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CURRENTLY VISITING HAWAII!!

Hawaii

Hawaii
Akaka Falls

See the World for Free

The idea here is to TRAVEL THE WORLD regardless of time or budget. It dawned on me one day that even if I had unlimited time and money (which I definitley do not), I still couldn't see everything in the world that I'd like to see--I'm simply not going to live long enough to do it.

But I had a bit of brain wave and soon after the travel envelope was born. This is an actual physical envelope. I typed the name of every country in the world, plus every state in the US on little slips of paper which I then put into the envelope. In the beginning we (myself, my husband, Dave and daugher Catherine) would draw out a slip at random at the beginning of the month and that's where we would go---at least in our minds. We grab some books about the country from the library and put them in our bathroom to look at. We also check out some videos about the country if any. We check it out on googleearth, listen to the music, try the food, maybe even attempt to learn a dance or celebrate a festival.

After the first two years we discovered that even virtual traveling can be tiring, so we travel now whenever I happen to be in the mood.

It's great fun. I especially love it when people I meet have been to the place I'm "visiting" in real life, or get excited and have some virtual adventures of their own. I hope that anyone who comes across this blog will feel welcome to come with us on the trip!



You have a standing reservation to see it all!

Jun 28, 2010

DIM SUM!!

WOW!!  Our most elaborate attempt at foreign cooking yet.  The original intent was to try out a new Chinese restaraunt that's supposed to be good, but the library had a book called Dim Sum with pictures and recipies and I lost all control.  Yesterday's dinner menu was: rice, crab dumplings, potstickers, orange meatballs, scallion pancakes, stuffed mushrooms, and stuffed bao bread all made from scratch! Dave and Catherine were drafted naturally, and we are all proud of ourselves.   We hung a Chinese lantern (50 cents at a yard sale), turned on some Chinese pop music from the internet, Catherine and I stuck chopsticks in our hair and we had a feast. 

To my immense delight none of these dishes was very hard.  I picked them out with an eye toward spending the least possible money on weird sauces that we would never eat again and discovered that it was possible to feast on the cheap.  To take this item by item:

Rice-duh.
Potstickers---The scary thing here was making the wrappers.  The recipe is 3/4 cup flour 1/3 cup water.  I just couldn't believe it would work.  I ate some mighty tough tortillas based on the same idea.  It works FINE! I divided up the dough in 24 portions as recommeded, which forced me to roll the wrappers very thin and enabled me to do the fancy pleating and everything.  Result was surprisingly professional--although I wonder how many hundreds of potstickers a real Chinese cook could make in the time it took me to make 24.  Filling was basically pork, scallions and cabbage--first fry lightly in oil then add water and cover.

Crab Dumplings--wrappers the same as the potstickers with the addition of a little spinach.  Filling was cooked shrimp lump crab.  These are steamed for 10 minutes.

Orange meatballs--yum--they're supposed to be steamed, but we only have one small steamer--so we baked them--ground beef, orange peel, oyster sauce are main ingredients. 

Bao Bread--possibly my favorite discovery.  A simple yeast bread dough--then roll out in 3 inch circles--stuff with a pork filling--gather at the top to close, fry briefly and then steam.  Simply terrific texture.  Must try again because I burned the bottoms slightly.

Scallion pancakes--another flour based dough make the dough, roll, sprinkle scallions, fold up in a fancy Chinese tube then squish tube and roll again into pancake shape--fry.

Stuffed mushrooms--again pork filling and again a bit of frying and then steaming.

Time-wise--not something I'd want to do everyday--about an hour to make the fillings on Saturday and then about three hours on Sunday to put everything together and cook it.  Would go much faster next time now that we have an idea.  Still, loads of fun and since our kitchen is tiny we got to enjoy some real Chinese style crowding too.