Gong Hee Fatt Choy!

Happy 3rd Day of the New Year!

We try to celebrate CNY here in Minnesota. I always snort when I consider that in China, CNY is called the Spring Festival. It would never work here, because we still have at least 2 more months of winter (if we're lucky) before there's any sign of any possibility of Spring turning up. And CNY here is a quiet affair - the stores are stocked with Valentine's stuff because nobody knows what CNY is. Which is fine by me, because the last thing I want is loud Chinese music, complete with cymbals and gongs, blaring over the PA system at the supermarket.

Still, I'm Chinese, and the kids are half-Chinese, so I feel obliged to do things during this season to show my roots, as they say. 

Food is always a safe option. Everyone likes food. 

We made pineapple tarts, using Mum's original recipe. 

Here's the jam. That container came from two oversize pineapples, chopped and cooked down to that miniscule amount. 

Here's the butter. I actually went out and bought European (okay, Irish) butter because it was more like the sort we use in Singapore. Here it is with a bit of American butter (the larger block of Irish butter is yellower and melts more quickly). Nothing wrong with American butter - and it's probably healthier than the sort we use back home, because it's less oily and fatty. But American butter only works with American recipes and European (or Australian) butter only works with the recipes we use in Singapore. Anyway, I used Irish butter, and it really made a difference.

The girls all helped.

And then they ran off and left me to finish up. 

But not before we'd filled quite a few trays together, of tart shells and balls of pineapple jam.

And then we baked them. Here are the ones I like (they have more pastry than jam)

and here are a few we made specially for the family members that prefer a higher jam-to-pastry ratio.

Yum.

And then we packed them away in the same kind of containers we use in Singapore. No reason other than they look more authentic this way.

We filled three containers. Er . . . they were full. They're not so full now.

Here's a tray showing evidence of the children having been part of the baking process. Do you see it?

Here - I'll isolate it:

Yes, it's stuffed-animal-sized tarts for favourite friends.

Unfortunately, family oaths prevent me from sharing the recipe here (or anywhere). All I will say is that we had some leftover egg whites, which we turned into macarons. 

Food apart, we did two other Chinese things.

One was to sew this blouse,

and make these buttons.

Very important aspects of culture - food and clothes. Far more important than language and customs and whatnot (especially since I am atrocious at both).

The last thing we did was to share our culture in school. Every year, I go into the girls' classrooms and do a short presentation. The girls are always very excited about Mum Coming To Talk About Chinese New Year, so I told them I'd do it until they or their teachers lost interest. We bring in our entire paper lantern collection, talk about customs (ha ha ha - I usually have to surf the net to get info), do a short quiz and hand out little clementines and red packets with chocolate coins. Some years I even dress up and wear my (ancient) traditional Chinese blouses. This year -hurrah - I actually had a blouse that fit. 

On to the new year, then! May yours be, like Christmas, merry and bright.

Pizza

This January, we've had a record five days of school canceled because of the cold. People who've lived here for years tell me that this is unprecedented. It's been nice having the kids home with me but we did quickly run out of things to do indoors. So on some of those days, we ignored the "too cold to go out" warnings and went out for lunch and a grocery run. On other days, we stayed indoors and baked. 

Last week, we made pizza from scratch. I don't usually do this, because home-made crust never turns out the way I want it to. It is not a bad crust, as far as home oven crusts go, but it isn't the sort of tender, crisp, unchewy crust one gets in a pizzeria that has a wood-fire brick oven. I've learnt over time that it has less to do with the kind of pan or dough one uses than the temperature of the oven. My oven has a very low upper limit, which is usually nowhere even near the upper limits promised on the temperature dial. I only discovered this duplicity upon investing in an oven thermometer, following quite a few baking adventures with dismal outcomes in spite of issue-free mixing processes. This is an unfortunate thing (the low maximum temperature, not the duplicity) because it means I am not unable to successfully bake stuff that I enjoy baking but that requires very high heat, like yeast breads. 

Still, I try. I tell myself that the practice (even if not also the results) can do no harm. 
And I keep looking for a decent pizza dough recipe that works with the limitations of my oven.

This is one of those decent recipes. There are only two things in this recipe that set it apart from other, previous recipes that have fallen flat:
a lot of olive oil - much more than the token tablespoonful in other recipes
allowing the yeast to proof before adding in other ingredients.

Here's our recipe:

Ingredients:

• 1 1/3 cups of water (between 110 and 130 F)
• One package (1/4 oz) or 2 1/2 tsp active dry yeast
• 1/2 tsp sugar
• 1/4 cup olive oil, plus more for oiling the bowl
• 3 1/2 cups bread flour, plus more for dusting
• 1 tsp salt

Method:

1. Dissolve the yeast in the water with the sugar, in mixing bowl. Let stand for about 10 minutes, or as long as necessary for bubbles to form and foam.
2. Stir in the oil.
3. Add the flour and salt and knead with dough hook in mixer (or knead by hand with about 3/4 of the total amount of flour, adding the remainder as you knead).
4. Oil a large bowl, roll dough into large ball and place in bowl. Cover with moist towel and let rise about 1 hour until doubled in size. In the summer, I leave it in a locked car on our driveway. In the winter, I preheat the oven to the lowest temperature, turn it off and leave it in the oven along with a second, large bowl of boiling water to provide heat and moisture. 
5. Use dough immediately or refrigerate (or freeze) overnight. Pat half the dough onto a preheated pizza stone (or 12" unheated pan) dusted with flour or cornmeal. Prebake 5 minutes in a 450-500F oven. Then spread sauce and toppings and bake for another 10-15 minutes, or until cheese is melted.

The girls patted out and assembled this pizza. Because there were little hands involved, we didn't use a preheated pizza stone and instead used a cool pizza pan. Kate doesn't like pepperoni so we left her third without. 

Orange Picking

My ideal vacations-away-from-home involve visits to fruit orchards and factories where cheese, chocolate, candy and local crafts (or anything, really) are made. In Minnesota, we have made a summer/fall tradition of fruit-picking each year, but only berries and apples grow where we live.So when we were in Florida last December, I was thrilled to discover a citrus grove 15 minutes away from our villa. Hurrah! 

We spent the morning walking through the trees, scrutinizing and picking oranges, grapefruit, lemons, kumquats and pomelos. The relatives came, too.

The oranges we picked were nothing like the squeaky-clean variety we buy in the supermarkets, but they were the sweetest and juiciest we had ever had.

Here's a pomelo - we didn't pick any of these because we didn't feel like eating or packing them in our suitcases to take home with us. 

We did pick quite a few oranges and rationed them out throughout the early part of the winter, to make them last. 

Disneyworld

Rather than the usual frontal view of the castle that graces so many postcards, I thought you'd enjoy seeing that one above first. So pretty. 

Aaaaand here's that obligatory front-castle family shot.

So, we went to Disneyworld. Happiest place on earth, or something like that. Our main motivation for going wasn't so much for the whole stalk-the-Princesses experience but to meet up with family from Singapore. Uncle Kum Kit, Auntie Laura, Victor (her oldest son), Agnes (his wife) and their two daughters Alex and Adelynne were there for a week just before Christmas and thought it would be fun to spend time with them (while stalking Princesses).

We went to just one theme park - Magic Kingdom - during the three days we were there so as not to run ourselves ragged trying to pack too much in. So two days in MK it was, and we had a blast. The lines were (for the most part) short or non-existent and the kids were great sports with all the walking involved. We even managed an outdoor swim at our villa and some superb meals at a couple of restaurants along the way. And we visited a citrus grove to pick some of the loveliest oranges we'd ever had (photos in next post).

But the whole trip was really about Disneyworld, and it was truly magical. Like impossibly-happy-characters magical. And weather-from-heaven (80s in December!) magical. We didn't stay to watch the fireworks (too late for our kids), but on the second night, we were there late enough to behold the castle at twilight.

It was quite a sight.

Ranked highest on my Personal Enjoyment Scale was really watching the kids take it all in. Kate, especially, is still young enough to be completely enthralled by everything while being fully aware that it's make-believe (a truly potent combination). I'm glad we didn't wait till "everyone was a little older" before coming; our kids were the perfect age for this. 

Here are two pictures Kate drew while on the plane trip to Florida. Note the air traffic control guy in the first picture, and the arrow indicating the window behind which she thought our seats were.

Incidentally, we didn't stalk all the Princesses - just one. 

The girls got to participate in a little interactive skit with Belle. Emily was the family horse Philippe and Jenna was her father Maurice, shivering in prison. Kate wanted to just watch. 

Then there were the rides, that everyone loved and among which each of us quickly picked our favorites. Kate's were all the slow, wonderful, visually beautiful rides and Jenna and Emily especially loved the twisty, turny and more thrilling ones. 

All in, a lovely trip. Having done a fair bit of pre-trip research and planning for How To Get The Best Out Of Disneyworld, I look back now and realize that we could've gotten by on just three tips:

1. Go in winter, not summer.
2. Go right after the park gates open for the day. 
3. Check out a guidebook from the library to find out which rides are most suitable for certain age groups (and personalities).

Random Photos of the Day(s)

Last week was very cold. 

So cold that 

• school was canceled for two days due to "dangerously low temperatures"
• some news reports described our temperatures as being "colder than Mars (the planet)"
• phrases like "frostbite within minutes", "polar vortex" and "arctic conditions" and "North Pole temperatures" liberally peppered meteorological reports
• videos popped up on youtube of people throwing boiling water into the freezing air, which froze instantly into powdered ice on contact (with some people foolishly got scalded in the name of science).
• on exiting the door of the building after a swim, my damp hair froze into stiff clumps in just the 20 paces it took me to walk to the car.

But then this is Minnesota.

Where one gets icicles in one's nostrils just by breathing while walking to the mailbox to retrieve the day's junk mail and bills. Or, at least, that's how I personally know when the temperature is below zero (F). I suspect other people may use the thermometer, but, hey, my nose is more convenient.

Anyway, as I said, this is Minnesota, so it's not as if we were expecting balmy weather anytime before June. Still, it was cold.

Thank you, friends and family, who emailed us to inquire if we were okay, or if the news reports were true at all because they sounded so unbelievable.

I am happy to say that we survived.

In camisoles and capris, no less.

Which were the girls' indoor uniforms that week as they galloped around the house on stick horses, re-enacting daring adventures with imaginary equine sidekicks. Not a whole lot to do on sub-zero days, really. 

Emily is not in that particular sequence of photos (she was at a friend's house for a playdate) but here she is with her sisters, relaxing in a papasan chair in front of the telly at their grandaunt's house on Christmas Day. 

During the long winter/Christmas break from school, we all devoured vast quantities of books. Emily counted having read 11 chapter books in those 3 weeks. Jenna read all the books (10) she received as Christmas gifts, plus library checkouts. Kate isn't an official chapter book reader yet, but she's been practising (and reading to Bunny).

Over the next few posts (time cooperating), I'll share photos of typical days at home with Kate while her sisters are in school, featuring Bunny clothes, Bunny cosmetics, Bunny stories, and all manner of other Bunny-centered activities. Stay tuned.

Toffee/Heath Bars

Happy new year, everyone!

We had a wonderful year-end, packed with all kinds of good things. The kids had an extra-long winter break due, in part, to very bad weather (school got canceled for two days this week) and us taking time off early to go somewhere fun (more on that in a later post). Now that they are finally back in school, I'm slowly catching up on chores, correspondence, photos, updating this blog and routine in general. For the purpose of more accurate record-keeping, I'll be back-dating some of these posts to reflect when their events actually happened in 2013.

We traveled a lot over the Christmas break and, as a result, didn't do as much baking as we usually do. None of the teachers or neighbors got our annual platter-of-cookies. In fact, most of our Christmas goodies were given by friends (thank you, friends!). I did, however, try this one new recipe from my father-in-law. 

Ingredients:

• 1 cup butter
• 1 cup light brown sugar, packed
• Saltine crackers, enough to cover 13" x 9" surface
• 1 pkg milk chocolate chips

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 400F.
2. Grease/spray a 13" x 9" baking dish, line with foil, and spray the foil.
3. Lay a single layer of saltine crackers, salt side down, in the foil-lined dish.
4. Melt butter and sugar in saucepan on stove. Boil 3 mins. Mixture will thicken.
5. Pour mixture over crackers.
6. Bake in oven for 5 minutes or a little longer, till crackers float.
7. Turn off oven, remove from oven and cool 3 mins.
8. Sprinkle chocolate chips, return to cooling oven to melt chips (or melt chocolate chips in double boiler and pour on), then spread with knife.
9. Cut into bars while warm (or before cooling completely so layers do not separate and/or crack).

What Do You See?

Glass Half-Empty: Needs soap and water.

Glass Half-Full: She just made something for someone she loves.