Thursday, February 24, 2011

Chinese New Year

We had a great Chinese New Year celebration earlier this month.

I found a great book by Karen Katz: My First Chinese New Year. It was short and cute, and the girls loved it.

On our celebration day, we swept out the old year.

We wore red and put out oranges for good luck in the coming year.
We made our own red decorations.
And remembered our ancestors.
Any celebration wouldn't be complete without food.

I spent plenty of time online, looking for the perfect Chinese recipes. Were they authentic? I don't know. But they were oh so good.

Emeril's egg rolls - Loved that I could bake them and not fry them. I left out the meat and bean sprouts. You can find egg roll wraps in the produce section, they are usually by the tofu.

Chow mein - This was really really good. Although looking back at it now, I had to leave out/change a lot depending on what I had. I used thin spaghetti instead of Chinese noodles. And I left out the oyster sauce, pork and shrimp. Even if you don't have the specialty ingredients, it still makes a wicked good chow mein.

Spicy Orange Garlic Shrimp - Has anything from Pioneer Woman let you down? I didn't think so. I might have a crush on Pastor Ryan. This was so good.

Orange Chicken - Okay, so I didn't make the orange chicken for our celebration, but we had it recently, and it was amazing.

Friday, February 4, 2011

Elmo and Ricky

Kitty loves to watch Elmo on youtube. Whenever I crack open the laptop, she comes running, signing 'apple'...meaning 'Elmo'.

We always start with Ricky Gervais' Celebrity Lullaby. It still makes me laugh.


And Adam Sandler.


And lately we've been watching Jason and dreaming of the day when we can go outdoors and then breathe free.


I figure we've got another eight weeks before that happens.

And that's if we're lucky.