Fun Fun 的

Did you know that a polar bear, that seems really big at 1,000 pounds, is really not that big in comparison to a walrus?

A male walrus can weight around 3,000 pounds. Holy Cow. Or, walrus rather.

Today, Mom and I went to the Denver Museum of Natural History. I went for a refreshing run and then Dad came back from his archery coach training. We decided to do the birthday dinner tonight instead of tomorrow night. I decided to create each dish with complex flavors and contrasting textures.
The first dish featured the four flavors that in each bite came up in this order: Soup, Citrus, Mushroom, Kick.
My soup was created by chopping up lemongrass, adding it to 5 cups of vegetable broth and heating it. Then I stirred in 1/4 cup Thai Sweet Chili Sauce. It simmered while everything else was cooking and about 15 minutes before serving I added 1 large portobello mushroom, chopped.
It created a great combination of a lemony flavor with an afterkick, and the mushroom to calm it down.

Next came the main creation. I cooked quinoa in vegetable broth. I then made a sauce with the following:

1 1/2 cups vegetable broth

1/4 cup orange juice

3 tbsp. rice vinegar

1 tbsp. apple cider vinegar

2 cloves minced garlic

1/4 tsp. ground ginger

After mixing those ingredients and putting them on a burner, I added a slurry of 2 tbsp. cornstarch and 2 tbsp. water and continued heating it until it thickened. However, I didn't make it too thick, because I wanted to be able to drizzle it.

Next, I cut 3 chicken breasts into small slices and sauteed them in light olive oil.

I removed those and sauteed 1 sweet potato, chopped, and 2 zucchinis, chopped. I added a splash of Thai Sweet Chili Sauce and a splash of vegetable broth, then added a lid to steam the vegetables for about 10 minutes. I added the chicken, stirred well and brought everything to the table.

The sauce gave another complex mix of flavors, and various textures of the meat, vegetables, quinoa and sauce.

After dinner we went to see the 3-D Alice in Wonderland, and after that came the ice cream pie that I made on Friday.

Dad didn't see me make it, so he thought it was storebought! Crazy kid.

Eating the ice cream pie was exquisite. It was a great combination of flavors and textures with the outside cookie, the bottom ice cream that had melted and refrozen, making it harder, the other ice cream and the surprise strips of fudge.

Overall, I finally feel like I'm getting back the touch--the ability to just know what to add to a dish or what method to use to prepare something. This meal can be very well described using Chinese grammer--the grammar in which you can take an adjective that isn't necessarily positive or negative but then say it twice (plus 的) to make it positive. This meal was 辣辣的，酸酸的，甜甜的，很好吃。

Speaking of Chinese--I have planned a Chinese language day camp for this summer as part of the series of day camps I am planning for the fellowship for which I am applying. I've spent tons of time planning these camps, so I'm really hoping it works out. One of the camps is an exploratory myriad of archery, Dutch oven cooking, hiking and service learning, one week designed for 6-9 year olds, one for 10-13 year olds. Another is an environmental education camp focusing on reduce, reuse, recycle. Then I want to do a half-day camp for little kids using story telling and art, another half-day camp for older kids using photography and movie maker on the computer to make stop animation. Then I have a week of half-day German language and half-day Chinese language. Finally, I have a week of Culinary Journeys in which we cook food from various countries and learn about crafts, music, dance, etc. from that country. Man, I hope this plan works.

Bananas and a Baby

Fact: My cousins' child is the cutest person I have ever seen.
Another fact: The cousin's idea of making banana boats filled with peanut butter, nutella and chocolate chips was almost as delicious as the kiddo is cute.
Almost.

It's a pretty simple operation. You just cut the bananas, splitting them lengthwise without cutting all the way through the peel on the bottom side.
Fill with the good stuff (Peanut Butter, Nutella, and Chocolate chips), place in a baking pan, heat up in the oven until it's all gooey and melted.

Enjoy with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

Jumping back a bit, we had delicious black bean burritos for dinner. It was wonderfully colorful!

It kept snowing and snowing, up to about 8 inches maybe, and it's still below freezing, although it's bright and sunny out now. Here are some pics from last night.

But, it's time to get the day going, so that's all the chitter chatter that's going to happen for now. 

Deviation Black Bottom Pie

I woke up this morning and it was snowing! It's still snowing, and it's actually sticking!

So it was perfectly fitting to make ice cream pie! Right?
Well, regardless of whether or not it is snowing, I needed to make an ice cream pie sometime for the Grandma/Mom Birthday dinner that is coming up. Mom related the story of a black bottom pie, a.k.a. "fat bottom pie," which had a crumb crust on the bottom, but in my past experience I've had the crumb crust always separate from the ice cream, so I deviated from the past pie a bit.

This is how it happened:
For the mold-able chocolate I melted:
4 Tbsp. butter
Then added:
1/2 cup baking cocoa
2/3 cup sugar
A pinch of salt

I heated it to boiling and got it to thicken a bit. Then I added a splash of vanilla and stuck it in the freezer to thicken it up quickly. The result was a chocolate clay that didn't harden to solid fudge, but could be used to make shapes.

I began the ice cream pie by putting a layer of chocolate ice cream on the bottom of a spring-form pan.

Then I pressed Pamela's Extreme Chocolate Cookies (Gluten-Free) vertically around the edge, like Ladyfingers.

Then I put a layer of vanilla ice cream, but not in the center. Just a ring around the outside.

And then I took some of my mold-able chocolate and made a sun-like pattern.

And then came another layer of vanilla.

And then a mocha ice cream layer that filled in the little hole in the middle and then all the way across the top.

And then a pattern of chocolate dividing the coffee layer into quarters. And then added vanilla in each of the inside corners. And then I made shapes with the chocolate molding stuff and did a symmetrical pattern.

It looks cool and you can't go wrong with ice cream. Sunday should come fast so we can dig in!

It's still snowing...

This is how we roll.

Today was wonderful because my liebe cousin and his wife and kiddo came to visit. Family is amazing.
We spent a few hours entertaining ourselves with watching the kiddo, and then we went for a nice sunny walk. We got back and went to the store to get some sushi making ingredients and got to work.
Well, it took a looonnggg time, because we had to wait for the rice to cook before we could even start rolling. Sooo, we ended up eating dinner at about 8:00 pm, but no worries, it was totally worth it! The fish wasn't super high-grade, but hey, that's probably what we get for buying it at King Soopers.
Still, the experience was fun--my good ol' cousin has always taught me the best of skills, and tonight sushi was added to that.
First, you have to cook some short-grain rice, and then mix in rice vinegar. We cooked 1 2/3 cups rice dry with 2 cups water to get about 5 cups cooked rice, to which we added about 3-4 Tbsp. rice vinegar.

While the rice was cooking we cut up cucumber, avocado and our fish.

Since the Mom and Grandma didn't want to eat any raw fish, so we made lemon-pepper steaks for them.

Once the rice was ready, we laid out a piece of nori seaweed on a bamboo rolling mat. But to make it easy to clean, we put it in a plastic bag. On the seaweed, we pressed rice across it all. A space at the bottom is supposed to be left so it can seal when you roll it up. Ours was a bit too thick this time.

Then we laid out the deliciousness of fish, avocado and cucumber.

And rolling--the "most important step" is the first roll that secures the goods inside the rice. Cousin did well, I pressed too hard and the avocado and fish got squeezed out. I'll just practice more!!

After it's rolled, it's cut into pieces...which we ate with our hands, because there was a total of one chopstick in the house.

Yay Cousins! Yay little kids! Yay Colorado! Yay Sushi!

Go team!