Joe's Lesson: What Not To Do

Thursday Joe stupidly stuck his hand in an old snowblower when it quit, and Joe thought it was off. A surprise! it back-fired on him, followed with an emergency trip to a hospital, where he was treated for his broken bone, then given 12 stitches. The first thing on his mind was, "Oh, no. Am I going to be able to play my PS3?" And Yes, he still can.
More importantly they say his finger tip should heal fine and that his nail will grow back.
And really, this should keep Joe out of other stupid troubles, wouldn't you say?
Believe it or not, it was his first broken bone ever!

Winter Party?!

As we promised, Joe made a big plate full of Spam musubi today for his extended family to celebrate our local winter festival. Everyone remembered Spam musubi from last year (for the same occasion), and yet again we were left with an empty plate at the end of the night. (OK, I ate the last couple of pieces while doing the dishes.)
Earlier in the day Joe worked hard in making and tasting the musubi just perfect. That spicy Spam, directly imported form Hawaii, was a big hit!!
Like I said, we tried to have a Chinese/Asian theme for the Chinese New Year as well. For a main dish we had Chinese Spaghetti with savory soy flavored ground pork sauce.
On the side we had shrimp/pork pot stickers, sweet/sour meatballs, and Asian coleslaw.
The main event though was the firework display over Teal Lake that we could watch from our front porch. Thank goodness it was about 15 degrees ABOVE zero tonight. A heat wave!!

Did I Say It's Cold??

It's freezing cold!! This morning when I was leaving for work, the temp was still below zero. (I took the picture through our frosted back door.) Though the sun was out, deceivingly cold, the temperature stayed single digit. Now, that's cold. Real cold. Tonight we are expecting it to be 13 below or something. It's actually too cold to even snow.
The photo below was from a couple of days ago. We had nice, fluffy snow the way we supposed to get.
Yesterday, on my day off, I wanted to have fish. I picked up fresh trout fillet from our fishery by the lake to make "chirashi" sushi. We don't need a reason to have sushi, right?
We invited Joe's extended family again for our winter festival this Saturday. I decided to serve Asian/ Chinese dishes to sort of celebrate Chinese New Year. On our menu is Spam musubi. Joe will be busy again making all those Spam musubi on Saturday!

New Year Celebration

Happy New Year!
We had nice and relaxing Christmas and New Year's Day. We had a couple of friends over for BBQ ribs and Cajun beans & rice on New Year's Eve. We stayed up past midnight finishing up the dishes to welcome the year 2012.
Since we had not so typical dishes for Japanese New Year celebration standards the night before, I made a simple "udon" dish for the New Year's Day.
Then, next day, Joe had a snow day due to the blowing snow, while I went to work as normal. Yesterday was my day off for the week, so I enjoyed cooking. I roasted a whole chicken Thai style, served with spring rolls. I hardly roast whole birds, but the book I'm reading made me want to.... I'm that simple, I guess.
The next thing I want to try making is homemade kimchi. The new year, some new recipes to try.

Christmas Almost Here

Today was my last day of work before Christmas, too. Joe and I have three days off!! A miracle. Christmas is almost here, and we are almost ready.
We are going to see "Sherlock Holmes" the new movie tomorrow, so Joe is making me watch the first one on DVD tonight. So he doesn't have to explain to me as much in the theater. Gotta start the movie now.
Merry Christmas to all!!
P.S. Yes, it is lightly snowing outside.

Leg Lamp Cookies, Yet Again

Finally we took time to make leg lamp cookies on Wednesday evening. And finally I got to use my new RED hand mixer from my birthday. It was doubly entertaining because Joe's cousin and his wife sat and watched Joe make his cookies. No explanation. Just funny.
Then, last night was our frosting party. Joe was better with covering more cookies, and I made them neater. Joe was in charge of his leg lamp cookies, of course.
Lots of snowflakes.
Joe's masterpieces.

Happy Printing!

Finally, I printed our holiday season greeting cards today... all 115 of them. Once again I was quite happy smelling the fresh inks, though I felt a little like a printing machine with a stack of paper too slow to disappear.
I must say it was quite an efficient operation. The hardest part really was to come up with the design idea. I'm not used to the full-time job taking up lots of my time and mind.
Little by little, we are getting ready for the Holidays....