Asian food night

On Saturday Snow invited 2 friends, CiCi and Lilly, over to the house.  Now Snow doesn't cook, but CiCi and Lilly do, so they decided to make us pork and Chinese dumplings.  Here is a similar recipe:

http://allrecipes.com/recipe/pork-dumplings/

The three of them worked solidly for three hours creating one hundred of these artful little packets of pork, egg and Chinese (napa) cabbage.

   Snow and CiCi working hard

          Lily

Here is the finished product, served with a Chinese hot sauce containing salty soy beans - yum!!

Snow hid pistacho nuts inside several of the dumplings, giving luck to the person finding them.  Apparantly I am not very lucky, even though I kept trying my luck 'just one more time' before giving up with a full belly.

I also made shrimp Tom Yum soup which is a spicy Thai style soup.

11/11 - Veteran's Day and Singles Day

Today is Veteran's Day and the kids are off school.  The greatest thing about no school is that I don't need to drive the Molly and Snow to school at 7am so I got to sleep late - well 7.30am is sleeping late to me.  This is one of the rare secular holidays that is also celebrated in the UK, called Remembrance, Armistice or Poppy Day.  In China 11/11 is another celebration altogether known as Singles Day because of the four single digits.  The holiday is known in Chinese as "Guanggun Jie,"  which refers to "bare sticks" — slang for bachelors.  It is celebrated by hanging out with your single friends and gift-giving.  It has recently become the biggest shopping days of the year where retailers offer on-line discounts similar to those offered on the first Monday after Thanksgiving, known as Cyber Monday.

I am just about to head off to Spinning at the gym (the current time is 8am) but I don't expect to see the kids up until late morning.  It took the five of us three hours to clear all the grass and tree areas of leaves so I expect they will be tired.  I love working outside in the fall feeling exhilarated by the fresh air and hard work.  Here is a before and after shot of the front yard.

The kids working hard....