Chihuly Garden and Glass

My first trip to the Chihuly Garden and Glass happened in February of 2013 as part of a Valentine weekend celebration. I've just returned from my second time with my in-laws visiting town, but both times have been a great treat.

The works you'll find there are just stunning from glass-filled boats to hanging chandeliers; growing-stretching gardens both indoors and outdoors.

The tour begins with this tentacle-esque and iridescent series of sculptures. Perhaps to put you in the mood for some additional glass works. Each section of the hall, however, is special on its own to say the least.

Things progress through a quick look at some aboriginal-inspired art before opening into a beautiful sea-themed room filled with crabs, squid, and a writhing blue mass of seaweed or tentacles, surrounded by sea life.

After the underwater sea show you are treated to a ceiling full of multi-coloured pieces. You can stare up in wonder and take a photo with your family under the psychedelic glow.

Next you enter through a growing garden draped in darkness. The only source of light comes from the life-like structures coming up from the centre of the room with a plethora of different "flora" to explore!

From there you enter a world of floating ornaments. At first you find a dark lake with two boats simply filled to the brim with spheres of glass and other shapes as they spill out and hang across the bows. Afterwards, the tour of floating glass takes to the ceiling with intricate glass structures reaching down - some like tentacles trying to grasp you from above.

In the last section of indoor pieces, you enter a hall of autumn-coloured glass flowers suspended from the ceiling with a looming view of the Seattle Space Needle high above. During Valentines you can reserve a nice dinner here in this haul - if you can afford it!

Finally in the outside garden you are treated to more growing glass as it stretches upwards with stunning beauty - like looking at a garden in summer, except you can enjoy it nearly year-round. At night you can even return to enjoy these structures under a different glow.

If you are in the Seattle area, I suggest you not miss a chance to visit this exhibition hall. Perhaps it will even inspire you to make your own glass artwork!

Homemade Turnip/Radish Cake

With the Lunar New Year approaching, I am reminded of my family's yearly tradition. Each year, my grandmother (and now my aunt) spend hours preparing Lo Baat Gao (daikon radish cake) and Nien Gao (a sweet steamed rice cake). So I decided to look up the recipe for radish cake and make some at home since we'll be so far from family for the holidays.

So I found a great sounding recipe at Epicurious.com which I will relay here for you all, along with some small tweaks and things I learned along the way.

Ingredients:
~200g of Chinese bacon (the less fatty the better since you really want that meaty taste!)
1 large Chinese radish @ about 2lbs
8 Chinese dried mushrooms
1/2 cup Chinese dried shrimp (the small kind)
2 teaspoons rice cooking wine
1 teaspoon sugar
2 cups rice flour (non glutinous)
Salt or soy sauce to taste

Recipe:

1. Rinse and soak (at least 1/2 hour) the dried mushrooms and shrimp in separate bowls (~1/2 cup) liquid each bowl. After that you can mince these finely and set the water aside for later. At this time you can shred your radish into a large cooking pot.

2. In a steamer, steam your bacon for ~15-20 minutes then remove most of the fat (but not all) and mince it up.








3. In tandem you can also begin cooking down your shredded radish in about 4 cups of water. It takes 15-30 minutes depending on how tender you want your radish to be. Drain after but reserve the liquid.

4. In a large wok over medium heat, cook your minced bacon for a few minutes or until it begins to brown. Add your shrimp and mushrooms along with your rice wine, some salt, and soy sauce to taste. Ideally the bacon, shrimp and mushrooms will add a lot of taste to the radish cake. Remove from heat.

5. Drain the cooked radish and add into the wok and combine with your other ingredients.

6. In a separate bowl, mix your rice flour and, mushroom juice, shrimp juice, and 1 cup radish juice. [Aside: the Epicurious recipe says that the batter should look like rice pudding but I don't really eat that so I had no idea how thick it should be. I made it closer to pancake batter by adding about 3/4 more rice flour and a little more radish juice. In reality, this made the cake a little harder than I thought it should be. Instead, the batter should be like crepe batter, kinda thin to give you a softer texture of cake at the end! So, keep this 2:2 ratio as specified]

7. Mix the batter and radish mixture, add a little more salt for flavour and steam for about 30-60 minutes. You want the water at a slow rolling boil rather than furious one. You'll also want to do it in a good steamer where cooled steam won't drip down on your cake but that can be hard to manage. If anything, try to use a domed lid on a pot wide enough to let the cooling water drip down the sides and back into the pot, and NOT onto your cooking cake. You can also try propping the lid up on some wooden chopsticks/spacers to let more of the steam escape.

8. Let it cool down after the cake is spongy/hardened. Pop in the fridge for a few hours and then when you're ready, cut into 1cm thick slices to fry up and eat. Don't forget to add some Oyster Flavour Sauce, but the cake should be salty enough on its own :)

Update: I've made this recipe twice now (once every Chinese New Year's) and it's been enjoyable each time. I had the luck of some snow the second time around, which allowed me to cool it out on our balcony!

Conquering (Nearly) Humpback Mountain

So the other day I had my first opportunity at snowshoeing outside Seattle. Now I've used snowshoes before but this was definitely a new experience. My idea of snowshoes was the old-time criss-cross, tennis racquet tied to your shoe design - you know what I mean right? The snowshoes for this trip, however, were much more modern and meant for much harder kinds of hikes.

My friend Dan and I started the morning driving through a blanket of fog out of Seattle and Eastwards towards Humpback Mountain. Somewhere along the way, however, we went from dense fog, to absolute clarity. It was quite amazing! It's not even that the fog had "burned off" but For tthere was some kind of barrier that literally kept the fog in Seattle (proof of this later...).

For the inexperienced (like myself), your approach to Humpback Mountain begins far from the trailhead. Unless you have a great SUV with 4WD, you need to park along the road about 1.5-2 miles from there. So we arrived to find some other hikers heading up to conquer silver peak and began the trek to our trailhead. It really was quite nice and the snow was packed enough that you could walk centrally along the road between some massive and deep tire tracks.

I honestly wasn't keeping track of time, but we eventually made it to an entry point and started in on the somewhat snowy forest. Trying to navigate through this first point, however, we only made it so far before we nearly became stuck in a deep snow bank or drift. I was literally crawling along just to avoid sinking in. At one point I sank hip-deep and had to drag myself out - also a good time to try and learn how to use an ice axe folks (just sayin').

 At that point we tossed on our snowshoes and broke out onto another road before starting a somewhat steep ascent. We ended up tackling the mountain in stages. About 30-60 minutes of upward fighting through drifts that were broken up at these intervals by lone roads/trails.

 

Three major ascents later and we were finally breaking towards the top of the mountain. We had started at 8am, and it was about 1:30 now. We spent the next hour with a great view slowly working our way upwards while avoiding falling snow/ice hunks (yes, painful hunks!) from trees. The view, however, was more than worth it!

On the right we see Mount Rainier. On the left, in the lake of fog we see nothing... but that's Seattle!

Dan had set our turnaround time at 2:30 so we tried our best to scale to the peak by that time. Unfortunately with the sun out, the icy slopes and my inexperience, we called it quits about 50 vertical feet from the summit and started tumbling back down the mountain to grab lunch. We ate around 3, and then spent roughly the next 2.5 hours or so on the descent.

After taking a much-needed shortcut, we were back on the road but light was failing and boy were we tired. I was so thankful when we finally reached the car at 6:30. We made it to a gas station, I munched down a huge bag of Doritos and a Gatorade to boot and eventually made it home.

The trip, however, was not without its scary moments, and here's the lesson to this story: when you are barreling down a mountainside with a big, heavy, sharp, metal ice axe, try not to lose control and fall forward at high speed. Coming down one part and hitting a clearing, I did just that and I totally could have taken out my eye on any of the 3 sharp ends of the axe. Fortunately (somewhat) I fell forward knocked my forehead hard against the handle of the axe. I was stunned for about 5 minutes and just wanted to lay there in the snow, but that was the worst of it. My toque probably absorbed some of the hit too so I was lucky :) Just a bruise and soreness that will last a couple weeks... probably.

Despite the head bump, all in all a good 10-hour hike with a great view. A much better choice than sitting in foggy Seattle all day long...

Update: For about 3 months after this trip, I suffered terrible vertigo every time I sat up and lay down in our bed along with when I would look up or around abruptly. Jing gave me some exercises to try and relieve the problem but they never really took. I'm pretty convinced that I had a concussion but I can say now that I've made it through :)

Home for the Holidays

Hot pot! So much food, and it makes a soup at the same time!

So it has been months since I was back in Toronto and I came home for multiple reasons: family, friends, and to prepare my wife for her big move. Yes, after months of waiting she will be joining me and we've found her a job here so everything is looking set.

Bubble Tea!!!

Back in Toronto, I ate all the things I've been missing in Seattle. I'm not saying Seattle hasn't been a haven of good food per se. Rather, I just haven't had the opportunity to truly explore and some places you just need to eat at with friends. For example, Hot Pot, All You Can Eat Sushi, Bubble Tea, and Dim-Sum!

At one point we were driving down town and I looked out the car window and thought to myself "Boy, have I missed Toronto! All the skyscrapers, people walking streets and food!"

Of course it wasn't all fun and games for me in Toronto either. There were trips to the vet, preparations and errands to be completed. There were also goodbye parties to be planned for Jing and the inevitable packing.

Seor Ak San. How I've missed Pork Bone Soup

Despite missing all my favourite hangouts in TO, I found that I did not miss the snow. After skipping breakfast one morning to see our accountant, we came back to Jing's parents house to get some things done before lunch. I shoveled snow while Jing filled out endless paperwork for her job. Maybe I was just hungry and tired from all the work, but at one point I stopped and thought to myself, "Man, I miss Seattle! If I were there right now I could be wearing my fall jacket and there'd be none of this snow in my way!"

One of the most memorable moments back home, however, was with our cat. After speaking with the vet, they suggested that we give him 12.5mg of Gravol for when we were to fly him back to Seattle. This wouldn't be happening until February but we took our second last day to try it out on him, you know, to see how he'd react.

We wanted to make it quick and painless so we purchased quick dissolving Gravol but that only comes in a low does, cherry-flavoured children's version. Sound great right? So we cut one in half, popped it into his mouth and made him swallow.

Seconds later, the drool begins; little strands dripping down the side of his mouth turn to bigger ones. Then the drool begins to take on a foamy aspect and all of a sudden it looks like the cat has gone rabid. Of course, it's probably a reaction to the horrible taste of cherries! After a minute, it was clear that he wanted to throw up that gravol, and he did along with a large bolus of food and hair. Then come the dour looks of disappointment from him, as he continues to foam with saliva. Poor guy. My sister was over at that time and we were in unending fits of laughter and "awww, poor thing"s. It was quite the show.

Santa-themed dessert by our talented friend Wendy!

Things to remember:
1) Cats hate pills - especially cherry-flavoured ones.
2) Winter in Toronto is great if you don't need to shovel snow.

Until Next time TO and Seattle...

That's One Hot Lap!(top)

So over the course of my Black Friday, wherein I cooked an amazing dinner for my amazing wife's visit, I purchased a laptop off of Amazon. The Acer Aspire V5-171-6422 which has pretty good bang for the buck based on what I paid.

It was a busy week when it first arrived and I only had time to start playing with it about a week later. I managed to load much of my data and gave the machine its first full day of work from home. I programmed all day long on a script for my research when I had a thought about keeping all my work on Dropbox instead of syncing it all the time to a hard drive to take back and forth from work. It was a fleeting but good thought and I told myself I'd get to it later.

Cut to a few hours later when I was Skyping with my wife. We had decided on some things for her upcoming move here to Seattle when I received another call from my older sister. We were busying talking about my little nephew when suddenly the screen went blank. I couldn't figure out what happened but the laptop was clearly not turning on anymore!

Things seemed to be charging, but when I pressed the power button, the light would flash briefly and then... nothing. Looking over the entire unit for a problem, I suddenly saw this little hole - which I had previously thought was a noise-cancelling microphone. A closer inspection, however, told me it was not meant to be there.

So unfortunately, all the data I had accumulated over the day was lost because I did not follow my idea of linking to my Dropbox account!

Fast forward over a couple of weeks of emails, and phone calls and I was at a crossroads with Acer Corporate and Amazon. Should I return the machine to Amazon and let them deal with it or pass it on to Acer to repair. I hadn't really had enough time with the machine to know if I truly liked it or not. More importantly, my data was on the laptop AND there was not way to remove it without breaking my warranty!

In the end, I made the tough decision to pass it along to Acer just before Christmas. Their customer service was very nice and helped me to arrange its transport back. I was told that due to the possible safety hazard, they would require an engineer in Houston to take a look. At least this was an interesting situation! Well, a few days later I received another call saying the laptop would be fully replaced (say goodbye to my data!) AND they wanted my permission to send it along to another set of engineers in Taiwan for inspection.

Unfortunately the laptop arrived in Seattle while I was back home in Toronto but this is definitely the most interesting incident involving one of my electronics. I should note that for some reason, things have a habit of breaking on me. A quick laundry list includes

1. Galaxy Nexus: 2 months after buying it, the motherboard exploded. Fully replaced by Samsung, but I lost my cool photos.
2. iPod Nano (3rd generation?): simply died one day, after 3 years. Never figured out why.
3. Acer laptop (my first!): motherboard died after a year.
4. Hard drives (at least 3): definitely died due to random failures.
5. Toshiba LCD TV (another first!): died a couple weeks before my wedding. Puzzling that it chose to die mere months after the 4-year extended warranty.
6. Canon SD400 camera (also my first!): Dropped it about 1 foot from a well-carpeted floor. Never turned on again... also died just months after its long extended warranty was up.

I'm sure the list will continue to grow but a melted laptop screen definitely sits at the top now. And that's the story of one hot laptop.

It's Clemen-time :)

So it's been busy at work the past few weeks but I wanted to note that Clementine season is upon us! I already ate a small bag last week and "mistakenly" picked up a huge bag yesterday at the grocery store.









It will take me at least 3 days to eat through all of these... maybe 2. I also love eating these because they are much easier to transport in my bag than bananas. They may roll around a little but unlike bananas they don't bruise, get mushy and potentially explode all over your things. Even if exploding was a possibility, I can still bag them unlike my bananas. Aside from the more pragmatic aspects of the clementine, I just really love the taste! Little miniature oranges, sweet and tangy. Great for dropping in your pockets as a quick snack when you go out for a brisk afternoon walk!

I also forgot to post this amazing mushroom picture from about a month back. It was just growing outside work on the grass by the side of the street where cars park all day long. I only discovered it because we saw some folks pointing and taking pictures of something on the ground on day. We couldn't see what it was since it was behind a parked car so I ventured down for a look and was richly rewarded!

Check out that Mario-style mushroom! aka Amanita muscaria

Unfortunately, it was gone a couple days later. We suspect that it was perhaps taken for it's possible hallucinogenic effects. I would rather not try since the list of other symptoms really sound unpleasant. Of course, I'm really not looking for a good hallucination either.

Speaking of getting melty, I have a great story for another day but I'll wait until I resolve some issues before posting pictures. I will, however, leave you with this little gem I found parked on the street. Kinda... surreal. Those windows have been open for a couple of days now... and it's been raining. Hope their stuff is okay...

Stay classy Seattle!