the wonderful life of sea lions

New post at last.

So many things to write about but I’m not sure where to begin. Serves me right for not posting as often as I should. Well, I suppose I could start with knitting. I’ve actually finished Nathan’s gloves and they came out nicely. I’ll have to post pictures another day since I need to weave in the ends still. I’ve been trying to work on my cable knitting but it seems some of the more complicated patterns are annoying because of the yarn I’m using. I’ve read that cotton yarn can be hard to work with sometimes because it’s not as flexible as some animal yarns. I tried a few times to make a certain pattern but the yarn was really stiff and wasn’t coming out remotely uniform so I gave up with that yarn. Now I’m trying another yarn which I think may be a cotton/acrylic blend which makes it a bit more managable but it still seems a bit complicated. I’m trying to decide if I should give up on the project and maybe buy some other plant yarns to work on lace shawls, hats, etc that I want to try for potential gifts in the future.

In terms of food, nothing new really. Although we did have a very mediocre Japanese style dinner last week. We really wanted ramen so I looked up a recipe and decided we’d make Shoyu ramen soup which is basically a soy sauce based soup. The broth started off nicely: leeks, shoyu, no-chicken broth, and a few other things. It kind of went down hill when we added the noodles, mushrooms, and seitan. I wanted a bit of substance so I added carrots and dried shittake mushrooms to the soup but the mushrooms ended up changing the broth completely and making it way too….mushroomy. I actually made some mushroom broth the other day to freeze and it tastes great but the 4 shittakes in the 3 cup ramen broth just overpowered the other ingredients and was just too strong for our liking. Then the noodles…well we got these fresh noodles from the market that were actually made from tofu and they tasted alright but it just didn’t have that good ramen taste which I think had to do with noodles being made from tofu.  But the noodles weren’t all that bad in comparison to the mushrooms and setain. We picked up pre-flavored chicken seitan since we’d never tried it and because we thought it would taste better in the soup. Ugh, I don’t know how Nathan managed to eat 2 pieces of it because it was so disgusting I almost spit it out onto my plate but thought it might not be all that appealing for Nathan to look at while we ate. We ended up just spooning it out because it was so nasty. Who knew seitan could taste so horribly.

The other part of the meal was kind of cool. I made teriyaki setain which was about 1/4 cup of soy sauce with a 1/3 cup mirin for about 8oz (I doubled it because I made enough to feed a small country…and we ate it all…not sure what that says about us….but the soup did suck so….). I heated up a pan with a high heat oil and dusted the seitan with salt, pepper, and then flour. Started to fry them up and then….then came the flambe! Omg, I am so awesome! So I had my sake all ready and I was nervous as hell and Nathan was standing by to make sure I didn’t burn off my hands. We also had some matches on hand in case it didn’t flame up.

So I tossed in the sake and nothing happened. ::Sigh:: I think I was so freaked out about it that I didn’t let the pan get hot enough but we ended up lighting a match and using tongs to light the sake. Took a couple of tries until we realized the first burst was about as fancy as it was going to get. It did look pretty cool thoug the flames coming up and dancing around the seitan but I wish it had lasted longer. Oh well. Came out really yummy but next time I think I’ll add some spices and garlic. At least the teriyaki came out nicely and the photos did too.

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The onion picture is only up because I thought they were so funny with their little shoots.

Hmmm…let’s see. Took a nice stroll down to the wharf last week which was nice and it’s so pathetic that we haven’t been there for at least 2 yrs. and we live a block away. We can literally see the wharf and ocean from the driveway but I suppose we never go because there isn’t much to do and we can’t really eat at the restaurants since it’s mainly seafood. Still, I hope we go a bit more often because it’s really fun to see the sealions and all the birds. We even saw a guy standing on a makeshift raft paddling towards the beach. Hopefully he made it alright.

Ah, what beautiful and interesting local animals. It seems all but one is native to the region but I can’t be for certain.