I am getting father and father behind! Yesterday was also a busy day and I hope things will calm down a little this week after today. We shall see.So Sunday was Supper Club where we were doing Thai food. I was very not excited about Thai food, it just isn't my sort of thing. But the whole point of super club is to force you to try to make new things and enjoy that food adventure with other people. So I went at it with Gusto and made two dishes.
First thing in the morning I started my Slow Cooker Thai Pork with Peppers which needed to cook for 5-6 hours. It was my "alternate" dish and turned out to be the one I liked more. Easy and simple, pork with a peanut sauce really.
My second dish was Pad See Ew (Thai Noodles with Beef and Broccoli) which I thought seemed way more Thai but the recipe looked pretty Chinese. I thought I was going to love this dish, I really enjoy good beef and broccoli and rather enjoy oyster sauce in it. But this dish just turned out okay.
I had planned to try to find wide rice noodles at the gourmet store or A Price off base but ran out of time as while the pork cooked I needed to do my English lesson for Tuesday because book club on Monday was stop me from doing it then. So I plugged away at the lesson and cleaned the last bit of the house and then realized it was time to cook my second dish.
So I sent Jason off to MaxValue to look for rice noodles on the chance that they had some. I figured this is Japan, they cook everything with rice and glutinous rice, surely they have rice noodles. So Jason went off and an adventure that took a lot longer than expected. His asking for rice noodles seemed to confuse everyone and people were trying very hard to help him.
In the end he came home with Konnyaku noodles which are nothing at all like rice noodles. They are essentially gelatin in noodle form. The fluid they keep them in reeks of fish and they need to be washed and boiled to be eaten. So we did not use those but instead used the thin rice noodles I had received from a cooworker who got them from some one who was PCSing.
Yuko has offered to make me a dish with them so I can see how one would make them decent in a dish. Otherwise I have no idea what to do with them, they are really odd. It seems, after we chatted with Yuko, that Japanese don't really do rice noodles, go figure. So I am sure the people of MaxValue were trying very hard to explain this to Jason in that uniquely Japanese way of not saying no, they don't have that.
Once Supper Club rolled around I found that everyone struggled with their Thai dish. Most of us were disappointed in how things came out. However when it came down to eating time, no one left the table hungry. All the food came out pretty good and everyone was pretty satisfied. We had Thai Cucumber Salad [Crawford], "Pad See Ew" (Thai Noodles with Beef and Broccoli) [Evans], "Gai Pad Med Mamuang Himaphan" (Thai Cashew Chicken) [Ono], Slow Cooker Thai Pork with Peppers [Evans] and Thai-Style Peanut Sauce with Honey and Fresh Spring Rolls [Crawford] and Sesame Bananas [Dix].
It was a really good spread of Thai food and we even had a little beef, chicken and pork. We all tried new things and enjoyed good company, that is the important part in the end.
After Supper Club we headed down to Mother Leaf right outside my house to try some Okinawan Shaved ice. Japanese shaved ice has a finer "flake" to the ice and if often topped with sweet and condensed milk or something very similar. If you want a real Japanese treat you order Zenzai which on Okinawa is shaved ice topped with sweet beans and brown sugar with a few bits of Mochi on top. It is quite unique and a lot better than what most westerners would think. It really hit the spot after all the Thai food.
Once all the fun was over I worked on my lesson a bit more and headed off to bed.
Monday can be summed up pretty quickly here too.
Work followed by making cookies for book club. Book club, where no one really liked the book and we mostly talked about religion (the book talked about religion so it was sort of related) and ate the food that people brought. After all that fun stuff it was back home again to try to work on some of my ESL book and get ahead and then yet another bed time.
While I am at it. Today, even more boring.
Work, food, nap, ESL lesson and then teaching followed by sleep. Well I guess it can't be all fun, games and food adventures everyday!
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