Seattle in 4 days!

While Meiko was here, Nile and Meiko went around Seattle. Here are some things that they saw:

The new main branch of Seattle Public Library. (Picked as one of the 100 best modern buildings in the U.S. by Architectural Digest.)

At Volunteer Park, Meiko pokes her head through the Black Sun.

Nile gave a tour of the Conservatory. Here is Nile among her collection of cacti and succulants.


They did a drive-by of Safeco Field where Meiko got to see a giant poster of Ichiro while Nile watched the traffic lights.

Kerry Park--the vista of Seattle. We went back that night too.

The new Olympic Sculpture Park!

The also stopped by the SAM (under construction) and saw the famous sculpture.

Nile and Meiko went to the first Starbucks.

Meiko brought some origami paper for Matt, so they folded some origami together. They made a hermit crab and orca together.

Here is the completed hermit crab.

Seattle YUM!

Nile's friend from foever-ago, Meiko came to visit us from Okinawa for 6 days. Nile and Meiko went on a restaurant tour of Seattle. First stop was Vios, our neighborhood Greek restaurant. It was as good as it looks. They had: Lamb Suvaluki and Greek Salad.



Then they started eating before taking photos. This is at Tutta Bella Pizza. Takashi said that their pizza's are better then the ones he had in Italy.


This is Queen Sheeba, our local Ethiopian restaurant. This was Meiko's first time trying Ethiopian food.

Then they started to forget to take photos all together. Other restaurants they visited were: Red Mill Burgers (one of the 20 best burgers in US, according to GQ), and Agua Verde (Mexican).

These were donuts from Top Pot. YUM!

Lastly, when we went to Vancouver, we had some cup cakes, yummy dim sum, and crepes.



We're pretty sure we all grew sideways that week.

Lemon Cake!

For Valentine's Day, we were going to make this Lemon Cake but Nile was so tired it didn't happen on the actual day. When it did happen, it was really good!















As you can see, we're too excited to eat it to take a good picture! It was really good!

Flower and Garden show

Anita, Jim and Nile went to the Flower and Garden show.

Anita got a lot of ideas and Nile got a lot of questions from Anita. Nile was happy when she found the Master Gardener talbe that could answer Anita's questions for her. ;-)
 

Cupcakes for Valentine's Day

Matt made Nile this sweet cupcake for Valentine's day. He also decorated a few others with flowers. 

Darwin

Nile was asked to help teach a lab at the UW greenhouse this week and she was able to take her Darwin finger puppet with her as her helper. :-)

This is Darwin hanging out with the famous Darwin Orchid after all the labs have finished. Darwin hypothesized upon looking at a herbarium specimen of the orchid that the plant must have a tightly coevolved pollinator that can get the nectar at the bottom of the nectar spur. Unfortunately, Darwin never got to see the pollinator. A few years after Darwin’s death, a large hawk moth was found that had a proboscis with the perfect length.

Pink Pasta

This week, Nile made beet and blue cheese pasta from the Union Square Cafe cookbook. It was very pink and it was very good.

Vancouver Shopping

It was raining in Vancouver today, but we still had a great time. We had crepes and then walked up and down Robson St. shopping. Jennie is weilding her new umbrella that Takashi picked up for her in Japan.

We also went to the best cupcake store we have ever been too. They also make wedding and birthday cakes. Their cupcakes are fantastic. Much better than Magnolia in New York City or Cupcake Royale in Seattle.
 

Bison for dinner

We visited Jennie this weekend in Vancouver.

As we always do, we went to Granville Island on our first morning to shop at the market. We planned to cook bison for dinner since Jennie had a roast from her uncle. The selection and displays at the market are always phenomenal.

We bought some pasta to go along with the meal.


Mmm... 

Pancakes

Nile got this recipe from the New York Times, and cooked it for Matt one morning before he went to work. This is week 3 of her 1 new recipe a week. It's called "10 minute pancakes". 

Snow!

We got some snow! As usual in Seattle, things came to a stop due to this relatively small amount of snow. The picture on the left is the castle building we see from our house covered in snow and the one on the right is our building covered in snow.

Curry Carrot Soup

This week Nile made Curry Carrot Soup from a book Audrey gave Nile for her birthday. The book is A Beautiful Bowl of Soup by Paulette Michell and it is an excellent book.

Thanks Audrey! It was yummy!

New Years Resolution

Nile's new years resolution is to try a new recipie a week. The first one she tried is GAMENI a traditional Japanese winter food with lots of root vegetables. She cooked in the Douefu that Takashi kindly gave us when we visited this winter.

Happy New Year

Q chan made a great traditional Japanese breakfast with soup with greens and mochi, and fish eggs. They also put our shilaae on there too.