Mike, Jill, Lucy, & Wubie!

This weekend we hosted a birthday party for Auntie and Grandpa…our annual August birthday bash.

It was a lovely day so we all decided to have a picnic in the park, then come back home for cupcakes. It was so relaxing in the park, I forgot to take any pictures, so we’ll have to start with the cupcakes Lucy and I made…

the gang’s all here…

about to sing the birthday song…

partygoers and birthday celebrants. Happy Birthday Grandpa and Auntie!

“I’m a princess who doesn’t need a crown.”
— Lucy, after much deliberation (and misplacing her tiara) adds a new princess rule

We visited my mom (Lucy’s Gma) last weekend. In addition to getting caught up (and getting our fill of soup and adobo) we got a big bag of frozen lumpia to take home with us. Score!

Lucy and I decided to take a few pics of the batch we cooked up today. I like to wrap my lumpia in lettuce before I chow down, something I picked up from eating eggrolls at vietnamese restaurants. The lettuce adds a nice clean, cool crunch to go along with the fried, warm crispiness of the lumpia.

Of course, you can’t have lumpia (or just about any of my favorite filipino foods) without vinegar. I made sure to snap a pic of the condiment squirt bottle I use for my vinegar. The squirt bottle is great because you can get as much vinegar as you want as you chow down w/o having to double-dip your lumpia in a shared sauce dish. (Once bitten into, a lumpia’s structural integrity goes downhill fast; double-dipping would leave lumpia chud in the sauce dish.)

I usually stick the following in my sauce:

• vinegar
• garlic
• soy sauce
• pepper
• chili peppers

Hungry? Some miscellaneous links:

• Burnt Lumpia (Filipino Food Blog)
• My video of my mom making making lumpia (with help from a baby Lucy)
• The kid chowing down

“I’m a sardine cartoon!”
— Lucy acting silly at the kitchen table

“Here’s my house
With furniture and a mouse”
— Lucy singing as she plays with her dollhouse

A while back I read an article on “cowpooling”, where people join together to buy grassfed beef directly from a rancher at a reduced price. The article mentioned a group, the Bay Area Meat CSA, that helped do this.

So I started checking out the site on a regular basis and eventually decided to join seven other people in agreeing to buy 1/8 of a grassfed cow from a bay area source. The price we paid covered the rancher, the butcher, and miscellaneous associated costs.

So, last week I picked up my 1/8 of a cow, which came out to around 50 pounds of frozen steaks, roasts, and hamburger meat. I’d already arranged to sell half of it to my sister, so my eventual haul was around 25 pounds of grassfed beef for about $122, which averaged out to a little less than $5 a pound a really good deal.

I think we’re set for a while, but I’m sure I’ll be placing another order sometime in the future.

One of our local stores has little shopping carts for the kids…Lucy loves it! She pushes her cart around and puts random things in it. If the bunch of bananas needs room, out goes the lettuce. No mommy, you may not put that in my cart!

I try to steer her clear of the other shoppers as she gleefully strolls down the aisles singing. The checkers are always very nice to her too…and point her to the treat box by the door. It’s a great way to shop!

Just a quick post about one of my favorite subjects: food. Back when we were teenagers, my friend John and I would sometimes drive (actually, he’d drive—I didn’t have a license!) up to SF late at night just to eat at a favorite restaurant in Chinatown.

10 PM on a school night? No problem. We’d just make sure we had our trusty Maxell 90 minute cassette (“All Mod Cons” on one side, “Setting Sons” on the other) in the deck, a couple of bucks for gas, and we’d be off! Those were fun times (except for having to wake up for school the next day.)

I started going to Cho’s, a tiny dim sum restaurant on California Avenue in Palo Alto, back in the 1980s, when I worked at the now gone Tower Records in Mountain View. For me, Cho’s epitomized the small “Mom & Pop” type of place. I remember for art he had drawings of jet fighters, courtesy of his kid, scotchtaped to the walls. The kid was probably no more than 5 or 6 years old back then. He must be 30 by now!

Anyway, back then potstickers at Cho’s were always part of a good day on California Avenue: hit the comic shop, check out guitars at Draper’s Music, drop by Printers, Inc. Books, inhale potstickers at Cho’s, see a show at the Keystone Palo Alto. Yep, that would’ve been a pretty good day.

Years sprint by, things change. John’s in Arizona now. He’s married with three kids. California Avenue is a different place. No more comic store, no more Draper’s Music, no more Keystone, no more Printers, Inc.. Everything changes, old favorites drop off the radar and eventually (if I’m lucky) become treasured memories.

Cho’s is still there. I still find myself at Cho’s every once in a while when I need a potsticker fix (enough to warrant having Cho’s phone number on my cell phone!)

It’s comforting to hear Cho say, “Potstickers, ten minute. Bye-Bye.” when I place an order. I guess after all these years it’s just nice to have something remain consistent, something to just be there. Thanks for all the potstickers and for being there, Cho.

On Sunday we went to Japantown for lunch. Before settling on a restaurant, I gave the girls a quick walking tour and pointed out some places I remembered from my youth.

I dig this picture (left) that Jill took of the Filipino Community Center. It looks like a giant Pocky box is peering in, trying to gain entrance. Alas, in reality the scene wasn’t nearly so cool. Just a normal, non-giant Pocky box we had in the car being reflected in our car window.

I recall going to this center a few times a long time ago, when I was around ten, usually tagging along with my sisters. I’m fairly confident of the timeframe because I vividly remember hearing Paper Lace’s “The Night Chicago Died” on the car radio for the first time when leaving the center one day. The ten year old me loved that tune.

The building on the right, Okida Hall, is next door to a restaurant I worked at as a teenager. I remember the hall being used as a martial arts school back then. The front doors would be wide open during the day and I could see the students in their Gis practicing. The teenage me though it was very cool because it reminded him of the scene in Enter the Dragon where Bruce Lee first steps foot onto Mr. Han’s island.

This is the restaurant I worked at. A friend who waitressed there got me the job. A day after I started, the friend had some kind of falliing out with the place and quit. I worked there for a couple of years as a busboy/dishwasher/kitchen helper. I remember the family that ran the place as friendly and kind.

Jill took a picture of the alley next to the restaurant (right) after I pointed out the sewer drain and mentioned it as the place I’d dump my bucket of dirty water after mopping up the restaurant each night. The teenage me had awful looking hands during this time. I was always going back and forth between cleaning tables and doing dishes and would never spend the time to put on any kind of gloves while at the sink. It was too much of a hassle for a teenager, I guess. As a result, the skin on my hands was always peeling and falling off from doing dishes.

Here we are doing a little grocery shopping. This brought back memories of a few occasions when I had to grab cabbage or pick up fish for the restaurant. I’d be running through the streets, apron on, trying to get that big fish back to the restaurant. In these pics Lucy is absorbed in a box of “tiny special” dolls her mom picked up for her at Nikaku earlier in the day.

We ended up having lunch at a hawaiian place. Lucy was especially excited because she got to order french fries, a favorite she hadn’t had in a few months. Her parents split a plate of Kalua Cabbage and Pork. The middle-aged me thoroughly enjoyed his Sunday.

See more pics.

Pics of food! Can’t go wrong with that. Anyway, above are a couple of pics of the organic strawberries and spinach I picked up at the Mountain View Farmers’ Market on on Sunday. We go through strawberries pretty quickly, so I said “what the heck!” and just bought a case. That’s over 12 pounds of strawberries! Luckily, our freezer is big enough for them.

One really cool thing about getting ‘em at the FM: they average out to about the same cost as the nonorganic strawberries I’d been getting from Costco. Score!

The organic spinach was actually kinda expensive compared to other places I can get it. However, I thought I’d pick some up to try out. It’s already just about gone and it’s just Tuesday.

The bottom left pic is just a quick shot of my (mostly) primal tacos: ground turkey on romaine lettuce hearts. There’s a bit of cheese there, but not too much. I like the romaine lettuce hearts because they give that satisfying crunch without having to use taco shells.

This weekend I’m going to try making a rice substitute out of cauliflower. Hopefully, it’ll work out because I miss my stir-fry over rice! I’ve no doubt the results will make it onto this blog via another food post.

Lucy and I made madeleines today with our acorn pan…love it almost as much as our mazed-shaped brownie pan. Such cute little cookies!

We’ve been trying to eat better lately. One offshoot of this has been eating a lot more fruits and veggies. At first, we just bought whatever we could find at the neighborhood PW or Costco. However, this eventually lead to weekend trips to local Farmers’ Markets and paying heed to how the stuff we were eating was grown. Jill and I have joked about our “journey”, wondering how soon it will be before we’re wearing hemp sandals and debating the merits of raw goat’s milk.

We try to buy organic (despite that Penn & Teller episode) when we can, but sometimes it’s not practical due to convenience, cost, location, etc.. Because of this, we’ve adopted a “This Should Be Organic, This Doesn’t Matter” philosophy based on articles like the following:

• The New Dirty Dozen: 12 Foods to Eat Organic
• The Clean 15: Foods You Don’t Have to Buy Organic
• Top 12 Fruits and Vegetables You Should Buy Organic

Because some of the articles above use the very irritating “let’s divide this one short article into multiple pages so we can increase out web site hits” philosophy, I’m posting the relevant info here:

Should Be Organic: Celery, Peaches, Strawberries (gotta work on this), Apples, Blueberries (gotta work on this too!), Nectarines, Bell Peppers, Spinach, Kale, Cherries, Potatoes, Grapes, Leafy Greens, Carrots, Pears, Tomatoes.

Don’t Necessarily Have to Be Organic: Onion, Avocado, Pineapple, Mango, Asparagus, Sweet Peas, Kiwi, Cabbage, Egg Plant, Papaya, Watermelon, Broccoli, Sweet Corn (not sure about this), Tomato (huh, this is on the above list too!), Sweet Potato.

Now, many of the foods above we don’t really eat on a regular basis. However, there are some that we we eat pretty much daily. So, our personal organic/not organic list kinda goes like this:

Should Be Organic: Spinach, Lettuce, Berries (Blueberries, Raspberries, Strawberries — we have to be more diligent on the berries because sometimes I still just grab frozen non-organic bags at Costco because of the convenience.)

Doesn’t Have To Be Organic: Banana, Onion, Pineapple, Cabbage, Broccoli.

I’m sure this list will change as we proceed down our road to better health (which I’m sure will still contain occasional pit stops at In-N-Out!) This post is meant as a snapshot, a point of reference regarding where we stand right now (in our hemp sandals, of course.)

Every once in a while our fridge gets packed with too much stuff. This sometimes happens when Jill and I get our signals crossed. If she goes out shopping for groceries in the day and I do the same on my way home from work—BAM! Grocery gridlock!

In the past, this could end up in a lot of waste with produce going bad before we could even get to it. However, these days, we do a much better job in consuming what we buy because of our handy dandy blender.

Late last year I started making a habit of having a green smoothie for breakfast each morning. This has worked out great in a number of ways: I’m eating way more veggies and fruit, I’m no longer skipping breakfast, and I no longer eat nonstop once I get home from work (this is a big one.)

Another big plus with the blender is that though my current morning smoothie is pretty locked down (previous recipe here) with the following…

• 4 oz spinach
• 4 oz banana
• 4 oz blueberries
• 4 oz strawberries
• 4 oz acai juice
• 4 oz almond milk
• 8 oz water
• 1 Tbsp Omega 3 Oil

…I also make sure to do an inventory of the fridge’s contents every once in a while in case any produce looks like it’s entering the “not too fresh” zone. Anything that looks like it’s even contemplating wilting will usually find its way into the blender before it goes bad. This includes old celery, bendy carrots, neglected lettuce, and Lucy’s half-eaten bananas (see pic below). Ewww.

They all taste fine once you mix ‘em with some berries. I love my blender, a gadget that has actually improved our quality of life—just like they promise on TV!