Pad Thai

For a little while now I have been on a mission to find and successfully make a good, authentic pad thai. It is something we really like and I hate having to pay the price to eat out when we want good thai. We have also been making an effort to make more dinners without meat after I looked at the meals I had planned for one week and realized we were eating meat at every dinner. I have nothing against eating meat, but somehow eating it every day seemed excessive. So anyway, I think we are getting closer to mastering pad thai. You can check out the recipe here if you want. The only suggestions/changes I would make are that we found that you really need to soak the noodles until they are soft and flexible. The 5-10 minutes recommended in the recipe is not enough. I didn't bother getting the banana flower and preserved turnip and it was still good without. Also a note about tamarind. If you are not familiar with it, it is the pulp of the fruit from a tamarind tree. It comes in a bottle or a little block of paste. We found it for around two or three dollars at our local indian market and since you don't use much it will do you for a while. I found that it was a little hard to break it down by adding the paste directly to the wok. It worked better to thin it down with a little water to more of a thick sauce and then add to the wok to stir fry.

The Grand Tour

Okay, so this post is for all of you who live too far away to visit us in the next year and are curious to know what living in cinder block student housing is like. If you're not, feel free to skip ahead. But first off I have to confess that even after over a year of blogging I have not yet learned how to post a picture and have the matching comment show up directly under the picture. It always ends up completely mixed up which is why this is showing up as several different post because it is the only way I know how to get things to line up right. If you know how and want to instruct me please leave a comment.

All right, so here is the tour. Starting with the girl's room.

the boys room

Haven't done much here, mostly because the boys don't seem to care much. Notice the initials on top of the toy box. They are for the boys names, but most days the initials B.O. seem very apt for a boy's room.

the kitchen

Brent built the awesome counter/dishwasher/cabinet space in the corner and pretty much doubled our meagre counter space. We survived for about 4 months without a dishwasher until some friends moving out left us theirs for which we have been very grateful. The picture on the bottom shows you the really lovely backsplash that is in almost every apartment. I wasn't sure I could look at it for another year so we covered it with contact paper and printed some cute tree/flowers (whatever you want them to be) on it.

the living room

Our room

Our room. Notice the dryer in the corner with the lovely silver hose venting outside. We tried to disguise it with the desk and turn it into extra desk space. The lanterns are a cheap (under $10) find from IKEA and really help to brighten up our basement apartment.

Kaise's Concert

Kaise's music class at school has been working hard the past few months for a program that they did the other night. They talked about different countries and performed songs from those countries. Kaise's part was about Brazil. She did a great job and had a fun time. Some of these pictures are a little far away so it is hard to see, but she is on the back row on the far left.

Siri's 1st Birthday

I am a little late posting this, but we wanted to post a few pictures from Siri's birthday. We actually had to celebrate it a day later because Brent was in finals on her birthday. It was kind of a crazy day that began with Siri getting her one-year-old shots and Briggs getting kindergarten shots. Then Briggs went to the elementary school for kindergarten testing and Kaise had a field trip to a farm. Given the craziness of the day and finals week we opted to have a quiet party at home.

I love this picture. Siri was really mad that Brent wouldn't let her touch the flame on the candle.

Siri's favorite part of the day was her birthday bath.

I am the Keymaster

Owen likes to wear Kaise's helmet, but he always wears it like this, I think because it is too big and he is trying to keep it on. I finally figured out what it reminded me of . . .