Rock! Death! America!
Littering our noise on the Earth
January 24, 2012 at 9:55 pm · Filed under Family, Food, Holiday, Kids
2012 is the year of the dragon in the Chinese zodiac. O is excited because that means only one more year until his zodiac year - the year of the snake. XM is excited because it means she is guaranteed noodles for dinner.
We’ve managed to amass a nice amount of decorations - firecrackers and characters for good luck that the kids wrote and animals of whatever year it happens to be. XM has fun being decorations director.
Of course, the food is the main event! I had frozen dumplings that I had made for December 31st, so I fried those up. I love the way they transform - frosty to pillowy in five minutes.
We went shopping for ingredients at Fubonn - the big Asian market in town. O was excited about the bok choy, and they both wanted the cute, tiny, white mushrooms, so the noodle ingredients came together quickly.
We also had spring rolls. I can buy 24 veggie spring rolls for less than $2 at the Pacific Market four blocks from my house. That sure beats paying $3.95 for three at any local Chinese restaurant! I’m pretty sure XM and O could polish off 24 on their own.
We also had the requisite oranges and nuts and candy (do yourself a favor and try to find some young coconut candy), and stuffed ourselves silly.
They both wore their school Year of the Dragon shirts, and mustered up a bit of energy to pose after dinner.
January 16, 2012 at 3:36 pm · Filed under Family, Food, Kids, Vegan
December and January are rough in our family, with six birthdays and Christmas in a five week period.
XM’s birthday was in December, and she had her first birthday party with friends! As usual, my kids have crazy cake requests. She wanted a chocolate cake that looked like the Great Wall of China. It also had to have Mulan and cherries on it. I did my best, but it sort of looks like the yellow submarine to me.
The recipe for the cake is from The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Vegan Eating for Kids. It was my first time using that particular recipe, and I was a little worried because it had you add a cup of boiling water at the end. Luckily it turned out super moist and delicious! I used the old stand-by buttercream frosting from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, sprinkles, and of course, cherries. Request fulfilled!
Her Granny sent her flowers, which was really sweet.
O’s birthday was just a few days ago. He and I have been watching Doctor Who, so he wanted a TARDIS cake. Thankfully he didn’t want it to scale, so I could just make a sheet cake and decorate it.
I got him a wind-up dalek since XM got a toy on her cake. Plus, a wind-up dalek! Awesome! As usual, O wanted a carrot cake, so I used the Incredible Vegan Carrot Cake from Vegweb. I followed some of the tweaks in the comments and used applesauce instead of pineapple, and a little less oil. It came out a bit dry, so I guess I shouldn’t have skimped. I bought blue food coloring at the Decorette Shop, and man did it stain! I still have blue hands, and anyone who ate it ran the risk of blue lips and teeth.
He is happy to be 10 (note the blue tongue).
XM did her best to lose both front teeth for Christmas, but the second one was being stubborn. She just managed to whack herself in the mouth with a squirt gun and knocked it out.
Maybe she can sing “all I want for Chinese New Year is my two front teeth…”
January 12, 2012 at 6:06 pm · Filed under Family, Food, Kids, Vegan
My go-to cookbook for Chinese food is Bryanna Clark Grogan’s Authentic Chinese Cuisine. I can’t verify its authenticity, but it makes some tasty stuff and everything in it is vegan.
I’ve really only tried a few recipes though - dumplings and steamed buns and chow mein are the big three - and I wanted to make something different this week. Enter the Crispy “Pork” with Sweet and Sour Sauce (page 132 for those following along at home). The recipe called for seitan, but I had a hankering for soy curls. Butler’s soy curls are just soybeans - cooked and “delicately textured” and dried into strips. You simply reconstitute them, then cook how you want. They fry up really nicely, so I wanted them for this dish!
I soaked them in hot water and some soy sauce, then fried them in a canola/roasted sesame oil mix. We have to feed six people for dinner, so frying is easier in my Granny’s electric skillet!
The sweet and sour sauce turned out really nice, it was really mellow and not to sickly sweet or too vinegary. The crispy soy curls were perfect. My in-laws said it tasted like it came from a restaurant. I’ve never had sweet and sour pork, so I’ll have to take their word on it! Unfortunately when re-heated in the microwave the curls lost their crunch, but it was still a tasty dish.
O ate it up, but XM is getting picky in her old age (7). She once would eat plain rice by the gallon, and now will barely eat it. She did eat the peas and the soy curls and a bit of rice. Maybe that will put her over the hump to reach 40 lbs.
Also on the menu this week is Lemon “Chicken” (made with tofu). We’ll see how the family likes that! Lemon is hit and miss with the kids, and I know I’ll have one ecstatic to have broccoli and one telling me that swallowing it makes her feel like she is going to throw up. Good times at our table, let me tell you…
January 9, 2012 at 4:50 pm · Filed under Kids, School, Vegan
Say what? A new post here? Yep. When I started up my art blog to help support my fledgling art career, I found myself blogging there instead of here. Couple that with the inevitable joining of Facebook, and, well, blog posts here fell by the wayside.
Not anymore.
I’ve been thinking about it for a few days, and I feel like I want to write here again. I’ll probably talk about board games and beer, esp. D’s basement brewery project. But I’ve been really interested in chronicling our lives as vegans, especially with regard to the kids. We’ve been vegan for about two years now, and it has been an interesting trip.
One thing I love about the elementary school my kids attend is that they encourage all the students to become published authors. Kindergarten and first graders often collaborate on a book, with each kid writing one page. As they get older they write and illustrate stories ranging from a paragraph to several pages. The stories are bound and put in the library, and anyone can read them. Two or three times a year the authors are honored with an Author’s Tea. The kids gather in the cafeteria and eat milk and cookies while the librarian reads a selection of their stories and hands out ribbons to each participant.
You might see the problem there for vegans - milk and cookies. With the blessing of the librarian, I’ve been quietly slipping her a bag with a boxed soy chocolate milk and a couple of Oreos (vegan! crazy!) for my kids. Today I decided to give them something closer to the kind of cookie the other kids get, and baked up some chocolate chip.
My go-to chocolate chip recipe is from Vegan with a Vengeance by Isa Chandra Moskowitz. Now vegan doesn’t necessarily mean healthy, as the cup of margarine implies. But damn, these are good cookies. It can be hard to keep track of special treats or parties that might go on at school, but at least I know my kids will get to celebrate with their peers at Author’s Tea without feeling left out. Congrats to my two budding novelists!
August 20, 2010 at 5:48 pm · Filed under Beer, Board Games
Our new three tap system is finally fully operational!
That is my glass of cream soda. Yes, soda! We bought the book Homemade Root Beer, Soda, and Pop so we could have something on tap for the kiddos. And us. Soda is yummy!
We have two taps for beer - right now we are serving a Widmer W’10 clone and an apricot wheat. Life is better with choices!
We got a chalkboard at a garage sale for a buck, so of course we had to name our brewery. We chose Victory Point Brewing because of our board game obsession interest. The tag line is commonly found in our board game directions: “The winner is the player with the most victory points”.
Looky! We even bought shelves to house our games. Now we can use the table, play the conga, and navigate the floors.
Sadly, this isn’t all of them, but the bookshelves are happy to have some breathing room back again.
August 17, 2010 at 12:42 pm · Filed under Board Games, Family, Kids, On The Road, Vacation
We awoke to another beautiful day in Mammoth. O was still no better, so we got him a follow up appointment at the clinic for later that morning. On the way we stopped by the earthquake fault, which the signs even admit is more of a fissure than a fault, but it is still pretty cool. I remember when you could walk down in it, but now you can only walk along its edge.
Looking into the fault.
We got O to his appointment and after a chest x-ray it was confirmed that he had primary pneumonia, meaning he picked up the actual pneumonia bug, it didn’t start out as a something else and move into pneumonia. She gave him some antibiotics and by that afternoon his fever broke for good and he was feeling much better. Hurray! Except we were leaving the next day to head home. D’oh!
The sun looks so beautiful going down behind the mountains.
We bid farewell to the family and drove my mom up to her place. The next day we headed for Portland, with a stop along the way in Ashland at Funagain Games to pick up our order (Igloo Pop, Gonzaga, and Opera, for those playing along at home). As usual, the kids were great in the car. We always end up driving back into Portland at 5pm, so that feeling of almost being home is put off an extra hour by traffic. Boo.
Anyway, it was a nice trip in spite of the glitches. I was really happy to have had a chance to go back to Mammoth, and to show the place to the kids.
July 26, 2010 at 3:28 pm · Filed under Family, Kids, On The Road, Vacation
The Sunday of our vacation became a day of rest for O. D stayed at the condo with him and they just hung out, napped, and dosed O with medicine when his temps flew up over 104.
My mom, brother, SIL, niece, nephew, XM and I took the shuttle down into Reds Meadows and Devil’s Postpile National Monument.
Rock formation at Devil's Postpile.
It was much warmer down in the valley than up at Mammoth.
Granny and XM.
We went over to Soda Springs, an area by the San Joaquin river where mineral springs bubble up. Unfortunately the water level was so high the springs were way underwater - we saw the bubbles, but it was too diluted to taste different.
The San Joaquin at Soda Springs.
We did wander around the meadow a bit, where we found a snake swimming across one of the waterways.
Sir Hiss.
The cousins and XM filled out some fun Junior Ranger booklets specific to Devil’s Postpile, and were sworn in as official Junior Rangers. We brought O’s nearly completed book with us and XM explained his situation so they gave him a badge as well, as long as he promised to take the oath. Luckily we got the whole thing on tape. It was all pretty cute.
Newly minted Junior Ranger.
Later we took the gondola up to the top of Mammoth mountain. It was a gorgeous day and the views were just amazing.
On the way up.
View from the top.
Hey! I can see our condo!
O wasn’t any better, but it was good for his body to be able to relax. Later that evening we watched a deer wander through the brush behind the condo.
The plan for Monday was to head out as a group to Yosemite. We decided to wait until the morning to see how O was feeling before committing to the plan, so we dosed him up with more meds and crossed our fingers.
Tune in for the final installation: Mammoth Vacation! The Final Days.
July 13, 2010 at 3:55 pm · Filed under Family, Kids, On The Road, Vacation
The next morning my brother took the kids out into the meadow behind the condo. They were just going to run around out there, but pretty soon they were marching off into the forest on a trail. D and I grabbed the camera and hurried to catch up. We found them playing Pooh sticks.
We found this tree by the condo - apparently the gardener watches too much Mythbusters.
That afternoon the friends and family all gathered again and we had a little memorial for dad. Can you believe that at 75 he still had many of the friends he made when he was nine? It was a funny and touching gathering as we all reminisced about Frank Blackford.
Afterwards we hosted a BBQ for everyone at a beautiful spot called Hayden Cabin - an old timey cabin/museum in a little meadow next to Mammoth Creek. I somehow managed not to get any pictures of the creek, which was so full that parts had to be sandbagged so it wouldn’t overflow into the cabin area!
We had the party catered by Angel’s Restaurant, a local place that caters events with a big smoker. I figured as the lone vegans we’d be bringing our own dinner, but it turns out in this not terribly vegan-friendly town that the BBQ restaurant has vegan baked beans, cooks the corn without butter, and makes the most delicious vegetable skewers I have ever had. The owners also said they have vegan food on their restaurant menu, and that they cook the food separate from the meat. Wow! It is really rare to have people “get it”, and I couldn’t thank them enough for being so awesome.
We couldn’t have asked for better weather, the temperature was just perfect.
We had some fun taking pictures on a huge boulder as the sun sank behind the mountains.
O was a trooper throughout, despite the fluctuating fever, hacking cough, and lack of appetite and energy. We decided that he would have to miss any planned events for the next day and just stay home and rest.
That is where our journey will continue - with Mammoth Vacation! Quick! Go Sight-seeing Before the Rest of Us Get Sick Too!
July 9, 2010 at 4:43 pm · Filed under Beer, Family, Kids, On The Road, Vacation
As promised (and in a timely fashion), I bring you the next installment. The first thing we did on Friday morning was take O in to the doctor. She said it sounded like he had a cold, and she could barely hear a hint of a wheeze so she gave him an inhaler and some cough medicine with codeine. It sounds like regular sick symptoms can be exacerbated by patients sudden change in altitude (Mammoth Lakes is at about 8,000 feet), and we all figured he’d be good to go.
We headed out for some sightseeing, and went up to the lakes. Our first stop was at Twin Lakes and a visit to the campground I always stayed at when we came up in the summer. Here is a shot of Twin Falls - the water level was really high this year and everything was beautiful. We even saw a bald eagle.
We drove up past the rest of the lakes and stopped at Horseshoe Lake, where the mountain is releasing enough carbon dioxide to kill the trees. Spooky!
The lake was just gorgeous. There was a huge patch of snow down to the lake shore just to the right of the photo.
The kids were impressed by this big cracked rock.
The road to the upper lakes leads to a great view from the top of Twin Falls. Here is Twin Lakes, and the valley behind it.
Our next stop was for some beer at Mammoth Brewing Company. They had free tasters of all ten of their beers, plus root beer for the kids. The beer is really good, and D and I were smitten with the IPA 395, a double IPA that uses hops with local sage and juniper.
That night we had a party in our condo for the friends and family that had come from all points across the country to celebrate my dad. My brother had a ton of pictures of my dad enlarged and mounted on foam core, so he was watching the proceedings from several vantage points. He also converted a bunch of old family super 8 movies to DVD and had that playing as everyone ate, drank, and chatted the night away. It was a really nice time, and a testament to how much my dad was loved by everyone.
We finally managed to get the kids to bed and dosed the boy up with codeine cough medicine. He slept pretty well for the first time in a few nights, but it would turn out to only be a brief reprieve…
I think I’ll split the Friends and Family Plan into two parts, as I have a dozen more pictures and I don’t want to make this one too long! So I’ll see you again, at Mammoth Vacation! The Friends and Family Plan Part Two.
July 7, 2010 at 3:05 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
We recently drove down through the great state of California to get together with my mom, my bro and his family, and family friends for a memorial/party for my dad. We all met up in Mammoth, an area dad went to as a kid and we went to as a family quite often.
We left on a beautiful, partly cloudy Wednesday and headed south for the long drive down I-5.The kids were great, as always, on the long car ride. Here is O rocking his new headphones.
We stopped in Medford for lunch. This was our second vacation as vegans, so we did some research and ate lunch at what turned out to be a mediocre Indian food place. Not bad food, just nothing we’d go back for. The waitress noticed O was coughing a lot, and asked him if he had allergies. The cough was sort of out of nowhere, and I thought maybe it was just the dry A/C air in the car. Turns out this was the beginning of what would be an interesting development!
Does anyone else make their kids stop for a photo op at a rest area? This one is so pretty, down by the Klamath River just north of Yreka.
We spent the night at my mom’s house outside of Chico. O was looking a little off so we took his temperature with her old-fashioned glass and mercury thermometer (!!!) and it was in the low 100 range. His cough was pretty deep and rattly so we got him some cough meds to help him sleep. We packed my mom’s stuff into the car in the morning and I squished in the back between the kids for the ride to Mammoth. We packed a lunch and stopped at this little roadside set of picnic tables in Nevada. At this point O started to look pretty bad and feel pretty miserable, and the trusty thermometer said 102. Good thing D bought kid’s fever reducer when he bought the cough medicine.
As we got closer to Mammoth we realized we’d be there too early to check in, so we stopped at the Mono Lake Visitor Center for a bit.
There were swallows nesting under the eaves of the building.
The clouds were amazing over Mono Craters.
We headed on into Mammoth. It looked exactly as I remember it, and I hadn’t been since the summer after I graduated high school. In the interest of full disclosure, let me say that I am absolutely smitten with this part of the world. D prefers his forests a little more subtropical, but I love the sharp peaks outlined against the sky and the fragrance of sagebrush and pine trees. We headed up to the condos, where we had just recently been upgraded to the top spot because someone decided to paint the condo we had initially reserved. That put my family, my mom, and my brother and sister-in-law and their two kids in a 3500 square foot, 5 bedroom condo with foosball and a pool table. It was amazing.
The kids enjoyed looking for fish and frogs in this pond while my mom got the keys to the condo. I was adjusting my camera when I heard a splash - XM had fallen in. I guess saying “please be careful!” forty times isn’t enough. Luckily it was only about eight inches deep. Unluckily, I didn’t catch it on film.
The condo was pretty amazing, and we spent the rest of the day catching up with the rest of the family and a few friends that stopped by.
The best part about the condo was the view…we were so fortunate to have a deck facing the mountains instead of the golf course, the road, or other condos.
It was fortunate we got such a large condo, as O’s cough kept him (and us) up most of the night.
Stay tuned for part two: Mammoth Vacation! The Friends and Family Plan.
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