What I’ve Learned Having Houseguests

Now that the holidays are over and I’ve recovered somewhat, I tend to review our hosting strategies, successes and misses. Every year we have at least 1-3 guests stay with us for any given length of time. It could be an overnight stay or a couple of weeks. Don’t know about other people, but I get worked up. I just want to make sure that our guests feel welcome and comfortable, that they enjoy their stay and would want to come back.

We have a slight challenge of not having a dedicated guest room, but here’s how we get around that: the basement. It becomes a semi-private suite. In the case of my awesome brother-in-law, he’ll room in my kid’s room, or with my kids. No problem. However, I can’t necessarily assume that everyone will be as accommodating.

My must haves: No matter what the state my house is in, I will prep good pillows, a good air mattress (we have two), towels, sheets, clock, storage cubes doubled as nightstand, hangers, and coat rack. Don’t have yet but would like: luggage rack.

Entertaining: Here, I luck out again with pretty easy going relatives. My in-laws did most of the shuttling around last Fall with our guests. But, it’s helpful to have schedules and sight-tour brochures handy. Seriously, I even picked up at our library a few copies of “family-friendly” publications that have local things-to-do and set that on the bedside table for our guests.

Meal times: I’ll ask about favorite snacks and more importantly, kids favorites, if I’m not exactly sure what my guests are into. Putting together a dinner/meal schedule was also a super timesaver. It was more like a guideline, if anything, but sure helped with grocery lists. We had plenty of drinks on hand too.

Here’s my favorite way of setting up my towels on the bed for a cute “welcome”. One of my best friends taught me this a long time ago when I stayed at her home for a few days. Sorry, you might only get this the first time you come over, after that, you’re like family and I don’t sweat it out so much.

Abby took video footage of me putting it together (our first video tutorial), but the file was too big to upload! This will have to do.

**Update** I figured out how to add video:

1) Take the bath towel and fold into thirds along the long direction.

2) Fold into thirds the other way (short direction).

3) Take the hand towel and fold into thirds along the long direction.

4) Now wrap the hand towel around the bath towel.

5) Take the wash cloth, fold into thirds, then wrap around the hand towel to hide the ends and create a “bow” appearance.

Voila! Hotel-ish towels for your guests… enjoy!

Tags: basement, eating, family, Friends and Family, holiday, home, houseguests, tutorials, vacation, visitors

Making homemade potstickers

As a person living in an Asian household and cooking Asian food, there are some must-haves in the kitchen like a rice cooker with a steamer attachment, a hefty bag of short grain rice (in our case we have three different kinds), a wok, soy sauce, you get the picture. But egg roll wrappers or dumpling wrappers, we usually buy those from the Asian market. Until one day… we got the itch to roll out our own wrappers after watching Anita Lo (Top Chef Masters) make some. It’s only water, flour and salt. Oh, correction, HOT water. We used cornstarch to dust the rolling pins, surface and our hands.

Abby thought it’d be fun to help. Thank goodness Ollie was napping. (Yeah, look at my man’s guns there.)

Anita Lo makes it look so easy on television! I didn’t feel so bad, though, when Bobby Flay tried making some on one of his “Throwdown” shows (dumpling recipe here).

Note the “store bought” skins in the background. That was for insurance in case we totally botched up the recipe. As it was, it turned out pretty well. We have to work on our technique, but we did use the ready made skins for the extra meat filling we had leftover.

I’d share our filling recipe, except we don’t have one that’s completely documented or consistent, yet. Just know that we use ground pork, napa cabbage, sesame oil, salt and pepper. I’m sure I’ll update this with a proper recipe sooner or later.

Tags: chinese food, cooking, eating, homemade, potstickers

Visiting Bittersweet in Danville

This is my last post about our yummy stops in California. So, here we are satisfying another chocolate craving. We had a great lunch with my aunt, uncle and cousins and on the way back to Vacaville we stopped by Bittersweet: the Chocolate Cafe in Danville. Not only was this place cute and quaint, but the chocolate they stock is impressive! You walk in and the chocolaty aroma just swallows you up… so delicious and luxurious. Mmmm.

What lured us in was our cousins telling us this place has THE BEST hot chocolate. So thick it’ll knock you out. You know how they make it? With chocolate ganache! Brilliant!! You just choose the kind of milk you want: skim, 1%, whole, etc. Abby chose skim, and still, it was rich, but not overly so. Perfect for her.

We also took the opportunity to try their desserts. Unfortunately for me and Ollie, there were a lot of good looking pastries but with nuts.

This was my choice to go with the hot chocolate ganache: homemade raspberry marshmallow. Seriously, it makes me want to make my own. Why buy the white styrofoam-ish nuggets when you can have fluffy clouds that melt in your mouth…

Tags: bittersweet, California, chocolate, dessert, eating

Finding THE Donut Shop – Dynamo Donut

We were really thrilled to find Dynamo Donut and Coffee in San Francisco. And it’s all because of the Apple Maple Bacon Donut. I don’t know who was more excited, me or my husband? The kids had fallen asleep while we were driving around half-aimlessly (we had a GPS in the car) in completely unknown territory. I felt like we were in the Pacific Northwest, not sure if it was because of the artsy storefronts, the small kitschy-ness of the vendors in the area. I don’t know. All I know is that I really liked it.

So, we’re driving, and the GPS is beeping at us telling us we were at our destination, and I look around totally confused. Then my husband says something like, “There it is!”

“Where?!”

“There!! The green awning!”

“Cool!” We pull in and then we figure out how many donuts we should buy. How goofball am I for standing out there taking pictures of the facade like a starstruck fan?

As I’m waiting my turn at the counter, I realize they don’t have the bacon donut. All out! Hmm. So I strike up a conversation with the man behind the counter, who is really funny in a subdued sort of way, and he tells me not to hold it against them that they’ve run out. “There are plenty of tasty donuts here still!” and I believed him, of course. What’s not to love about donuts that are made by hand, cut by hand, fried in a small fryer by a person… it’s all good.

I mentioned that we saw them on Food Network (again) and he said, “Oh, man, ever since that airing, it’s been nuts around here, ” and with a grin he says, “Man, I wish people would leave us alone.”

Even though we didn’t get to sample the bacon donut, we did walk away with a green tea and a half dozen donuts: cherry buttermilk, monte cristo (complete with ham bits!), and chocolate rose. I could only imagine what they might have tasted like fresh out of the kitchen, but they were still delicious. Crisp, nice flavors, fluffy on the inside, not too sugary sweet… I’ll definitely be looking for more handmade/homemade donuts around the Chicago area.

Tags: California, cooking, Dynamo Donuts, eating, eating out, vacation

At a foodie destination in San Francisco

Oh my goodness, one and a half days without internet access from home is brutal. We rely on it so much! Looking up recipes, sending e-mail, reading the news, reading my favorite blogs… Even our little one was suffering withdrawal from not being able to log onto The Disney Channel’s webpage. Anyhow, after an hour the cable technician was able to diagnose some loose cables outside our house and he found a nick in the cable that comes from the main line. Apparently he put in an order for the line to get replaced. Who knows when that will actually happen.

But what I really wanted to write about is The Ferry Building. I really don’t know if we have something similar to this in Chicago, so you can only imagine how excited I was to walk into this place with all these specialty food shops! My husband spent $50.00 within 30 minutes… it was so easy to do. I did visit some plant/garden/gift shops, too, but our main focus was on the eats.

For the mushroom fans, Far West Fungi. It was strange that no one seemed to be working there at the time… kind of eerie. Unfortunately, we didn’t really visit too long, but it was neat storefront.

Imperial Tea Court had a great selection of loose teas, but what we were really looking for was…

…this place! Boccalone! Their tag line reads, “Tasty salted pig parts”. How awesome is that? This place was featured on Food Network recently, and we just had to try the salumi cone. Deliciously salty and fatty. It can’t possibly be good for you. We did bring home some nduja, spreadable salami, along with some cheese from Cowgirl Creamery. A $20 grab bag of cheese and a little cheese knife.

Scharffen Berger chocolate… oh my dark chocolate goodness. The kids were so good in the store. You’d think they might go nuts in a place that has samples at every turn, but no, they were very well behaved and Abby really impressed the staff with her taste for 60%-70% dark chocolate. “Your daughter has a surprisingly mature palate.” Why, yes, thank you very much.

We ended our little foodie excursion with dinner at Taylor’s Automatic Refresher, a casual diner but with some upscale diner meals. We caught up with my college roommate (daughter’s godmother) and her new husband of one year (happy anniversary!!). I tried the Ahi Burger and we also ordered the Grilled Mahi Tacos. Fresh, delicious, light… mmmm. I’m sure the beef burgers were great, but we definitely wanted to try the seafood.

I think this pretty much sums up the day. My kids are such troopers when it comes to their dad and me dragging them to all these specialty groceries and food markets.

Tags: eating, eating out, grocery, tea, vacation

Eating Again, but where?

The pictures of food never stop, do they? Even Abby is getting into it. She loves taking close-up shots and she’s getting better every time. We were running errands and stopped for a snack… can you guess what this is and where it was taken?

Not that this is any help, but here’s another view. We love visiting this neighborhood place, which isn’t in our immediate suburb.

More California journals coming. They’re in the works along with more projects, too.

Tags: eating, eating out, family, restaurants, summer, vacation