Sounds wonderful! Enjoy!

Oh you poor dear, you'll have to stay by the pool. You're killing me! ;) Have a great time and happy birthday K! Happy Friday Lars!

We're slated for good weather tomorrow too. I think I might actually just go sit in the sun. That's it. Sit. I'm really looking forward to it. I have to help mom with paperwork and so, I'm likely to go there on Sunday and do it after church and lunch. We probably have to go out to eat (wink, wink!). Sol's dirtbombs keep calling me, making me think of cooking, but that's inside. Wonder if I can drag the stove outside? I wish I had an outdoor kitchen. Haven't been cooking too much as we're in the downhill slide to school year ending. We usually wind up with March and April in the biggest drops of homework ever, so they can do all the standardized testing and it's the last shot they have to teach anything. So homework has been taking precedence over eating. Maybe I'll cook and get it ready for reheating later this week?

Happy Birthday to Kevin! Have a great getaway, the weather will be gorgeous and there are plenty of good restaurants in the area!

Have a wonderful time. Palm Springs has changed so much since I started visiting it. Used to love going to The Living Desert "museum " in Palm Desert . Happy birthday to Kevin! Today is DD2's birthday. We have a February/ March cluster !

Today we found out that our bikes do not fit in the back of the pickup with the top closed, and Kevin decided that he wants to leave them here. Since it will be his birthday, I let him choose. We were thinking about taking a skim board to use on Mount San Jacinto, but there is no snow left (; and so we won't be going there. We still have the pool option.

The first time I was in Palm Springs was 1968, and I know it has changed a lot since then, but I don't remember much from my first trip, except that it was hotter than Texas.

Lars

TGIF and Happy Birthday to Kevin. My sis moved to Indio and we visited her last spring. Interesting place for bumpkins from the woods to visit, lol. Loved the Living Desert, and all the new-to-me flowers that were blooming.

Just got home from my first experience with biofeedback. Verrrry interesting.

I have a rare Saturday off and hopefully we can get together with the kids for dinner. It's supposed to be nice out but everything's so mucky, there's no point in even trying to work outside yet. At least it's not snowing!

Have a good weekend all.

TGIF Lars, and a very happy birthday to Kevin.

It still sounds like a lovely weekend, even without the bikes or the boards, I'll be looking forward to the pictures. Here it is expected to be a high of 25 and a low of about 1F both Saturday and Sunday, possibly some more snow.

Tomorrow I plan to start a roaster full of chicken "parts" from the freezer, the assorted necks/backs/carcasses that I save and freeze until I get enough to make stock. So, it's a good weekend for canning.

I have some ghost pepper seeds that I need to start, and the rest of the tax documents to arrange before meeting with the tax preparer next week.

Katie, biofeedback? I hope you can get with the kids on Sunday, that's always good to spend some time with them, especially for them when you feed them so well, LOL.

Rob, make the dirtbombs, then you can both have something to snack on while you work on that homework, plus your Mom can have one on Sunday. Can't help you with that outdoor kitchen, though, we definitely don't want one here right now, LOL.

Annie

Sounds fun (Palm Springs).

I'm in New Jersey. Flew here today for my grandmother's funeral. She passed away last week, at 105 y/o. Her life was very full and long, her last year had been in a sort of gently fading twilight, and her death was, it seems, pretty peaceful and painless, at home with no tubes or machines. So her passing was as gentle as it should have been. Life was kind to her, and at the end no less.

Laying on the couch, lights off, thinking about this house and the things left over from fifty years of being my grandparents' home. There are photographs, my grandfather's calligraphy scrolls, my grandmother's needlepoint art. Those will be taken, I suppose many have already been over the past couple of years. Then there is the random daily stuff that has no value, but that I recognize from fifty years of visiting and sometimes living here. Old toys and books, dishes, things like that. I suppose it will all be disposed of, except for a few bits that people might take for sentimental reasons. Then the house will be sold, as a fixer because it needs a total remodel, although in a nice neighborhood with a good sized lot. And that may, I think, be it for New Jersey, for me. My aunt and uncle and one first cousin live here, but without my grandparents, my connection to this place, a place I never liked much, will be done.

I think I'm going to cook dinner tomorrow at my aunt's. She has a nice Bluestar range and that is where most of the family will be. Her daughter, my other first cousin, is flying in tomorrow. She lives in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia where her husband works for the United Nations. I don't think they like it as much as Switzerland, where they lived for the last several years. But the UN HCR (High Commission For Refugees) moves its senior staff around every several years. They don't get permanent cushy posts in comfortable cities; they have to go where the refugees are, so Ethiopia was, I think, better than some places they might have ended up.

There isn't much scope for home cooking as an expat in Addis Ababa, I'm told. Especially with young kids who are adapting from their previous Franco-Swiss diet (and life). So I figure she might like a dinner at home, at her mom's home anyway. Menu undecided but I'm thinking about chicken marbela. I also have a hankering for ceviche. They may not go together, but tough.

Otherwise, no interesting cooking recently. I have spent the last month on back to back to back business trips. So I've been eating like crap - airport food, hotel food, restaurant food. Occasionally a good ramen or other street food in New York, but mostly crap. As the weeks of this have dragged on, and I've gotten fatter and flabbier, I've started skipping restaurants altogether and going to grocery stores and delis to get "healthy" things to eat. So my diet has mostly dwindled to Greek yoghurt, canned sardines and tuna, bread and cheese, fruit, takeout sushi, and coffee. It's not a bad diet but there isn't much cooking or variety involved.

Although I have discovered that canned tuna plus Greek yoghurt plus a little salt or soy sauce makes a creditable and oh-so-healthy tuna salad. And that chopped raw salmon, Greek yoghurt, and one of those super-miniature bottles of hot sauce that you can filch from restaurants makes a reasonable spicy salmon filling.

When I get home on Monday, I don't have another trip on the calendar for months. I'm going to cook up a storm, enjoy being home on weekends, re-acquaint myself with bicycling everywhere, lose this travel flab, and appreciate springtime in Portland.

Katie, biofeedback? Very interesting. It has been my thinking that health and weight gain both have a lot to do with biofeedback. After all, you can use biofeedback to control almost all involuntary functions of your body, including skin temperature, heart beat, dilate your pupil at will ---- etc. I think that's why there are people who can eat and eat and never gain an oz.

John, sorry that your grandma is gone, buy happy that she left in such a peaceful way. 105! let us know what has been her life style and eating habits?

No special plans this weekend. May be an exploratory journey into unknown territories of the freezer.

dcarch

Rough menu
Chicken Marbella
"Thrice cooked" pork ribs
Mashed cauliflower
Black rice mushroom risotto
Chestnut and pear salad

John, my condolences on the passing of your grandmother, but it does seem like she had a very peaceful passing and a very long and happy life. It's difficult to see the bits and pieces of someone's life drift away, but hopefully there will be some value in the sentimental pieces and your grandmother will live on, in family stories and in memories.

The menu sounds good, but what happened to the ceviche?

Annie

I was doubtful about the fish to be had here in New Jersey, so
I left ceviche off the list.

The dinner turned out well. Kind of busy. Here is the evening, the below was about 3.5 hours:

Start by simmering pork baby back ribs. Remove from water (saving the pot of pork broth), pat dry, salt, and roast. Cut chestnuts, into a pan and roast. Slice pears, place into bowl of simple syrup. Meanwhile, debone and brown skinless chicken thighs in big pan and set aside while adding bones to the rib pot. Make paste from green olives, dried prunes, garlic, capers, olive oil, anchovies, salt, pepper in blender. Brown 1 pound of sliced oyster mushrooms in the chicken pan. Fry black rice in butter and oil. Add broth from the ribs and start risotto. Simmer one head of cauliflower, roast the other head broken into florets and slopped with olive oil and salt. Keep adding pork broth to the risotto, also minced red onion and some of the oyster mushrooms. Mix some pork broth with soy sauce, minced ginger and garlic, corn starch. Deglaze chicken pan with red wine vinegar, harrange browned chicken pieces, pour in broth and roast . Mix a cup of pork broth with soy sauce and corn starch. Mash the simmered cauliflower with half & half and butter and salt. Make a paste with capers, green olives, prunes, olive oil, pepper, all in a food processor. Coat chicken with the paste and return to oven. Pull chestnuts, set aside to cool, crack, and peel. Keep feeding and stirring the risotto, add minced red onion. Spoon braising liquid over the chicken. Fry the pork broth-soy sauce-corn starch mix, toss pork ribs in it, coat and fry. Crack and peel chestnuts, melt sugar in a pan and candy the chestnut pieces. Mix up dressing from olive oil, red vinegar, minced garlic and ginger and scallions, S & P. Baste chicken again. Grate cheese over the roasted cauliflower, mix melted butter with the mashed cauliflower. Remove chicken Marbella, garnish with cilantro, serve. Plate pork ribs. Taste and adjust mashed and roasted cauliflower. Candy chestnut piece in hot pan with melted sugar, assemble salad with pears, chestnuts, homemade dressing . Stir risotto, add rest of browned mushrooms, serve. Melt some Brie cheese into mashed cauliflower, serve. Grate cheese on roasted cauliflower, serve. Sit down and drink wine. Whew .

John,
If there's a good way to go, it sounds like your grandmother did that. I do send my condolences.
That dinner sounds like your usual wonderful effort and I'm sure the family present appreciated it. I'm guessing you will sleep well.

After the burial yesterday, there was a reception and eventually we all went to have a Chinese banquet. I was hopeful, after hearing the restaurant had xiao long bao (soup dumplings), but the food was ultimately underwhelming. The broth in the dumplings was so so and the meat filling was a bit chewy. At dinner I was told of a new (to me) trick to make sure your wonton or potsticker filling is not chewy. It is to include finely chopped tofu in the filling paste. I'll have to try that.

I'll mention a little more about my grandmother, because it might be interesting. She was born in 1909, in a village around Shanghai. She was the eldest daughter of the richest family in the village. Her feet were bound when she was little, but even then the custom was dying, and her more modern cousins would secretly unbind her feet when she visited, so they were never too affected. She was educated at university, which must have been unusually progressive at the time. My grandfather was from a poorer family, a commoner, but was smart and studious enough to go to college where he studied engineering. They were married against her family's desire and had four children, born from 1930 to 1938.

When world war 2 broke out and the Japanese invaded china, my family fled northward to get away from the invasion. They took horse carts, rode on the roofs of trains, walked, slept sometimes in homes and sometimes in the fields. Sometimes my dad, who was a little boy, looked up and saw fighter planes in battle overhead. Sometimes the planes bombed around them. My grandmother kept up the kids' education during this chaotic period, teaching them math, English, Chinese and history.

After the war, the family returned to Shanghai where they lived until the civil war started. As the Communists gained ground, my grandfather and grandmother moved the family south and finally found a boat to Taiwan. The kids went to high school and college in Taiwan and in 1949 my grandfather came to the US. He settled in New York, found work, and took an apartment at 106th near Columbia University.

One by one the kids came over and finally my grandmother came with their youngest daughter, who would have been just out of high school. The kids went to university and then graduate school. One became the head of the Princeton EE department. Another earned a PhD in math and went on to a career in missile guidance systems. My older aunt became an artist. My younger aunt became a chemist, earned her PhD and spent her career in pharmaceutical drug development. My grandfather also went to school here; his Chinese engineering degree was not recognized here, so later he went back to school and earned his BS from Princeton.

Many other young Chinese passed through the apartment on 106th. The sons and daughters of my grandparents' friends, they would arrive in the US, be welcomed, given a place to stay and locals to help them find jobs, apply to schools, learn to drive, learn English. Eventually my grandparents moved to a house in New Jersey where she lived for fifty years, and that is the house I was in this weekend.

I was poking through old photographs of dinner parties in that house, young babies now grown, young men and women now gray. There are thousands of photographs and negatives stored away there. My younger aunt will organize them and scan some. I photographed a few with my iPhone, but I didn't take any away. Someday I'd like to look through those photos, but right now I feel like there is too much ahead still to do. Its not yet time, for me, to look to long at the past.

Oh, sorry - her lifestyle and eating habits. She had almost exclusively Chinese home cooking, lot of steamed and boiled food, some frying, no baking. Pretty plain food, lot of seafood and vegetables, didn't drink or smoke. She walked for exercise. She was genetically blessed, was slim all her life, was lucid and walking with assistance until a week before her death. Even at 105 did not have any major system malfunction, but simply ran out of strength to eat or remain conscious.

John, your grandmother sounds like a strong lady, marrying against her family's wishes, educating her children during wartime and immigrating more than once.

No surprise that she lived a long life, and what a life it was. I hope someone has chronicled her life journey so younger members of the family will remember....

Annie