Easter Dinner: "Eat It Now" Lamb Shish Kabobs

As with all things in life, our Easter menu changed since last week. Instead of using the lentil soup recipe from The Language of  Baklava, we tried out a cream of asparagus soup recipe from Edible Ojai and Ventura County, since my mom doesn't like lentil soup. However, we went ahead with lamb shish kabobs, though I forgot to purchase the skewers, so we used a basket on the grill to cook the lamb.


Easter menu:

• Lamb chunks marinated in red wine, red vinegar, olive oil, fresh rosemary and oregano. 

• Cream of asparagus soup (recipe courtesy of the spring 2016 issue of edible Ojai and Ventura County)
• Freshly baked bread (pizza dough recipe doubled and allowed to rise over a full day)

 

• Dragon Fruit Sorbet for dessert (Brother Duncan's choice)

Wine from Brian's Cellar: 2005 Blair Fox Syrah; Paradise Road Vineyard Santa Barbara County

I had the pleasure of tasting at this vineyard three years ago, right around Christmas 2013 in the Los Olivos area.

Left to Right: Dad, me and sister Danica

 I had just come back from 4 months in the United Kingdom for a semester abroad, where they liked their cider, beer and ale more than wine. For our Christmas break Dad decided to take me, my sister and my Mom wine-tasting up in the Los Olivos area (yeah, where they filmed Sideways!).

"What a cool Dad!" Shannon, the tasting room attendant, said, upon hearing that my Dad was taking us on a wine-tasting tour.

Being the oenophile that he was, Dad always made sure that we knew about the wine we were tasting. And (to our dismay), he taught us how to spit out the wine so we could taste ALL the wine. We have several Blair Fox wines in Brian's Cellar, so we chose one for our Easter dinner. I'll talk about Dad's love of wine, and how he influenced my love of wine, in future blog posts.

Raising an Arab Father in America 

"Eat it Now" lamb shish kabobs refers to the first short story "Rising an Arab Father in America" in the memoir The Language of Baklava by Diana Abu-Jaber. In this story the author's father, a Jordanian who moved to the States and married an American, attempts to rediscover his roots by attempting to cook lamb shish kabobs from scratch. Having read this story some years ago at Westmont, I remember having learned from this story that the lamb must be calm before it is killed, or else the meat spoils. The father, Bud, and his brothers learned that after living for so many years in America they had forgotten how to properly kill a lamb, and spoil the meat for the shish kabobs in the process of killing a lamb that the children fawn over. 

Reading it four years later, I realize how Abu-Jaber's stories relate to me, though I am Filipino-American rather than Arab-American. I remember Dad forgetting how to kill a fish properly after so many years away from the cabin in Wyoming, or how the Philippines had changed after twenty-one years for Mom. Time changes everything, and though Abu-Jaber's story illustrates an extreme, it is amazing to look back upon one's life and realize how easily you can forget how to do something that defined your childhood.

Next week: "Nostalgic Chicken Livers" and "Bud's Special Rice for Special Company" in the short Story Hot Lunch.     

Breakfast Pizza!

We have this tradition in my family to cook a homemade pizza every Friday night--and it's a pretty awesome tradition, in my opinion. Dad spent years perfecting his crust, and now it is time to start perfecting mine.

Yesterday I attempted a new recipe that utilized different ingredients available from our garden: parsley and fresh chicken eggs. But eggs on pizza??!!

Our chickens Lumpia, Siopao and Adobo. 

Seemed like a crazy idea at the time. Eggs on pizza is a suggestion from Edible Ojai and Ventura County--a quarterly cooking and gardening that I had the pleasure of writing for a single issue. Eggs seemed too bizarre, but after some thinking I realized that we were cooking the same kind of pizza each week: meat-lover's supreme. Nothing wrong with wall-to-wall pepperoni, of course, but life's too short to have the same thing over and over again. So out to the chicken coop and vegetable beds I went!

Pizza crust ingredients:

• 2 1/2-3 cups of flour 
• 1 tablespoon of olive oil 
• 1 teaspoon sugar 
• 2 1/4 teaspoons of active yeast 

 Pizza toppings:

• Marinara sauce (growing San Marzano tomatoes for homemade sauce!) 
• Mozzarella (however much you want!) 
• Mushrooms 
• Onions 
• Bacon 
• Avocado (Fresh from Ojai orchards!) 
• Chopped parsley 
• 4 Ojai Day chicken eggs 

The most difficult part is cooking the eggs correctly without burning the pizza. Add the eggs after baking the pizza, keeping the oven warm to cook the eggs. The oven cooks the yolk evenly, so it's not runny inside. And voila! Only took a couple of hours!

 
With so many toppings this pizza ended up being very filling, yet so delicious. Next time I'll experiment with different kinds of soft cheeses for variety!

Wine-Stained Book: The Language of Baklava Challenge

I don't fancy myself a great cook. Sure, I'm a competent cook, but not a great cook.

It just so happened that my Dad was a great cook. One of his favorite past-times was watching cooking shows, movies about cooking, books about cooking, just about anything that had to do with food he loved to be a part of. He was all about the sizzling onions, watching the bread dough rise and experimenting with some darn recipe he found on the Internet. But who doesn't love good food?

My interests reside more in the literary realm, and it's harder for me to get as enthusiastic as cooking as he did. But there is something  to be said about how food described in a story breathes a higher level of  life into the author's world. Witches and wizards may cast imaginary spells, but butterbeer is something you can make and taste. The dystopian world of the Hunger Games seems too fantastic to be true, but the variety of District breads, laced with seaweed and dark ration grains, grounds the story to a reality the reader can easily access.

Though that's just fiction, such fiction grounded with such vivid sensory details is one of the keys to a great story. What better way to write with such vivid detail than to draw from your own life?

The Language of Baklava, a memoir by Diana Abu-Jaber, explores her childhood as an Arab-American through food. Each story contains one or two recipes, everything from shish kabob to baklava. After having read a few of her short stories, I mentioned the book to Dad as a way for me to read more fiction and have him cook the food. He loved the idea, but with a twist: he would read the book if I cooked the food. Well, I left him the book to think about the proposal. As per the family tradition, anything that we like likely has wine spilled on it, and lo and behold:

While he was reading it he ended up spilling wine on it. However, due to his passing in December, we never got to The Language of Baklava challenge.

So, I will attempt ("attempt" is the key word here) to cook one of the recipes associated with one short story a week. In the process I hope to learn a little more about cooking, and use it as an excuse to read through this book in its entirety.

First challenge (potential Easter meal?): Rising an Arab Father in America: "Eat it Now" Shish Kabob and peaceful vegetarian lentil soup.

The added challenged: pair the lamb shish kabobs with one of Dad's fancy wines from his infamous wine cellar for an Easter celebration.  

There's no guarantee that anything I cook will be amazing. After all, I'm only a competent cook. But let's see where this challenge will take us!

Anime Expo 2014

Kill la Kill! Sailor Moon! Sword Art Online! Massive amounts of cosplayers packed into the Los Angeles Convention Center! Welcome to Anime Expo, the largest anime convention in the United States!

This was my first big convention, and I had tons of fun! Previously, I had only been to smaller conventions, so this was a huge leap for me. Because this was Sailor Moon's 20th Anniversary, I had to take time out of my busy schedule to celebrate my (gateway drug) anime.

Fighting Evil By Moonlight!

As Anime Expo approaches, and I finish up my first ever cosplays (Sailor Mercury from Sailor Moon and Shinji Ikari from the mecha anime Neon Genesis Evangelion) I feel as though I have to write a blog post about WHY I decided to dress up as a magical girl.

The original Sailor Moon anime, or cartoon show, aired in the early nineties in both the original Japanese and English dub cast. Aside from being important for establishing and popularizing nearly every single trope found in the magical girl genre, this show was extremely important for getting me interested in science fiction and fantasy, particularly the superhero genre.

Anyone who watches anime is familiar with how huge of an impact Sailor Moon has made on the genre, and even though the main audience was women it has inspired so many people all around the world with its music and story.

What makes Sailor Moon so great? Both the manga (comic) and anime are unabashedly girly.

The show features a 90's power ballad opening theme, which serenades to the viewer that Sailor Moon "fights evil by moonlight, but wins love by daylight."

It also features the classic transformation sequence, in which the girls with magical powers transform into their superpowered selves. The Sailor Scouts are regular middle school girls who are called into action to rid Earth of evil, and to do this they are awakened by their feline guardians. The girls fight crime, all have fun personalities, and while the show is silly at times, it gets unashamedly dark. For me, Sailor Moon and the Sailor Scouts showed me that any girl could be awakened to their magical powers, fight crime, and look great while doing it. 

Now, twenty years later, the show is being rebooted with a bigger budget, bigger audience, and new animation: 

The primere is this Saturday, and I hope to attend to pay tribute to the show that awakened my love of science fiction and fantasy. This show is so, so important to women in the genre. Not only for the importance of an all-female cast, but also the fact that Nakao Takeuchi, the writer, is a woman who has influenced pop culture so much. 

So thank you. Thank you for everything. 

Dance Like You Want to Win!

AX Prep: Week 2


For about two weeks now I've been planning to finish Sailor Mercury, but hemming is proving more difficult than I thought. My mom and I had to hem the sailor skirt twice because the first time I tried I messed it up. It's difficult working on the costume after I come home from work, especially since I am now working on the big pieces of the costume. I've been working hard on my days off to finish the pieces:

Having never done a cosplay before, I of course had to choose one of the hardest costumes ever. But Sailor Moon has impacted me so much that I absolutely had to pay tribute in some fashion. And going in a group makes this even more fun! Even though it's a lot of work, I've been enjoying learning how to sew.

To take a break from Sailor Mercury I started working on DDR Shinji Ikari from the classic mecha anime Neon Genesis Evangelion. Thankfully, that costume is easy (especially compared to making a plug suit) and I pretty much got it done in one day. The hardest part is drawing the music notes on his shirt, which I have to make sure matches Asuka's shirt.

My dad started laughing when I was trying the crop top on, since he believes I'm trying to be an 80's dancer. Then he wanted me to poof up my hair and wear my mom's big glasses from 1985. My mom insisted on me wearing my black boots. I don't think she understood that the picture of Shinji Ikari she saw was a boy, but oh well Shinji Ikari's go-go dance outfit is pretty effeminate anyway.

Things I've learned from sewing thus far:

• Iron everything! It makes the actual sewing easier. 
• Be wary of the material you are sewing! Finer material bunches up more easily 
• I can't use the sewing machine to sew in a straight line

Last cosplay: Fiona from genderbend Adventure Time! Not certain if I will have time to get around to this one, but again this cosplay should be fairly simple.

Anime Exo 2014

Hello Again, Friends of Friends,

As spring comes to an end my workload has eased so much! Spring is a busy time for my industry, and now that people have planted their gardens I can relax with the summer heat, funny as that sounds, as it was a pretty hot spring in Southern California already. 

Since graduating from college a year ago I've made it a mission to participate in more events and conventions. So when I heard that the Sailor Moon 20th Anniversary panel would happen at Anime Expo in Los Angelos, I made it a point to go with several college friends who are also into Sailor Moon! So much so that we heavily debated going to a Sadie Hawkins dance as the Sailor Scouts!! (Hilarious considering that one of us is now married!!).

That being said I have never done cosplay before. I have several friends into cosplay, and one of my friends asked me to go with her cosplay husband at Comikaze in Los Angelos, which is the first and only con I've been to. I had fun at that convention. Bought some New Teen Titans beer glasses, got some A-Team stuff for my former roommate, held my friend's purse while she and her husband took cosplay pics. Good times. Yet I never had the time or energy to do cosplay while I was in school. Even now, a year later from college, I still find it hard to find the energy to do anything after work.

But learning new skills, as well as saving money to possibly attend graduate school, is key to living life after college. Since graduating I've learned that it's great to learn real life skills (gotten my typing credentials for possible government work, CPR license, studied and took the GRE), and sewing is a real life skill. I've never really sewed anything in my life, so my mom has been a huge help in making my SAILOR MERCURY cosplay. Learning how to sew has been incredibly helpful, and a bit humbling. But concerning the cosplay, what do I do? Commandeer the entire dining room table:

I started gathering materials for the cosplay back in May, but of course I'm going to do the month-long con crunch and do it all in one month. Sailor Mercury is the biggest cosplay item, as I'm spending the most time and money on it. My other (group) cosplays that I have not yet started: 

• DDR Shinji from Neon Genesis Evangelion with goingpostale as Asuka 
• Fiona from the genderbend episode of Adventure Time with my Sailor Moon cosplay group

My other cosplay idea is young Mikasa from Attack on Titan. So far I've been getting up at 7am every day this month (work is at 9am) just to work on real life stuff so I'll have time for cosplay after work. 

I'll be blogging more and posting pictures of my completed costumes as AX approaches! 

-Hanna