It turns out that all the advice I received is true – portobello mushrooms do make a decent substitute for steak on a barbeque.
Marinate for a couple of hours in a mixture of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Grill for 10 minutes (yes that is longer than it takes to do a steak to medium rare).
Ling and I ate them – Tim insisted he was having steak.
Last year I started doing weekly rides on a loop from Vancouver, up Cypress Mountain, out to Horseshoe Bay and back. This year the weather has finally started to get nice enough to do it again, and today was our first attempt. With the start of the year, we didn’t even attempt the whole loop, and the goal was the first lookout at Cypress – although this is quite a goal in itself. The loop is 55 km, and although the climb up Cypress is daunting – climbing 250 m over 5.5 km (820 feet in 3.5 miles) – the hard part is earlier in North Vancouver, where we spend 1.3 km climbing at an average 11% grade. All year that section makes me consider getting off the bike and abandoning – after about the first 30 metres, it gets so steep I can no longer sit and turn the pedals, I have to stand and use my weight to push them.
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I found a piece of paper on the dining table today; it writes as follows:
Good morning!
Mags had to leave early. Things for you to do today, please:
1) have breakfast
2) clean coffee table off
3) fix couch covers
4) ensure your dirty laundry is in hamper
5) vacuum
6) put your soup can in the recyclingI’ll take car of kitchen, laundry, yard work, Punky
Thx
Dad
Vegetarian or not, Tim’s eating that way until I’m done!Three bean chilli:
Mix it all together in the crock pot, and let sit for a day. With about an hour left, add 1 cup of frozen corn. Next time I think we’re going to try a pound of ground beef in there too, and maybe some extra water (it was really, really, thick). Another variation to attempt will be using dry beans instead of canned, soaked overnight.
I got up very early this morning, excited about checking my mom out of the hospital. The doctor in charge has agreed to release my mom from the hospital after Uncle Dong’s visit. However, I still want to confirm if this is the case with other doctors. I had the taxi booked; the driver was the one who took Uncle Dong back to ShuCheng yesterday. He was to pick me up at the hotel around 9:00 am. In the morning, decided that I wanted to get in the hospital earlier. I called the driver around 7:00am to see if he could meet me around 8:00 am. He happily agreed.
When we arrived in the hospital, my mom had everything packed already. She was sitting at the bed waiting – I could see the light in her eyes even though she looked calm and indifferent. She told me that the doctors and nurses have already confirmed that they are preparing the files for her checkout – what a relief!!!
Monday is the busiest day of a week in a typical chinese hospital; doctors usually gather together in Monday morning to discuss the critical cases they had in the previous week and then they will visit every room to check the patients there. It took us 3 hours waiting and finally we got out of the hospital around 11:00 am. This is usually the time for my mom having lunch. I suggested stopping somewhere for lunch – my mom rejected the idea. She insisted having lunch at home. I managed to convince her to have a banana. After all, It is an hour and a half drive; I really don’t want her to starve.
The trip went smoothly. I have to give the credit to the driver: he drove the car carefully and I didn’t have many heart attacks – we arrived in ShuCheng around 12:30 pm and the lunch was on the table already.
Now my goal is to survive the next 5 days in ShuCheng without mom having any relapse.
Saturday’s dinner: Cheese Quesadillas cooked on the George Foreman grill. Last night Tim got the pergoies that he had asked for the night before.
I made an interesting observation today: you can tell I am doing a lot of cooking if the kitchen is really clean. If I’m eating out or doing frozen food, the kitchen is a mess.
The reason is: I can’t stand to work in a messy kitchen, so before I do any significant cooking I clean it. However if the kitchen is a mess, and I’m feeling lazy, that can lead into quite a downward spiral!
Tonight is a Tae Kwon Do night for Tim, so that means a simple dinner, because I find it hard to put together a complete meal when we’re doing the running around (Ling, on the other hand, manages to get three dishes on the table; I don’t know how she does it). So I gave Tim a choice – what did he want for dinner – perogies or tortellini in tomato sauce? He chose the perogies.
I had some time to kill before taking him to the lessons, so I started to clean the kitchen. As I was washing, Tim asked if we had time to eat dinner before, because he was really hungry. So was I, so I agreed, threw the water on and started things boiling.
As I was chopping the onions it dawned on me that something was wrong. I looked around and declared what had now become obvious. Apparently we were having tortellini for dinner tonight.
You see I had actually expected Tim to choose the tortellini over the perogies, and when he chose the wrong food I don’t think it really sank into my mind. So when I got pulled out of my expected routine (make dinner later), my mind functioned on autopilot and did what it had expected to do all along.
By the time I realized it, the tortellini was almost cooked, the onions were chopped up to put into the sauce, and the pan was already heating up.
I guess we’ll have perogies tomorrow night.
It’s really weird not having her around the house. Daddy’s tried to explain to me what’s happened, and I understand kind of. After all if my mommy were in trouble I would help her as much as I could!
Daddy seems to be keeping things running in the house – watching him I can see how much she does for us all the time! But I can see he misses her almost as much as I do. Every night I try to convince him it would be better to sleep in the guest room with me, and I’m surprised – usually he says no, but ever since she went on her trip, he’s been saying yes a lot too. I think he feels that being in a room all by himself seems strange.
He also keeps giving me hugs and kisses, and whispering in my ear “don’t worry, she’ll be home soon”. I know that, but I think he likes to remind himself too.
Today he asked me to try something. He says I always have too much energy, and it would be nice if I could send some to her. So I’m going to squeeze my eyes shut while sleeping, and see if I can spend as much time as I can thinking about her. Maybe some of those good thoughts will get over there for my mommy and help her, like she’s helping her mommy.
I decided tonight to try and replicate the tofu dish that Ling makes. Although I’ve never formally been told how to do it, I’ve watched her enough times that I figured I had a chance to replicate it (I even remembered the salt)! Tim’s comment was that if mom had put it on the table he could have thought she made it; I’ll take that compliment!
We’ve made a couple of changes to how things work, to try and work around my inherent laziness. I have noticed a temptation to throw out items that really should be recycled because I don’t want to go to the garage. So I washed the blue box, and put it in the kitchen at the end of the counter – now it is just as easy as the garbage.
The city has started collecting food waste that is compostable, so we are now keeping a bucket on the counter to throw all food into (old rice, banana peels, vegetable ends, etc). Every night I dump them in the “green can”.
This, coupled with having one less person in the house, seems to have really reduced our garbage – last week we only used one garbage bag in the kitchen, and it’s really looking like this week will be the same.
Although I had better be careful that I don’t pretend to enjoy cooking too much – Ling may not take it back over when she returns!
Punky has a funny thing that he does – whenever Ling gives him a hug, he sighs like the best thing in the world has just happened to him. He only does that for Ling.
Today I was curious – after a week of doing all the things for him that she usually does, could I get the same reaction? I tried hugging him, but nope.
Apparently I may be playing the role, but I am *not* his mommy.
