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.

New Year's Eve

As the clock approached midnight, we broke out the soba noodles that Nile brought back from Hatae-san in Japan. Matt waned to eat them raw; he had had a little too much to drink.


We boiled them. They came out just perfectly. Mmmm...


Q-chan and Sussy fixed a broth and added some toppings to make it extra tastey. Matt slurped them up like a good little Japanese. Ami-chan isn't even 3, and she can eat noodles with chop sticks.

Shortly after midnight, we went to a nearby temple to ring a bell and bring good luck for the new year.

Top Pot Mmmmm

This morning we had Top Pot donuts. (The best donuts in the world.) The pink one is their seasonal called Pepermint Snowdrift. The green one is macha-an cake. The big brown one is Matt's favorite, the apple fritter.

Bitter Melon

Nile made a fantastic dinner tonight from the recipe she got from Yoshie. She made bitter melon stir fry (goyachanpuru) and it was pretty tasty, but pretty bitter.

Ice Skating

We went ice skating tonight at the Seattle Center. They don't have a zamboni. Instead people push around little scrapers on foot.

Ice skating reminded us of when we used to go skating in Canada.

up and around in Seattle (with Aliyah)

Aliyah, Nile's friend from college, is visiting her family in Seattle. Nile and Aliyah went to Bainbridge Island to have lunch.

Nile liked how you didn't even have to go to information to find out where to get coffee in Bainbridge.

It was a sunny day for Seattle and here you can see the new sculpure park (where the red thing is in the middle, and yes it is kind of hard to see).

On the way home, Nile went to the market and saw cute pigs.

I guess we're getting ready for the terun of the pigs?



The next day, Nile was driving on Renier Ave. and figure out why it was called Renier Ave. It is kind of hard to see but you can see Mt. Renier at the end.

Chrismas food

For Christmas we went to Anita and Jim's house. We made and decorated cookies. There were some injured cookies. A Far Side cookie "Bummer of a birthmark".

An alien cookie, and Matt had to show off his cake decorating skills with the holly wreath.

For dessert on Christmas day, we had poached pears with white and dark chocolate sauce. Jim and Anita putting the finishing touches on. We finally got to the bottle of sparkling wine that we won on Halloween. :-) It was very good and it was nice to help finishing the bottle since we're cheap drunks.