Thanksgiving Break

Crab ravioli!

This year, I am thankful for my family, my ten-year-old puppy, my friends, my awesome project at work, and my new Kitchenaid Mixer (!!!) that should be arriving in a few weeks! (Trust me, when that happens, it will get its own inaugural blog post).
Thanksgiving at my house is never a huge affair, not compared to other families. We aren't the type to gorge ourselves on endless food, but we do try to make a few tasty dishes to celebrate! One of our traditions is to eat duck, which I think it far superior to turkey anyways, as well as a few hybrid Chinese-American dishes. This year, I contributed a few yummy tidbits, thanks to 1000 Classic Recipes for Every Cook, a giant cookbook of around 10 pounds that had been sitting around our house for years. I flipped through its numerous pages until I found a few recipes I liked.

I made crab ravioli using canned crab meat, mixed with chopped bell pepper, Chinese cabbage, and bean sprouts, seasoned with soy sauce and lemon juice, wrapped up in a wonton wrapper and fried over the stove. I also whipped up a quick side of garlic spinach - simple, yet extremely tasty, and an easy way to fill the vegetable requirement in a diet. Along with other dishes that the rest of my family made, we ended up with a very tasty and filling (albeit non-traditional for Thanksgiving) meal on our hands.

Garlic spinach! (Wish I would have taken pics of the rest of the meal too)

For dessert, my sister offered up some homemade pumpkin pie while I whipped up a batch of my favorite red-bean mochi cupcakes. I've this twice before now, but for my parents, I made a few adjustments. First, I didn't make any frosting (they don't like it too sugary), and second, I used whole red beans instead of red bean paste. I also mixed in these red beans so they were more distributed through the cupcake, rather than just the filling, since my parents love red bean and never can too much of it.

Without frosting, they look more like muffins, don't they?

All and all it was a great meal...and not a day too soon, because the following day, I found myself sitting in the dentist chair, anxiously awaiting the removal of my first wisdom tooth. It had been poking its way through the gum for the last month or two, but I had been hoping that it might magically sink back down into my gum before the dentist checked it out. Obviously, I had no such luck and I was told it would need to be removed. It was a fairly straightforward operation though - the dentist poked and pushed for about three minutes before announcing he was done and showing me the tooth. It didn't hurt much either afterwards, since it was such a clean surgery.

I did rest up a bit though, while the numbness wore off and the bleeding stopped, giving me the opportunity to tackle a craft project that I wanted to do:

I still need to think of an appropriate (and cute) name.

This is an antibody plushie! And not just any antibody, it's a bispecific antibody...which probably means nothing to you unless you are in the biologics world, so I won't bore you with the science. But I'm sewing up a bunch of these for people at work - and they are really easy to make! I just cut the antibody halves out of felt and sewed the back to the front with a simple blanket stitch, stuff the halves with cotton, and then add eyes and mouths. Fun! I plan on attaching the two halves with Velcro as well.

No desserts in the post, sadly, at least, no new ones, but next week, after I'm back to California, we'll be back to regularly scheduled programming. Things to look forward to: 3D cookie cutters and the arrivial of my very own KITCHENAID MIXER!