cook: 2 kinds of poke (hamach and ahi

One of the veteran paddlers of my outrigger canoe club had friends who had sport fished in Mexico where they had caught 300 pounds of yellowfin, bluefin and hamachi, and so drove to San Diego on a Monday, drove back Tuesday and sold one pound fish packets after our Wednesday practice. I bought 2 pounds of ahi tuna and 3 pounds of hamachi. The next morning, I made poke for a clay club lunch. Into a bowl went grated ginger, garlic toom (garlic and lemon and olive oil paste), soy sauce, sesame oil, wasabi, sea salt flakes, and chopped green onion.

After whisking the marinade, I took the hamachi out and cut into bite-sized pieces to add to the bowl.

In the meantime, I was also boiling edamame and steaming Japanese rice.

I love hamachi for its buttery flavor. For the ahi tuna, I mixed the same ingredients for the marinade but subbed out the green onion for red onion and added sriracha for spiciness.

I'm almost always intimidated by ahi tuna, especially that blood line in the fish. But the poke tasted great.

For lunch, I served the poke, edamame, rice, pickled jalapenos and serrano, chopped butter lettuce, sunomono or Japanese cucumber salad. Forgot the furikake and the avocado. But Meral and Jeffrey gobbled it up. I had also made musubi snacks, and Zan took the tofu ones...

...while Meral and Jeffrey and I ate the Portuguese sausage and Spam musubi.

ceramics + canoe + cook: summer break

I entertained the possibility of traveling to Mexico City this summer, but then decided to stay home and find pleasure in ceramics, canoeing, cooking, and just chilling. My days are somewhat structured and a prelude of what my retirement will look like. Canoe practice on Monday and Wednesday late afternoons...

Monday and Wednesday mornings spent at Clay Life...

(I really love the teeny, tiny vases I've been throwing for the air plants)

...Tuesdays and Thursdays, cLaY cLuB at College of San Mateo with Zan and Jeff and sometimes Meral or Sara followed by lap swimming at its athletic center.

I started a couple of candelabras at the community college 3D studio with Sculpture Mix, but didn't extrude enough coils and so got rid of the scraps of cone 10 clay I had and threw these 6 bowls to put in the 10,000 hours to acquire the skill of throwing. The 2 dark gray bowls I'm sure are Black Mountain that got mixed with a bit of the red clay and the other tannish bowls are the same mixture but with more of the cone 6 clay. I'm hydrating some Coleman porcelain in the sink and will maybe purchase a bag of Black Mountain at CSM too.

On the house chores front, I finally was able to separate this orchid--which we received a year ago from neighbors when Sadie died, and gawd do I miss that little girl--from the two houseplants that were in the same pot.

However, I think one of these houseplants needs to be trimmed, so I can get it bushier. I transplanted them from the orchid pot into these super cheap pots from Michaels in Pasadena, but I still love the look of these $2 pots.

Some day, I will host a sale of pots and plants and call it Roots and Shoots: Plants + Ceramics for Sale.

I don't cook very many dinners because of Patrick's broth nights or my evenings at canoe practice or in the ceramics studio, but I manage to cook favorite meals for lunch like this Tuscan salmon and fettucine Alfredo with English peas.

And because I was on summer break, I drank Chardonnay midday.

I'm embarrassed that I ate the whole salmon and pasta dish all on my own. But then again, fish is not Patrick's favorite, so more for me. 

I volunteered to cook ribs for a neighborhood dinner even though I was exhausted from a regatta the day before. But I enjoyed firing up the grill even if I did most of the work for the meal.

 

I dry rubbed Montreal seasoning on the rack of the ribs and then roasted them low and slow in a 200 degree oven all Sunday morning. I slathered them with a bottle of barbecue sauce for the last hour and finished them off on the grill. I enjoined another neighbor to bring ears of fresh corn, which was added to the grill.

I think the ladies liked the ribs because all went for second helpings. I was just too tired to eat much. 

While cleaning for the cleaning lady, I gilded the star on a Christmas tree ceramic, which I can now store in the holiday wares box. I am SO NOT digging that blue tea light inside it. I also pickled a cucumber in the fridge as well as these jalapeno and serrano peppers left from the taco party I was invited to.

Holy crap were my fingers burning throughout the night and the next morning even after ceramics throwing because I didn't wear rubber gloves while prepping and chopping those peppers. 

July is nigh, which means only another month and a half of summer break left. Last night, I picked up 5 pounds of ahi tuna and hamachi from friends of friends of the canoe club, who drove to San Diego to pick up part of the haul of 300 pounds of fishing in Mexico. I'm thinking poke, grilled zucchini and Korean corn. And this Saturday is my last regatta, which means training for long distance races the rest of the season, which means canoeing in Santa Cruz, San Francisco, and Sausalito. Unfortunately, I missed out on the long distance race in Monterey though I get to paddle there this Saturday for the regatta.

(outrigger) canoe: scenes from my first regatta

Last year when I paddled, I only competed in long distance races. My first race at Santa Cruz had me hooked. I loved all the bumps or turbulent waves, my paddle going into the kelp, the expansiveness of open sea and paddled nary even one regatta. But this year, I paddled in my first regatta. Scenes from sprint races in the Foster City Lagoon below. The tunes were banging because of Kwad being the DJ, and I wished I had agreed to paddle in more races.    

The weather was glorious even if windy...

...so gusty that banners blew off poles into the lagoon. 

Right after her V1 race, Kayden retrieved one banner next to the gazebo.

Glorious truly.

 

There was food galore: breakfast, lunch and dinner throughout the day.

I had to run across the street to the drugstore because I'd forgotten my sunglasses. The sunshine was that intense.

Smack in the middle of suburbia. I see why this site is popular with other outrigger canoe clubs.

Race officials were in the gazebo.

Last year I didn't participate in the regatta in Sacramento in Natomas.

And the dock was right there for crews or teams to jump in and out of the canoes for the races. Only a few clubs brought canoes which we borrowed and paddled in.

I need to laugh, and when the sun is out

I've got something I can laugh about                       

 

Good day sunshine

cook: musubi

I've returned to outrigger canoe paddling after 2 1/2 months of resting strained intercostal muscles, and practice has been okay while the pain or twinges have been phantom. I'm just sore now from  regular exercise. I've been enjoying the few practices so much that I'm committing to strengthening those muscles in order to stay in the sport a couple more years. This Saturday my outrigger canoe club is hosting a regatta, and so I'm bringing a snack of musubi. Someone requested a plant-based option, and so I sliced a block of tofu into planks after blotting it with paper towels to get rid of much of its water, and then baked them in a marinade of Bachan’s Japanese yuzu barbecue sauce and then popped them into a 400 degree oven. 

I also measured out 4 cups of Japanese rice. I had borrowed a rice cooker from a friend in order to cook a larger volume of rice without it going mushy or burned. I used basically a 1:1 ratio of rice to water after rinsing and then letting the rice soak for 30 minutes before pressing the button to cook and then steam the rice.

I remembered that I had Portuguese sausage in the refrigerator and added those slices to a baking sheet along with 4 cans of Spam I had also sliced into planks.

Rather than fry all the meats in a skillet, they were laid into baking sheets that were sprayed with cooking oil and then popped into the hot oven to sear or brown. That probably took 15 minutes.

Oh yeah, I decided this oven technique was gonna be easier.

And then I messaged my friends to ask how much water to use in the rice cooker. I ended up using the first digit of my index finger of how much water should be atop the rinsed rice. 

I had bought this inexpensive tool for making musubi at Daiso, and it worked great. I simply dipped the bottom third of the mold in water and then laid it perpendicular on top of the nori or dried seaweed. I had bought seaweed snacks at Costco, and so I needed 2 slices of nori. The musubi tool came with a handy little rice paddle for ladling and squishing rice into the mold that I didn't even use the press. I then sprinkled furikake on top and then the plank of protein. And then flipped the ends of the seaweed over the protein. The moisture of the rice and the stickiness of the teriyaki sauce on the meat didn't necessitate using water to seal the seaweed.

I followed Sheldon Simeon's recipe for Spam musubi, which was adapted from his Cook Real Ha'waiian (a public library book from months ago in which I photocopied recipes I wanted to try), and didn't bother toasting the seaweed. They tasted great.

Making musubi was labor intensive with the construction and then wrapping of all the snacks in food plastic, and no leftovers! The keiki gobbled them all up at the regatta yesterday.