12.75 hours time difference. I slept most of Sunday and a good chunk of Monday. Jacob took me for a short walk through his hood Monday, and it completely freaked me out- car horns and motorcycles and everyone moving according to their own internal traffic rules.

After that Jacob whisked me off to a resort outside of Kathmandu. On our way there we stopped in Bhaktapur which is outside Kathmandu, the former capital of one of the old kingdoms. It was very scenic and interesting- they got some money to fix up the center of the town and the traffic was much less.

Pottery Square in Bhaktapur

A view of Bhaktapur from a rooftop restaurant.

Then we went to our resort which had damp rooms (Dulikhel Lodge Resort Official Motto: "Cold, but Damp"), ginormous spiders, mostly cold showers and indifferent food (Nepali menus offer everything from Indian and Chinese food to Beef Stroganoff- very little of it done particularly impressively.). That was the hard part. The great parts were impressive views (I have seen the Himalayas and they are really big mountains, just like the books say.) , hawks, pretty birds, a short hike that totally wiped me out, time with Jacob and a beautiful setting. Also lots of pooris for breakfast. (Mmm fried foods).The Himalayas! (It was cloudy in Dhulikel)

We came back to town on Thursday, and ate spicy chinese for dinner. Then yesterday Jacob took me to Boudhanath- which is a temple to Buddha in the Tibetan neighborhood of town. It was beautiful and we spent a lot of time talking to people who worked at a shop painting Thankas- a type of Buhhdist religious paintings- it was fascinating- Jacob was into the religious symbolism, and I was obsessed with getting a sense of how the paintings were put together.

And today we're going to the touristy center of KTM:Thamel for fun and games, so this is it for my post of the week. There is so much more detail I can't possibly convey.

Things I regret.

• I truly regret that my most successful sushi making attempt was a solitary endeavor. I think a sushi party will have to happen if I ever clean the apartment enough to have guests.

• I regret being absent from this blog for so long, as apparently Mom and Dad would prefer to follow my life remotely in picture format, and I have been chastised.
  

So for my folks, here are a few things I have been doing. I have been running many errands to get ready for the trip. One of those errands took me to Pasadena, where there is Yoko Ono installation of trees with wishes tied to them (reminds me of the New Year wish jar). It was pretty cool. My favorite wishes were the two tied next to each other which read, "I wish for everything/ I wish for nothing". Tres Zen. I also made a wish.

I have also been working on a baby quilt for April. While the below sketch was not in the end incorporated into the actual quilt, I can't post photos of the quilt itself until after she gets it. There is something dinosaur in the actual quilt, so I thought I'd show off some fun I had drawing dinosaurs. Hey Mom and Dad! Remember all that money you chipped in for that BA degree I got?! Look at those baby dinosaurs, look how cute they are, see how much I appreciate and utilize that expensive training! And for the record, I drew heavily on both Michelangelo's Pieta and Picasso's Blue Period for inspiration.

• I regret not learning about sub-irrigation gardening in time to set up sub-irrigation in my planters before the trip.

Here is a photo I took a few weeks back. We have one windowbox and 2 pots, and one coffee cup.

These are photos from this week. Thuy and I transplanted the peas to a new pot with a bamboo and rubber band trellis, and I added a new window box to hold the new addition of spinach and to transplant the poppies which were living in the plastic coffee cup. The role call is as follows:

Window Box One:
Sage
Salad Mix
Thyme
Basil
Chives (the most weakly of all the plants)

Window Box Two:
Spinach (most recently planted, not yet sprouted on my desk, but sprouted at Thuy's)
California Poppies (our only non edible)

Individual Pots:
Tomato (white lightning hybrid)
Sugar Snap Peas (with trellis)
Nasturtiums

• Finally: I either regret posting these photos during work hours, or I regret giving my boss the URL address to my blog so he can "snark" at me, as he promised to do.
  

heyyyy....what?

So today my coworker got an email with something strange at the bottom:

Finding the resemblance eerie I checked out the site: http://www.myemma.com/

After so doing I whipped up a small sample of my new logo:

And finally sent this email with my logo attached:

I expect the sports car and check momentarily, at which point I'm driving away from this job laughing hysterically.

Sushi Tuesday

I am learning to make sushi. Its actually pretty easy. The only things which are problematic are supplies- my grocery store sure don't sell sushi grade nothin from the ocean. So I winged it. The best versions I made were vegetarian, but the smoked salmon worked pretty decently.

So do you want to make some sushi? My downfall is usually rice. But there is this blog about fish somewhere on internet (sorry I owe someone a citation here) with a baked sushi rice recipe! Whoo! Okay. Let's do it.

Oven sushi rice:
1 cup sushi rice (equals about 2 cups cooked sushi rice- the ratios will stay constant as you increase the servings.)
1 cup water
Maybe some nori to throw in while you cook it?

Okay so you take rice, put it in a strainer or a bowl and rinse it until the water runs clear. then let it drain in the fridge for a bit (30 minutes maybe?).

Preheat oven to 375.

Boil the water.

put rice into oven safe dish with lid. Add water and bake 20 minutes.

Let it rest for 10 minutes covered.

The end. Perfect sushi rice. Add seasoned vinegar, pull out your Nori, and start throwing some ingredients around. Its actually pretty quick. My next plan is some fushion sushi. Has anyone ever made sushi Caprese, butternut sage squash sushi? No? Oh...it is on!

Eats. I posted them.

Danish breakfast sort of- its Egg and Tomate without tomate, plus bacon. The tomate was unfortunately busy turning itself into a white fuzzy goo, and could not find room in the busy schedule it had lined up for breakfast. Bacon is a good friend though and offered to chip in.



Braised lamb and potatoes in my flea market cast iron pot. I think these are the most iron rich eats in the world. Cures anemia instantly. Even though I suspect the pan had some iron it shed into the sauce, it all tasted good:

End result- spinach with dressing from previous post, braised lamb, potatoes and the braising sauce (thyme, sage, garlic, butter, red wine and veggie broth, reduced and thickened with cornstarch)


Mini quiche. Saved for a rainy day.

Invention is the redheaded stepchild of Mother Necessity

Gentle Reader (s?),

Some bad things happened in the kitchen over the last several weeks. Our plucky, and some might say, obsessively tidy (might) Ms. E, actually had a brief and specialized case of amnesia about what sorts of actions are required to lead to clean dishes. Then some ants, which are always hovering opportunistically in the building, discovered a hole not yet sprayed with organic ant killing spray under the fridge and suddenly, washing dishes meant dealing with ants, and dealing with ants meant washing dishes, and there were all these community meetings and things, and...well...lets just say I didn't cook too much for a bit.

However. On Saturday August 2nd and Sunday August 3rd, I did great battle against foul minions of chaos; Ants and Dishes, and prevailed. See? Clean Kitchen.

I even scrubbed my stove. I took a picture of the stove, it was that shiny clean (it could only have been cleaner when I moved in and took the plastic off of it) when I finished.


Of course in the...cough cough...unspecified length of time that my kitchen was in a state of distress, I ran out of food. So tonight I recycled withered lemongrass, wilted lettuces, the one egg, an old chicken carcass and some leftover wonton skins from a dumpling project, and got to work on dinner.

This is the end result:

Its salad greens with parm, and fried chicken lemongrass things. I also wanted to say that one thing I take pretty seriously is salad dressing.

Lecture break now: I don't hold with store bought dressing. Thats madness. Do you have any idea how much high fructose corn syrup and poly unsaturated fat is in there? What about maldextrose, guar gum, xanthan and stabilizers? And you are supposed to pay 3 bucks because the preservatives are on the house? Whyyyy??? Don't go down that road folks. Real food= you know what the ingredients look like. Much of my motivation for cooking comes from looking at the ingredients list on pre-made food and thinking what percent of it I know the health benefits of. Even that fried stuff thai dipping sauce, which comes from my grocery is simple- its just sugar, chili, vinegar, garlic and water- I checked.

So for posterity I give you this motto: salad dressing is just vinegar (maybe oil) plus fun anything else you have in your house. Tonight's dressing- featured in the unmarked glass bottle involved the following three ingredients and some oil:



Other things I might put in salad dressing include mustard, herbs, pepper, salt, sugar, bbq sauce (the kind where I know the ingredients), and so on. I also have a small library of vinegars- but mostly I use quality balsamic or white vinegar.

And that is the saga of how I returned to my kitchen and my blogging duties.