How was your Thanksgiving???

How was your Thanksgiving? Ours was AWESOME!! Families and friends and great food! We had our friends, Zach and Jolynn Frasers from Walla Walla come and visited us and my sister Thanh came also. We brined our turkey the night before and then spent all day making an 8 course meal. Our turkey was AMAZINGLY MOIST because it was cooked BREAST DOWN! I used the roaster I recently purchased this year so that we can use the oven to bake and have freshly baked everything. We spent a lot of quality time together shopping, making bread, cookies, and lots of yummy food. My friends gave me more compliments on my cooking than I deserved.
One of the best parts of the holiday was going to see NEW MOON with my sis and Jo (ahh Jacob!) IT WAS SO AWESOME! I want to see it again. I won't say more about this but you get the idea - the guys. After the movie we all went to the all too famous and the last USA XXX Root beer here in Issaquah, which we have to take Nama and Papa there when they come up for Christmas. The place was way cool but too crowded. The weather was clear so we went to the beach and to a park in Magnolia for some beautiful sight seeing. My sis is convinced that she wants to live here later. She got to play a lot with Reena and see her at dance class (stay tuned for more) and shopped at Pike Place Market, which she consistently asked why I didn't take her there sooner to give her more time :) And there you have it. Our wondrous and blissful Thanksgiving.

Apple pie! I braided the dough this time.


I was ready, so ready to eat but everyone kept taking pictures of us.

Somehow Dan still had the energy to play games with the kids. He is such a wonderful daddy. We all had a lot of fun.



We ended the vacation with some homemade Pho that Zach requested and my sis showed off her Viet cooking.




Lately we've been waking up to bright sunny sky. The next 8 days is sunny. It makes me so grateful for this beautiful weather.


Fall is great here. The leaves are still yellow and red and orange and purple and green and you get the point. We love it. We still see flowers like these blooming and it's December!


This website is pretty cool. Just thought I'd pass this along to you Seattle folks.
http://www.parentmap.com/component/option,com_pmcalendar/Itemid,268/?gclid=CLGmwfr6uJ4CFRhfagodEQhWlQ

Brining your turkey!

Brining your turkey is perhaps the most important part for having a tender and moist turkey. It also reduces cooking time. You will need about 10-12 hours. For those of you doing this recipe click on this link

The Best Turkey You'll Ever Make!

Last year my friend and I made an AWESOME turkey. You might have remembered hearing me bragging about it. Grandma Evans and several people asked for the recipe. I thought I would post the recipe and directions for you all just in case you're squandering around for a good recipe and getting nervous about whether or not you'll successfully make a good turkey this year. For this turkey, you will be asking for more WHITE MEAT even though you've never liked the white meat before! It's time to leave your mother's traditional way of cooking a turkey to try this to die for turkey.

THE MOISTEST TURKEY

Ingredients
* 1 turkey, approx. 15 lbs.*
* Juice of a lemon
* Salt and pepper
* Olive oil or melted butter
* 1/2 yellow onion, peeled and quartered
* Tops and bottoms of a bunch of celery
* 2 carrots
* Parsley
* Sprigs of fresh rosemary, thyme

For precise cooking directions, go to:
http://www.elise.com/recipes/archives/000037moms_roast_turkey.php

Otherwise here is the shorten version. 7 simple steps:
BRINE the turkey! Or in other words soak it in salt water

1. Remove the neck and giblets (heart, gizzard, liver). Use the heart and gizzard for making stock for the stuffing.
2. For flavor, put in inside the turkey a half a yellow onion, peeled and quartered, a bunch of parsley, a couple of carrots, and some tops and bottoms of celery.
3. Rub either melted butter or olive oil all over the outside of the turkey.
4. Add several sprigs of fresh (if possible) thyme and rosemary to the outside of the turkey.
5. Place turkey BREAST DOWN on the bottom of a rack over a sturdy roasting pan big enough to catch all the drippings
6. Start the cooking at 400 F for the first 1/2 hour. Then reduce the heat to 350 F for the next 2 hours. Then reduce the heat further to 225 F for the next hour to hour and a half.
7. Check to see if it's done. The dark meat in the thigh should be about 175°F. The white meat in the breast should be 160°F to 165°F

Check out this AWESOME way to cut a turkey!

Give me your feed backs after you've used this recipe!

Crystal Clear

I'm so glad to have this probably 20 minutes window to blog. It's nice to blog early in the day so that I'm more alert and awake unlike the last time when I was up 'til midnight blogging about the color turquoise. Sorry Mr. Tortoise. You are a natural brown not turquoise.
We came home from our trip to Arizona with 7 packages to open . Most are not worth mentioning, just merely stuff we've been saving up to get with the second half of the Amazon bonus money. The other stuff we got is a canner and canning supplies. I've been wanting to get into canning but for whatever reason haven't gotten around to it. When we visited Dan's sister Krista, she really got Dan and I convinced and we bought a canner even before we left her house. We've canned our pumpkins that we got from the pumpkin patch that we didn't carve, some turkey meat we got for $.29/lb and lots and lots of pears. We did pear halves, pear preserves, pear jams. We've tested the freezer pumpkin puree and made pumpkin bars for FHE. Excellent! Made some Papa's bread and tested the pear jams...also EXCELLENT! Too excellent. I had to run to the gym yesterday because I felt like I put on several lbs. Thankfully my metabolism took care of it otherwise with how much I eat, I would be overweight.



Perhaps the biggest purchase this last 2 weeks is having our new camera to play with. We finally decided on which one to get. Thank you all for your inputs. We bought i a week before we went to Arizona but with all the hassle trying to rush it here and it still didn't get here before we left so we just had it held at the UPS warehouse until we came back. Crystal clear is the right word. We went from a 4.0 Megapixel camera to a 15.0 Megapixel DSLR. It's the best one for the price. We wanted it to be no more than $1000 and we were able to keep it a little lower than $1000. It is AWESOME! I'm going to help some people take their family pictures for Christmas. We're excited to create many memories with it.






So good bye old camera! In memory of you we will post the last good picture you took. Our new camera!

I love my phone! I'm not saying goodbye to it because it captures moments that my nice camera can't because I don't always have it on me. This picture has no meaning except that this is me during the day catching various cute things of my kids that I normally wouldn't get my nice camera out.

There's a story behind this picture that was captured by my camera. Every Wednesday I go out to the courtyard park in Seattle with a street team from the House of Hope to help the homeless reconnect with their families and to help assist them in finding future employment. This one particular night was cold, a little usually cold for Seattle and I looked around my house in the comfort of my home and thought that I can sacrifice something that I own for these sweet people. So I took a sleeping bag that I bought in college that I love but rarely ever used and as I walked around the park I asked each contestant to share with me their story. To make the story short I was touched by this couple's story, mostly the woman's. She's been homeless her whole life and was fortunate to have 1 place she called home and that was a 1 bedroom apartment with her ex-husband who later on kicked her out because he got crazy and raped someone and eventually went to jail. I was so touched by her sad experience and many unfortunate events and gave her my sleeping bag so that that night she could call it her home underneath the open sky. My heart was full that day.

I chose to call this blog Crystal Clear because it was crystal clear sunny and blue sky when I started writing it. It is now 4 days later and I've had to correct this sentence a couple of times. The forecast does make it look worst than it is unless you look at the hour by hour. We've had 2 sunny clear sky 2 days in a row! Not a bad week. We like it when it dumps it all in one day and then be clear rather than off and on rain. Where did all this water come from anyway? In the summer we went weeks without a single drop of rain.

Ok Take 2 Arizona!!!

I couldn't wait to blog this in. We had such a WONDERFUL time. Last night I calculated that we spent $1100 on this trip down to Arizona but Dan and I both agreed that it was worth every dollar. Last year when Reena was old enough to really get into the spirit of trick or treating we took her around the neighborhood with a jacket over her costume because it was in the high 50's and that was when the inspiration came of taking her trick or treating with a big group of her cousins in a much warmer place. So I brought up the idea to Dan and of course he agreed that this was an occasion worth investing in. All year round we anticipated this trip and Reena talked of trick or treating with her cousins quite often though we weren't sure how much of the cousins part did she really understood. We loved this trip because we didn't really have to do a whole lot of planning. We have a reciprocal zoo pass that we thought about using at the Arizona Phoenix zoo and we also thought about checking out their botanical garden. But those things didn't sound as exciting to us plus we have botanical gardens here and lots of zoos also. We did however saw the train museum where we all went to help Chad, our nephew, with his Eagle Scout project (The kids and I were there for the moral support). But for the most part we just hung out with families and had the most WONDERFUL time watching our kids played with their cousins and getting acquainted with each other. I LOVE the family I married into. Reena and Debrie were loved and adored by all of their cousins. Dan was a happy man because he was able to show off how cute his kids are to his sisters and they all had a great time catching up and remembering old times. We had a blast!
Best Buds!


Whenever I did Reena's hair, Jacey would also come by, sits on my laps and wants me to do her hair. I felt like an aunt. I did the girls hair so that they look alike. They used to look so much more alike when they were young.

I sat Reena down and let her watch the Anime I was crazy about in High School and she saw Sailor Mini Moon and said "I want to be Sailor Mini Moon" so that's how it all got started. I looked around but there weren't any patterns so I just made her costume using pictures I see of Sailor Mini Moon. It worked out perfectly because we've already had a kitty costume. Sailor Mini Moon has a cat and her name is Luna. Debrie was Luna the cat. Trick or treating was so AWESOME! I think I had as much fun as the kids, probably even more fun. The best part was also celebrating Dan's birthday with ginger caramel cake! So festive! I will post the recipe later.








Krista's neighbors had a tortoise and he was the cutest thing ever! Reena really enjoyed being able to get close and touch him.

Houses. Unlike Seattle, Phoenix didn't have hills, lakes, bridges and tunnels to decorate its desert beauty. The prettiest thing I saw around the Phoenix, AZ area is the houses. We wish we could somehow bring the house prices up or that we could live in Seattle and not have to pay such heady price for the location. Seattle's housing market didn't get hit as hard as Phoenix and housing prices are still averaging half a million $ where we live. While driving around Phoenix we saw signs such as: Big and beautiful homes on 3/4 acre lot in the low 100,000. If we could have that price here, we could could buy 3 houses and have at least one of them paid off within a couple of years. We thought of buying a winter home there next to Dan's sister Krista's house, but we're such city folks we would be bored within a month of living there so that wouldn't work. All in all what I've learned from this trip is: There is no perfect place. Or if there is, will someone let me know where that is??? Seattle's too gray in the winter, though our summers are great! Phoenix or the desert is much too hot in the summer but the winter is great. Swap places for the seasons and that's the only way you can have the perfect place. Somewhere in the middle where our hearts meet. Where ever friends are is the perfect place. Our kids came back healthy and safe and that is truly the greatest!