Gettin' Sloppy

So I did the, pick up after school and brought the daughter back to my workplace to hang out while I battled on, thing today. After I packed it in, we had a great walk home in the dark talking about how kids become cool when they get to be over ten and some never come out of that stage. This was all prompted by the discussion about why there is no more milk sales at their school after wednesday this week. They tried to start a milk program but not enough kids signed up for milk so it died. The daughter was loving getting a chocolate milk on Wednesdays but alas it is no more. So from there we got into kids not wanting to do stuff if they thought it wasn't, "cool." Even though maybe they really wanted to. It was quite the in depth exploration of the teenage transition. Walking home is actually way better than walking to school. There are good conversations on both ends but my mind is some much more free to soak in what she is saying and really respond after work. I am always a little pre occupied in the morning. Anyways good day and we even got her homework done. But this came after dinner. So I am getting ahead of myselfWhich is kind of what happened at dinner. We arrived home and after getting some logs on the fire we came up and sat down to eat. The wife had whipped up some om-rice with two types of salad. The kids weren't so into the omellete part but I enjoyed mine thoroughly. The rice has some assorted greens in it and they were more on the flavour enhancing side. One salad was a cucumber, lettuce number with olives tossed in. The other was a pickled carrot and daikon number. Melded they were like the wonder twins and I wolfed down a big bowl of it. Of course I realised we needed to take a picture of dinner when my plate was pretty much licked clean so this is what was left over on the daughter's plate. This was not a big eating night for the kids. The son has a bit of a cold so his "yeah" strength was way down. Not so far down that he couldn't rail against the injustice of having to turn off Barney to eat dinner. Just not a big appetite night. The daughter was just being a bit picky but she probably ate about what she usually does.

After dinner we did some homework, I had a 20 minute nap while they had their bath, we got the fire up and roaring and then it was back to work. 7 days of school till winter break. Gotta keep my eyes on the road and a smile on my face. I know I can do it.

Wednesday: April 2nd.

Well I am still sick and the food continues to roll on. Today we went with omrice. We also had a pork based miso soup which had an amazingly rich flavour. The boiled squash (kabocha nimono) was lovely as well. Omrice, is basically an omelet draped over a little mound of rice. In Japan, the classic form of this is made by a fairly special technique of rolling the omelet around in the frying pan by holding the pan up and gently tapping the handing of the pan. In this way you get a shell of firm omelet surrounding an inside of basiclly runny scrambled eggs. This is laid over the rice and then slit across the top so the runny scrambled eggs cover the rice completely. The video below shows and excellent description of it. This snotty egged final version is excatly what the discerning japanese foodie is yearning for. I really like it but for some westerners it just doesn't work. Their loss I say.