Mmmmmusubi!

Mmmm... Musubi. I love spam musubi. I first had it when my cousin returned from a 1-year hiatus to Hawaii, and I've loved it ever since. Most people cringe at the mention of Spam, but mention it in almost any Filipino household (I'd say 99%... you have the rare ones who join the "dark side" of the vegetarian and vegan movement), and you're sure to make some mouths water.


I like to marinate my spam before frying it for my musubi. I base my marinade on a recipe from the Honolulu Star-Bulletin that I found online a long time ago. It's always changing and always done to taste... and it goes a little something like this:

1/2 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup mirin
1/3 cup water
1/4 cup sugar
1 tablespoon grated ginger
1 teaspoon minced garlic
1 teaspoon grated/minced ginger
1/8 - 1/4 cup tonkatsu sauce
1/8 - 1/4 cup korean barbecue sauce
1/8 - 1/4 cup brown sugar
* sometimes I add something spicy, too... like Sriracha Hot Sauce

I always adjust it based on what sauce is available at home... and what else I feel like adding at the time.

I made these in celebration of the first surf session I had with my brand new 5'8" Rusty Pirhana, which my husband bought at an AMAZING price at the Mira Mesa Rusty Warehouse. The board is *AMAZING* and fun.


My husband completed the package with some Future Fins that he thought would complement my surfing style (haha... as if I were good enough to have one) and weight... the John Johns! :)


I can't wait to take it out more often.. especially as the weather gets warmer down here.

Oceanside: a window of sunshine during rainy season...

My husband and I were able to enjoy a three day weekend together, and we started it off as a family day with my parents. Despite the pouring flurry of rain we had over that week, the sun peeked out for a few hours, presenting us with a window of opportunity to go for a walk around the Oceanside harbor area and have some fish and chips. :)

Why hadn't we done this earlier (when we originally moved to Oceanside)? The harbor is a nice, entertaining walk. I'd definitely do it again, especially when the weather lightens up.

We even found another little fishing pier... tiny and not as crowded as the Oceanside pier. I can't vouch for as much fishing success here, though...


...but it looks like a great place to have a picnic or lunch with lolo and lola! Besides, Caleb made a "friend" that day:


The walk was mellow, but it was still long enough to get our appetites worked up. Before we knew it, we turned around and headed back to Harbor Fish & Chips for some... fish and chips! Yum, yum, yum!


We finished our outing by visiting a local sunbathing sea lion pair who were bullying a third sea lion... poor guy just wanted to chill, but they wouldn't let him join them!


All in all a good mellow day. :)

Mmmm... Brownies... and Breakfast Sausage... and then some... :D

It's difficult to pass up super cheap brownie mixes at the supermarket when they're on sale... they're like an insta-dessert you can easily make at home (and that it's practically impossible to bake wrong... even though I admit to fudging them up a couple of times in the past). Besides, brownie mix gives me more time to enjoy being around my family WHILE enjoying the brownies... and it's kinda fun making them without having to think too hard about it, too. :)



Mmmm... easy, tasty yumminess. :)

On another note, I used my three day weekend as an excuse to eat well while also eating easily.. which gave me an excuse to buy some Jimmy Dean maple-flavored breakfast sausages and make little breakfast sandwiches with English muffins, over-easy eggs, cheese, and tomato. The tomato was an excellent added touch that my husband came up with at the last minute:


And an added bonus: the valentines day rosebuds finally bloomed. Too bad they didn't last as long as we were hoping...

Springtime in (Sometimes) Sunny San Diego

We've been getting quite a bit of rain and dreariness this winter, so the little pockets of sunshine that come by have been quite a blessing. I guess that's just me being a sissy: winters here are nowhere close to how cold they were in Colorado Springs at 7,258 feet above sea level. After moving to San Diego, it's difficult to NOT get acclimated to San Diego's version of cold. The very thought of surfing in San Francisco, where I first learned how to surf, makes me want to cry.

Unfortunately, our baby boy had been battling a cold for a few days, so he spent a few of the sunny days indoors. Thank goodness for this Craigslist score, quite possibly one of the coolest Christmas gifts we could ever buy for a mere $25:



Cold, rainy winters in San Diego often make us long for warmer winters... like Hawaiian winters... and this longing led to us mustering the motivation to make a Hawaiian pizza that was more Hawaiian than, say, the Hawaiian pizzas offered at most pizzarias. Why limit yourself to Canadian Bacon when you can have Spam and Portuguese Sausage instead? We finally decided to make our own personalized version of a Hawaiian pizza using on pizza sauce and crust from Trader Joes... and tossed in some sweet maui onions, just for an additional topping.



Don't the Portuguese sausage and Spam look delicious? ;)



My husband decided to toss all the ingredients on top of the sauce...



...so we ended up with the cheesy goodness you see below:



Mmmmm.... talk about some sweet-and-savory goodness! Next time we make it, we hope we find some slightly spicier Linguica... just to add a little more pizazz to the mix. :)

Healthier Filipino?

With aging family and their accompanying health issues, it's always a challenge finding new ways to enhance their diets while respecting the lifestyle and habits they're used to. Let's face it: it's difficult to ask someone who's lived for so long to make drastic changes to the way they've lived for so many years. I mean, they gotten by okay this far, right? Besides, I need to find ways to make the food I love enjoyable for my little one, too.



One of my favorite things to do is find ways to make some of the dishes I've grown up with slightly healthier. Yes, it does change the way they taste slightly... but you got to give a little if you're going to take a little. Take adobo, for example. I can't help but wonder if the original dish started similarly because it's hard to believe that people consumed so much MEAT in an island country without throwing in veggies to supplement. Haha!

Then again, I do remember an old college friend of mine confessing to me, after eating adobo for the first time, "Karm... I actually ate a chunk of fat... and you know what? I tasted GOOD! I wanted to eat all of the fat on the meat." Take that, health freaks! ;)

When I make the adobo, I often use boneless, skinless chicken thighs. To cut on cost at times (when I have the time to spare, of couse), I will buy the bone-in skin-on thighs and de-bone/de-skin them myself... and I trim off a bit of the fat. An old roommate of mine used to only use chicken breast, but I find chicken breast dry and uninviting. While dark meat is fatty, chicken thighs tend to be more economical as chicken breast... and just about as "healthy." Besides, they're one of the recommended meats in the hypertension-battling DASH diet.

When I cook the adobo, I tend to brown the chicken first and then proceed to cook the rest like a stew... and then I add all kinds of veggies, including (ta-da) zucchini! It gets very colorful and tasty... and I'm sure that there are other variations of veggies I can add, especially if I have to take the beans away (for my father's gout... poor guy!).



Anyhow, the end-product is still delicious and wrought with much vinegar-soaked glory. My husband is happy with the addition of veggies (since he's very health-conscious), and it gets my son to chomp down on veggies happily... AND, at the very least, my parents happily tolerate it when they have to eat it. ;)

On another note, my son (in his pickiness) also loooooooves SPAM with a passion. Luckily, I tricked him into eating the low sodium stuff. While most white people cringe at the thought of him eating "ham in a can," I don't mind it at all, since it gives me an excuse to make some, too! Besides, it's fun and easy to present it in a cute little package.



I can't wait until he's big enough to manage a Spam Musubi on his own. :)

Update

Yes! It's been a long stretch between posts... and since the baby's been born, it's been a long time since I've had ANY time to make much of anything. In fact, I tried picking up a knitting project a few weeks ago, only to discover that the more I wanted to knit, the more my little boy wanted to be held by mommy and given her full, undivided attention. ;)

I figured I'd put some of the projects I worked on with links just for reference... and to get myself motivated to work on more once Caleb can entertain himself for an extended period of time.

During the latter half of my pregnancy I decided to pick up sewing because it was too painful watching everyone have fun on the surf while I sat on the beach with my crochet and knitting projects. As beautiful as the beach was, I couldn't help but wish I was in the water surfing with my husband and our friends.

One of the big projects I worked on while I was in the final months of my pregnancy was creating homemade cloth diapers. Wow... that was a nice crash course in Sewing 101. I wish my mom showed me how to sew when I was a teenager, but looking back at how I was back then (more focused on school and sports than on anything else), it probably wouldn't have worked out if she tried. Sewing cloth diapers is a great, simple project, though... especially since you get to sew (dun-dun-dun) elastic with casing! Here's the original model I tried: the Rita Rump Pocket, available (graciously) free online!


A diaper I made-- note the soft microfleece inner and the cute flannel print outer layers!


An early picture of my diaper stash... complete with homemade microfleece/flannel wipes from the scraps. :)

I first tried them on the baby when he was only a few weeks old (I believe about 6 weeks old... after his circumcision looked fairly healed), and they fit nicely with a small diaper cover (Thirsties Duos-- a very good and affordable PUL diaper cover for babies with skinny legs!) which allowed me to avoid using safety pins (yeowch!).

One fun thing I got to try was using the Wonderwash, a neat little hand-powered pressure-washing device that allowed me to wash the diapers a couple of times while using minimal power (basically Karm-powered!), water, and soap. I would dry it with a small countertop spin dryer, and then hang dry the rest.

I normally sun dry the diapers on our tiny little apartment... porch (for lack of a better word, since we live on the first floor, so it technically isn't a balcony) whenever I can. Unfortunately, given the design of the apartment complex we live in, we get very little sun during the day (normally in the early, early hours of the morning), so I end up doing some of the drying indoors in the bathroom... haha!


Drying diapers with my $1.50 contraption from Marukai Daiso. Woohoo!

We've been house-hunting, though, and hopefully we'll get (at the very least) a nice condo or townhouse in Encinitas or Carlsbad with ample sunlight for sunning diapers. You'd be amazed at how well a little lemon and a lot of sunlight can get rid of baby poop stains on a cloth diaper.

When I was about 34 weeks along the way, my OB-Gyn told me during one of the weekly checkups (they become weekly once you're in that window of opportunity) that I had a small baby. At first it seemed like a relief to me-- I mean, I gained about 40+ lbs (I started out at 98lbs) during my pregnancy, so I was certain the baby was going to be big... but then I realized that I bought (one-size-fits-most) cloth diapers that were good for 8+ lb babies, and a tiny baby was going to need smaller diapers. Thus, I started making newborn-sized diapers for a newborn-sized baby... and knitting wool newborn-sized soakers (that I found on a nifty little site called Ravelry)to hold them up.



Needless to say, I popped out a 7lb5oz baby who wouldn't even fit into the newborn-sized diapers when he could finally wear them (after his circumcision site healed and we didn't have to use aquaphore on it anymore). =P

....annnnnnd I hear someone yawning. Baby's awake! I'll put up more of my crafting projects soon. In the meantime, that's it for now. :)

(Modified) Pineapple Curry With Shrimp

This is a very easy favorite of mine that I make when I'm low on time to prepare a decent dinner. The key thing about this recipe is the Pineapple Curry. The shrimp is usually just extra in the end, as the super-yummy pineapple curry can honestly be used as a tart-and-spicy sauce on just about anything (we've used it in pork chops and chicken most recently). I usually serve these with green tea soba noodles that we purchase at the local Japanese market. :)

I got the original recipe from an impulse-buy cookbook I picked up randomly one day called Quick & Easy Thai Cuisine Lemon Grass Cookbook (from Joie, inc). I highly doubt that the recipes are 100% authentic to the very last detail, but the book gives very simple & basic instructions for making wonderful meals that are just about as good as the real thing. It serves its purpose, especially since I like to modify recipes to my taste anyways... and it has pictures not only of the finished product: it provides pictures of the ingredients AND of various steps in making the dishes. Great resource for someone who doesn't want to deal with super-complicated recipes but also wants room to be creative.

Okay... here's the recipe!

Ingredients

14 oz. (400g) coconut milke (I always use coconut CREAM instead..)
1c crushed canned pineapple
2T red curry paste (if you want a milder flavor, try green curry paste instead)
1/4c fish sauce
1 1/2T sugar
2T lemon juice

1/2lb (225g) shrimp, shelled and deveined*

(optional) garnish: fresh lime leaves

*I use coconut cream instead of the originally suggested coconut milk because I prefer the thick creaminess of coconut cream. The curry sauce ends up having a thick texture. Coconut milk is perfectly acceptible if cream isn't available.
**I actually used 1lb of shrimp, being the carnivore I am. ;)

The almost TOO simple directions :)

1. Combine all ingredients except shrimp and bring to a boil.
2. Add shrimp and cook until done.

Yes, that's it! All you need to do is mix it all up, boil it, add the shrimp (and cook it), and you're finished! Better yet-- don't add the shrimp... just use the sauce to coat some grilled pork chops or chicken. It tastes great all the same!

A very rough pic just for your enjoyment (the book has a way better picture with the lime leaves for a garnish and a super cool-looking pot... so you'll have to deal with what I ate):



We ate this with a very simple side cucumber & tomato salad... and used the leftover pineapple curry sauce over pork chops the next day with some stir-fry veggies on the side & rice. :)