Last weekend we drove down to Portland for probably the last time until spring. Kim & Ryan are leaving on Tuesday to go to Europe where they'll spend 6 weeks with friends & then from there head to Thailand to travel around until April or May. I will miss them, of course, but I am so excited for their adventure! It has been so great to move here & be able to hang out while we settle in. But now we will go on our separate adventures, theirs international & ours in our new city, and come back together in the spring rejuvenated! And it's only 6 months, until a few months ago none of us had seen each other since our wedding 3 years earlier. I honestly don't know how I made it that long without face-to-face contact. They are family. Next on the list is for Amber & Simon to make it out this way & then the reunion will be complete.
So on Saturday we had a going away party complete with my best rendition of Asian-inspired cuisine, with lots of assistance from anyone who happened to be hanging around the kitchen. As delicious as the food was, I think the real thing might be a teensy bit better, at least the dumplings for sure. I was a bit surprised by how much they didn't look at all like the picture in the cookbook. But I've read about how food stylists blow torch raw turkeys to make them look perfectly brown or make ice cream out of mashed potatoes so it doesn't look melted in the picture, so I'm going with the idea that maybe the dumplings in the picture were made out of plastic. They just looked so damn perfect. But alas, this was my first time making them so perhaps I just need more practice. But they tasted amazing & that's really all that matters in the end.
Part of the idea of making the party Asian-themed, aside from the obvious, was that the food is so cheap to make, especially when you shop at the Asian market. Kim had never been before so it was quite exciting to introduce her to the world of technicolor grocery shopping. Bright lights, Asian dance music blaring out of the speakers, packages of food decorated with every color of the rainbow, Hello Kitty paraphernalia lining the shelves, desserts in colors not found in nature, etc. The key is to go in there without a list because if you're looking for something specific you'll just make yourself crazy, as we discovered with trying to find bonito flakes.
We bought everything we needed for spring rolls & dumplings & lots of different types of desserts & snacks & the total was 45 bucks, enough food for probably 30 people or so. That's what I love about shopping there, it's actually really hard to spend a lot of money, even when you're throwing random stuff into your cart just because the package looks kind of cool & weird.
So I bid you farewell Kimberly & Ryan! I hope you have the greatest of adventures, as I know you will. I look forward to hearing your stories & the things you learn along the way. Be sure to eat delicious food & lots of it, try at least one fried bug of some sort on a skewer -- you never know, maybe they all taste like chicken, -- and have sooo much fun stepping into the unknown. It will be grand. Love to you both.... xo
...spring rolls with rice noodles, lettuce, carrot, cucumber, tofu, cilantro & mint.
...fried tofu with cilantro yogurt dipping sauce.
...soy ginger dipping sauce for the dumplings & spring rolls.
...dumplings filled with a mixture of napa cabbage & shitake mushrooms.
...wasabi peas.
Recent Comments