Mom's Birthday

The day after I arrived my sister and I set up for a birthday party for my mom. I made red and yellow tissue poms to hang from the ceiling and my sister and her husband made homemade vanilla ice cream. We made dinner for the family along with my aunt's help getting some fried chicken and had a nice summer feast. We had family and a few family friends to help make my mom's day special.

 

 

Earlier that same day we went to Claires and my sister C got her ears pierced! My younger sisters are growing up so fast, it's hard to believe. This girlie has almost caught up with me in height!!! She did so well and acted so calm as she got her ears done. Look at that happy face :D

 

After getting her ears pierced!

4th of July

I arrived the 4th of July in the afternoon. We had a nice BBQ outside, rode the little motorcycle, shot some clay pigeons, lit some fireworks, and enjoyed time with family.

 

 

How many parachutes can we catch???

 

 

Ready to shoot some parachutes!

   











     

It gets pretty hot out where I am from so swimming is a must to stay cool!

                                  

 

One of my cousin's bought a new gun so there was some clay pigeon shooting. Many of us tried, even me. Jamie, my cousin's wife did the best out of all of us girls, she hit 2 out of 2!

 

 

My brother-in-law almost flew off the bike and gave us all a laugh! I think all the adults, including me, had more fun on the bike and had a harder time sharing than the kids did haha!!!

 

Mexican Food Monday

Last Monday I missed my Mexican Food Monday. I was back home for a short trip to celebrate my mom's 50th birthday and wasn't able to make something new. Everyone that I tell that I went to celebrate my mom's birthday are amazed how young my mom is! I guess most people in this area that are my age have parents already in their 60s? I was so happy to be home to celebrate the 4th and 5th of July with family and see some extended family (Uncle, Aunt and Cousins) that I haven't seen for probably about 3 years. I will post some pictures in the next few days of my quick trip but first I am going to share with you the recipe for my Mexican Food Monday. This week I made chipotle mint meatballs. I really want to use my chipotles once I open a new can so I decided to make a few things that use chipotles in the recipe to not waste anything. I didn't follow this recipe to a T but I think it still came out pretty good. These meatballs are in a tomato based broth and you add mint, garlic, salt, pepper, egg and rice with ground chicken or turkey meat. I used ground beef because that is what I had and I added bits of onion to the balls which wasn't in the recipe. I also used brown short grain rice because that is what we eat in my house. I think this needs some sort of side or maybe could be poured on top of a bed of rice or pasta to make it a full meal. The flavor was good and the mint was an interesting combination twist.
I am not sure how Mexican it is to have mint in the meatballs...I'd have to do more research to see how they are usually prepared but I think the overall concept of a tomato broth with meatballs are common for a mexican meatball recipe.
http://www.patismexicantable.com/2009/09/dreaming_of_julios_albondigas/

My local market

I am absolutely in love with my local market that is located just across the street from my apartment. I am very lucky to have a fresh local produce, fish, cheese, and a butcher meat market super close, all within 1 min walking distance. But it amazes me each time I walk into my produce market how much variety they have and how fresh things are all the time. There are so many different types and colors of fruits and vegetables that I didn't even know existed. There are rows of different potatoes, mushrooms, squash, peppers, apples, berries, peaches, pears, tomatoes, green and PURPLE asparagus, melons, lettuce, fresh herbs etc, etc, etc....You can find organic or non-organic and locally farmed or imported. They also carry a lot of specialty items such as sauces, jellies, grains, cooking oils (have you ever heard of using hazelnut oil?), breads, and locally farmed eggs and dairy products.  This is also the market that helped us find Three Twins, Lemon Cookie Ice cream, which has become our new favorite!
 I don't know what we would do if we lived farther away from this market while still living in the bay area because I think I am pretty attached to my market haha!...as you can probably tell because I am writing a whole blog post just on this market! 

It's hard to show what it really looks like inside and the variety that they have but here are a few of the rows of produce.

Mexican Food Monday!

Here we are again at Mexican Food Monday. I can believe it's Monday already, I enjoy my weekend's too much that I'm always sad to find that we are back to another full week of work. We will get to the food in a moment...

Today I have some bad and also exciting news. To start with the exciting, I had an interview at a bilingual private school today. I think it went fairly well but I always think back of all the answers I should have worded differently or how I should have thought of more questions for me to practice in my head. It never fails, I always practice a few common questions but they always seem to choose ones I haven't thought too much about and I get nervous and blank out. So I am really hoping this job is in God's plan, that I impressed my interviewers enough for them to offer the job, and I that I can move out of the position I am at right now. The bad news is that my source of transportation, BART, is on strike and will probably cause me some trouble throughout the week. Look up BART strike if you want to see what's going on around here. CRAZY!

Yesterday afternoon I was walking to meet up with my husband to watch him play soccer and found a Mexican market across the street. I started to think about what I should make for today and stumbled upon these dried flowers to make the very common drink that I love "Agua de Jamaica." I love Jamaica flavor so I thought I should try this week making it. I am going to again use the recipe from Pati's Mexican Table. We'll see how I like the recipe because I haven't actually made the drink yet. http://www.patismexicantable.com/2011/05/jamaica_water/Oh and by the way I finally got Pati's cookbook in the mail so more recipes I hope from her :)

We actually had her creamy shrimp again tonight and chipotle mashed sweet potatoes for dinner! I am glad so far my Mexican Mondays have worked out, except as I mentioned before we were going to try Rockfish last week and that was not a good choice...I won't probably buy rockfish again, Too Fishy! But, that was not Pati's fault, this was just an experiment to try to like fish so I can make seafood dishes for my seafood loving hubby.

Hope you guys have a great week ahead! I am visiting back home for a short visit the end of this week to celebrate my Mom's birthday. As a bonus it will be July 4th and I get to see some family that I haven't seen for 3 years. I'm also pretty excited to spend a few days with my immediate family who I miss. I'm just sad my husband couldn't take time off to go with me. :(

My cousin's wedding reception

{Late Post}

Thankfully I was able to get a few days off to go celebrate my cousin's happy wedding reception day at the beginning of June. I thought I wouldn't be able to take it off after my long vacation to Mexico and new enrollment of clients at work but I was able to get a day and a half approved. I was so excited that I was going to be able to make it and surprise my cousin. The reception was decorated so cute and they were such a good looking couple ;)
More pictures here: http://share.shutterfly.com/share/received/album.sfly?sid=0Abt27Nm5ZtGTkY&startIndex=0&fid=52f842b359c04760

Us girls plus my nephew ;)

My grandparents, they are also a good looking couple! They celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary last year!



My parents dancing

Mexican food Monday

If you know me well you know that I am not a huge fan on seafood. I didn't eat fish very often growing up. I never liked the fishy taste or the "spongy" texture of almost all seafood I tried. After moving to somewhere where fish and seafood is fresh, everyone told me that the reason I probably didn't like fish was because the fish I tried wasn't fresh and that is why I didn't like it.

We went to a friends house last weekend and had grilled shrimp. I didn't want to be rude and say that i don't like seafood so i ate it. I actually liked the taste! It still was a little bit spongy but the taste was good so that I could forget about the strange texture. I decided to make it for for us on our own. I found a recipe for shrimp and decided to use it for my new recipe of the week. I also bought "Rockfish" which is supposed to be like tilapia but since they didn't have tilapia they recommended Rockfish. It's supposed to be a less fishy tasting fish and takes on the flavor of what you're cooking it with.

This is before you add cream, when you set flame to the tequila

My new recipe is again from Pati's Mexican Table. I just bought her cookbook so hopefully the recipes in the book are as good as her blog recipes. I tried the tequila, chipotle cream shrimp. I didn't have the Mexican cream so I used Cowgirl Creamery creme fraiche which was recommended online if you didn't have mexican Rio Grande crema. I know next time I will try to buy the shrimp deveined and the shells to be already removed because it takes quite a while for an inexperienced shrimp eater to remove. It was quite a job! I had my husband stand by as I lit the flame to take the alcohol away from the tequila. I was afraid that I would light the house on fire... Or my eyebrows!!!! But no accidents happened, thank goodness haha! Overall we both again liked the recipe and I like that I am learning to use my can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce since I would buy a can for making Tinga and then it would just sit forever in the fridge. I have found some other recipes using it so those recipes are to come in the future :)(http://www.patismexicantable.com/2012/10/tequila_mexican_cre/)