Canned Salmon

Do you see that nice picture of a delicious sandwich on the salmon can? I thought I would make that for dinner last night. I just bought this one can to try it out, and I was kind of excited because I thought it would be pretty good. I noticed on the back of the can it said something like, "The small amount of skin and bones are a good source of calcium and Omega-3 fatty acids. Just mix them in with the rest of the salmon and eat." Hmmm. So I opened the can and kind of drained it, then I dumped the can upside down into a bowl. It looked so gross! I'm sorry I didn't take a picture of it, but you can imagine wierd random fish parts covered with the silver salmon skin. It looked icky! There was a LOT of skin on that fish! But I sucked it up and just mixed everything together like the can said to do. I noticed tiny hair-like bones through out the whole mixture, but decided that would be ok. They looked kind of soft and bendy, so maybe it would bother Greg. Then I noticed a bigger bone. It was a circle. I snatched it out of the mixture and it was very sharp! Then I started noticing those weird circle bones all over the place in my bowl of fish! I spent a long time trying to pick them all out. I couldn't believe they said to just eat them! Somebody would choke and gag on them, not to mention how cut up their mouth and throat would be from trying to chew and swallow those bones! It looks like part of the spine maybe.



So after all of that, I tried to not be grossed out. I mixed some mayo in (like making tuna fish) and took a little taste. It was gross! It was incredibly salty and just tasted off. Not at all like Salmon from Ivar's. I had Greg taste it (without telling him how grossed out I was) and he thought it was weird too.

So we made tuna fish sandwiches for dinner.
The End.

A Year's Supply of Jam?

I've been thinking about food storage and planning to get more of the long-term things like wheat and sugar...but do you think I have a year's supply of jam? There's blackberry, strawberry, black/strawberry, peach, yellow plum, and yellow plum/grape.
I really should figure out how to make and can something besides jam and applesauce....

Jam!

I saw Safeway had a really great deal on Strawberries a couple days ago, but it wasn't until I saw Annie's blog that the idea to make jam came along.


I never thought I'd make jam with strawberries because they're usually so expensive. Anyway, I made a couple batches of strawberry jam and a couple batches of blackberry-strawberry jam with the blackberries from my freezer. (Mom and Dad brought a bunch of blackberries for a surprise awhile ago...I just used the last bag for this jam.)

Greg helped me prepare the strawberries.


It was a lot of work to core and chop them all. He ended up chopping them in half or quarters and then using the food processor to chop them smaller.

It smelled so good while I was cooking the berries! I just wanted to drink it! It looked like some kind of pink love potion Harry Potter or Hermione might brew up in Potions class.


Both kinds taste great! And they look pretty in the jars too!

Choir

The Idaho-Washington Concert Chorale will perform Wade in Water, the final concert of the season at St. Boniface Catholic Church in Uniontown, Washington.




Under the direction of guest conductor David Erb, the 70-member Chorale and 20-member Chamber Choir will perform music focused on the theme of water as it flows through a variety of sacred compositions, including selections by Schubert, Bach, Handel, Mozart, and 20th-century spirituals.

The selections have been arranged in a chiastic pattern thus giving structural unity to the overall program. In some cases, the paired selections are settings of the same text by different composers; in other cases, a similar theme connects the paired pieces. The compositions represent over 500 years of sacred choral music including chant, motets, chorales, spirituals, and cantata and oratorio excerpts.

Several of the pieces will be accompanied by a chamber orchestra. Karina Brazas, this year’s winner of the Washington Idaho Symphony’s Young Artist contest, will be the featured soprano in Schubert’s “Mirjam’s Siegesgesang.”




Please come if you can! I know pretty much anybody that reads this blog lives 200 to 10,000 miles away, but you're still invited. And it's free if you're a student!

S.P.D.C.

Student Professional Development Conference

This is what Greg has been working on since the last half of the last school year. He is the President of A.S.M.E., the Engineering student club at WSU. A.S.M.E. is also a worldwide professional organization for engineers at all stages of life. Every year they hold a conference at one school in each district, and this year it was at WSU. There were six schools from the area that came to compete. Greg spent time putting the conference together by making hotel reservations for all the participants, organizing with catering services, making the schedule for the conference, setting up registration and determining registration fees, determining the location of certain competitions, organizing and coordination with volunteers...etc. Besides that, he also worked on two design teams to build the R.C. Baja car and to build the Mars Rocks Robot. This is a slide show of the car races. This event happened Friday night for a few hours starting at 7:45pm. We didn't find out until the banquet/awards ceremony that Greg's car won 1st place! He was pretty excited about that. He got a nice certificate and $200 prize money to split with Ben, who helped work on the car with him. (Ben is in orange in the slideshow.)

I'll make another post soon to tell you about the robot competition.

Kelley Chocolate Cake Recipe

Greg always makes this special chocolate cake for my birthday. It's so delicious! It's denser than a cake mix and very moist...I can't get enough of it!



Kelley Chocolate Cake:

350 degree 40-45 min.
Put water on to boil, you will need 1 cup boiling water-

Mix these together and let stand. (This makes sour milk)
1 cup milk
1 T cider vinegar

Mix together dry ingredients in separate bowl:
2 1/2 cup flour
2 T flour
2 t baking soda
1/2 t salt
1/4 t baking powder

Cream butter, then add the following ingredients one at a time:
1 c butter-softened

2 cups sugar
2 eggs
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

Add flour mixture and milk mixture alternately-1/3ish at a time


Then carefully add:
1 cup boiling water
1t vanilla extract

Mix Well. Batter will be very thin.

Pour into greased and floured 9"x13" pan

Bake 40-45 minutes at 350 degrees


Icing:
¼ CUP BUTTER
2 CUPS POWDER SUGAR
1 tsp vanilla
2 tbsp coffee
3 tablespoons cocoa

(I think you can just use a little milk if you don't want to use the coffee.)

Easter!

I had a great Easter this last weekend. All week I was looking forward to Summer and her family coming to visit, and I worked right up to the last minute to get stuff done so I could just play when they were here. (It's very busy for storage units right now.)



So Summer and Glen finally got here, and Greg got home about the same time. He kept saying how hungry he was, so I started making dinner. But right as I was getting everything out then he suddenly wanted to go for a walk and show Summer and Glen around the facility...as if it's such a beautiful place. Ha! I hurried and put everything back away and we went outside and walked all the way around all the storage units. Then we turned a corner and I saw a car parked, and at the same moment I saw a guy climbing up the retaining wall, holding a camera, and Greg said in a commanding voice, "Uh Sir, what do you think you're doing?" I was embarrassed that he was talking to the guy like that without giving him a chance to explain. Then something clicked and I realized it was Dad! And then Mom came out from behind the car and we all hugged. What a fun surprise!


So we all went back inside and had the best homemade pizza for dinner. Summer and her family stayed at our house and Mom and Dad stayed at a nice hotel on the other side of town. The time went by so fast! We got to do lots of fun things: Swimming, Lunch at Mongolian Grill, finding Easter baskets, my birthday party, and a nice breakfast at Mom and Dad's hotel Sunday morning. We stayed right up to the last minute and then Greg and I both had to go teach lessons the third hour of church. It was hard to say goodbye, and I felt sad to come home to an empty quiet house.

Summer made this for Greg's Easter basket. I thought it was such a cute idea!



This is my Easter basket (white) and the one I made for Greg (purple).


I'm excited to play with my new birthday things. Today I watched Pride and Prejudice from the set of movies from Mom and Dad, and I've already played a lot of songs out of the new piano book Greg got for me. He got a nice piano cover too. I cleaned the piano keys really good today so they will stay nice and dust-free now.



Summer and Glen got me some dinosaur eggs. Haha, at first I thought they were just those kind that you put in water and they get bigger because they're made out of foam. I told Summer they would be my new bath toy. Haha! She said, "They get this big!" and showed me about two inches with her fingers. I thought, "Oh, big deal, I've seen these toys that get way bigger than that." Then she started tell me how I have to feed them at the right time, and as they grow they do lots of flips and spin around in the water.


I figured it out as I read the package and found that they are actually living little animals! I don't understand how the eggs can sit in a container for years and then come to life when they get wet...Anyway, I want to go get a fish bowl to put my little Triops in. I'll put some pictures up on my blog as they're growing. I feel like I'm graduating from plants to animal life. Maybe someday I'll graduate from animals to children. =)

Don't the guys look so happy to celebrate my birthday with me?



Summer looks cute in her pink pajamas!



This is the lovely ham Mom brought for dinner. We were supposed to have that with dinner rolls and salad, but we ran out of time and just picked up burgers instead. I cooked it tonight but kind of felt sad to have it and nobody to share it with.


I wish we all could live closer and be together always!

Miriam's Song

This is a song my choir will be performing in May. It is about Moses and his people escaping from Pharaoh, crossing through the sea on dry ground, and mocking Pharaoh as he's swallowed up in the depths of the sea. Sorry, it's in German. You could probably find the words in English somewhere if you really wanted to.
Enjoy! (I love those cute little singing boys. They sounds so pure.)

Part One


Part Two



Part Three


Part Four

Ta DA!

Have you seen Gmail's April Fools?

There is a link to this on the gmail site. They have a new thing called "Gmail AutoPilot." It's almost as good as their idea last year about Gmail Custom Time. (https://mail.google.com/mail/help/customtime/index.html)

CADIE: Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity


I thought this was funny:

What happens if a sender and recipient both have Autopilot on?

Two Gmail accounts can happily converse with each other for up to three messages each. Beyond that, our experiments have shown a significant decline in the quality ranking of Autopilot's responses and further messages may commit you to dinner parties or baby namings in which you have no interest.