Entries this day: Cats_and_Dogs Kamakura Shopping_shopping_shopping great_dinner

Cats and Dogs

8:53am JST Friday 8 May 2009 (day 14289)

For Tokyo, it's raining proverbial cats and dogs, out into which I don't really want to go. BUT, at least there's no lightning nearby anymore.

Kamakura

3:34pm JST Friday 8 May 2009 (day 14289)

Have just visited 江ノ島 (Enoshima), a little island off the coast of Kamakura, a little coast south of Tokyo, with Traci's parents, Tom and Vicki.

Have been greatly enjoying relaxed meanderings and pictures of U-Cow, including one with a woman who called herself Yuko, though I imagine she just gave me a name that I couldn't track, unlike Uncle Cow. She was making octopus chips, and when I went over to see what she was doing, she commented on U-Cow and we talked a bit.

Anyway, Tom, though he says he can't write novels because he's so used to writing consise reports, loves telling stories. Just need to transcribe them and we'd have a novel quickly enough! Vicki likes to wander a bit more than Tom, and seems to be happily distracted with pretty, unique, interesting, or otherwise noteworthy things. In their relationship, perhaps she's the photographer, and he's the story teller.

They've lived in Brazil (Porto Alegre (which is not on the sea)), and also in Buenos Aires.

Shopping shopping shopping

6:46pm JST Friday 8 May 2009 (day 14289)

I'm chillin' outside the super market watching the bags while Tom and Vicki are inside shopping for foodage we'll prepare at chez Soness soon.

They bought me a necklace with a stone pendant with a rabbit on it! The rabbit is carved in relief (everything *around* the rabbit is carved down a bit). Sweet!

great dinner

12:34am JST Saturday 9 May 2009 (day 14290)

(written 7:33pm JST Saturday 9 May 2009 (day 14290))

We arrived at chez Soness around 7:20pm, and had just gotten a good start on dinner after Vicki went over each of the available spices, and found some bread crumbs to bread the chicken, and I found some (grapeseed) oil in which it could be sizzled. Soness arrived home around 7:50pm and Vicki prepared a salad of lettuce, tomatoes, avacado, and Soness made a vinegar dressing with her cool supergreenfood/spirulina breakfast shaker.

Salad was lovely, and then the chicken was great, served over something-like-rice-but-not-rice, with a thick sauce over everything. Soness and I were like "mmmm this sauce is great!" and Vicki was all, "it's the grapeseed oil!" and we were like, "wow!" and it went on like that. Soness got the pan with sauce left in the bottom, handed it to me all, "oh this is great; you should try it!" and then snagged the last piece of chicken from the table cause it hadn't been eaten yet.

I slurped up all the grapeseed oil sauce, wondering how it reacted with the chicken fat to make such a delicious sauce.

THEN we had broccoli soup, which had been blended into an o-so-delicioso puree featuring chunks of broccoli and man it was gooood!!!

Dishes time ensued; Tom and I tried to kick Vicki and Soness (mostly Vicki cause mostly she cooked) out of the kitchen so we could wash the dishes, and it was during that process (of washing, not kicking,) that a funny conversation occurred between Vicki and Soness:

Vicki: "and yeah so I just breaded them and threw them into the grapeseed oil.."

Soness: "You breaded them? With what?"

Vicki: "with this bag of breadcrumbs; is that not okay?"

Soness: "Oh! That's brown sugar. I was going to say, 'cause I don't have any breadcrumbs,' but that explains it."

SO NOW, we present to you the secret of deliciously sweet breaded chicken:

instead of bread crumbs, use brown sugar.

After that, we had bananas frizzled in the magic grapeseed oil by Soness topped with delicous vanilla Haagen Daaz ice creammmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.