Going Domestic

wound up

  A very tidy ball! 
  Originally uploaded by goingdomestic

I have to confess that I can't remember whether my yarn baller was a birthday gift or a Mother's Day gift, but I do know that I've had it for months and only tried it out a few days ago. Obviously, I am crazy, because if I was sane I would have started using it right away instead of trying to ball my yarn manually. I can't believe how quick it is, and I don't even own a swift to help the process out!  Now, I'll just be crazy about my yarn baller.

orange obsession

The arrival of those little mandarin oranges in the grocery stores has been one of the things about the holiday season that I've always looked forward to. My sister and I would eat a ton of them. I would get teased because before I could actually eat the mandarin that I'd just peeled, I had to try to remove as much of that white stuff that gets left behind as possible.

There have been mandarins at our local grocery store here since we arrived in the summer, but for some reason they don't taste the same. No matter, though. About ten days ago, little bags of the teeniest oranges that I've ever seen appeared in the produce section.

I bought a tray of them already peeled for about two dollars. They're roughly the size of golf balls (in my photo, they're sitting on a kiddy plate, not a dinner plate) and taste like clementines. And did I mention that a person can buy them already peeled? Oh, these might be the holiday season oranges that I will look forward to the most in the future ...

good as pumpkin pie

Unique experiences in Thailand are plentiful for us three Canadians. The dinner that we shared this evening won't be an exception - we celebrated a Second Chance Thanksgiving, courtesy of the American holiday. Unlike in October for Canadian Thanksgiving, there is now turkey in abundance in BKK, and many hotels and restaurants had it on their menus today. We ate at a BBQ joint that we'd been to once before, The Roadhouse, and as I stood in the buffet line, I thought that it smelled just like my grandma's kitchen used to. Turkey, dressing, roasted veggies - it was all there. Including some interestingly pale white sweet potatoes, but that's just a small detail, isn't it?

Chris was happy to finally have some (pumpkin) pie.

yay for perpetual summer

I frogged the tank that I was knitting for Madeline two days ago. The proportions just weren't right. A little too wide, and the bodice detail that I knit wasn't postioned properly, either.

I'm not worried about this set-back, though. No matter when I finish this project, it will be warm enough outside for Madeline to wear it!

second chances

It's a happy day when my husband receives a new issue of Saveur in the mail. And it's a happy weekend for Madeline and I when Chris decides to make something out of the magazine for Sunday dinner.

Two Sundays ago, Chris set out to make the "chicken and dumplings" recipe out of their November 2007 issue. Our kitchen hasn't smelled so good in awhile! Both of us hestitated a little bit when it came to add five and a half cups of butter to the dumpling mixture, but we figured that the folks at Saveur knew what they were doing.

Oh, were we ever wrong! The biscuit batter (yes, it was batter, not dough) didn't actually form into dumplings, but merely blended with the chicken stew/soup part of the dish. Our daughter thought the resulting dish was rather tasty, but Chris and I ordered take-out.

Subsequently, we both did a little research into other dumpling recipes, and began to feel pretty confident that we were victims of a typo - where the recipe said "cups" it was supposed to say "tablespoons". Checking the recipe on the Saveur website showed us that they'd been alerted to the mistake (via a reader comment), and corrected it.

This past Sunday, Chris made a second attempt, and all was good.  Even the kiddo ate it :)

I'm kind of wary of Saveur recipes now, though. I haven't forgotten my past frustrations using one of their meat loaf recipes ...

Casual Saturday

On most Saturdays, Chris and I feel an inexplicable urge to go into the city - be a part of the mob at the market, at the shopping center; indulge in a brunch buffet, dim sum, or barbeque. It's always exciting to be discovering more of Bangkok, but it's also exhausting at the same time. Lately, we've felt more like staying home on the weekend.

Without leaving The Compound or staying more than ten minutes on foot from it, we can swim, play mini-golf, visit a few playgrounds, eat at about seven restaurants, visit the grocery or convenience store, and even have a massage. We're not trapped.  This past Saturday, we attended a (delicious) pancake breakfast at the international school, and checked out a Thai craft fair immediately afterward (it's amazing how many hand-made Christmas ornaments one can buy in this Buddhist country!). It was great - Chris actually encouraged me to buy a decorative basket!

snaps from a saturday past

  Rice Barge 
  Originally uploaded by goingdomestic

My photography instructor has had me start taking photos in RAW format, so it's more work to convert them into .jpegs for sharing. Thus, it take me longer to get around to posting them ...

For Chris's birthday two Saturdays ago, we had dinner at the Marriott resort by the river. We didn't take a dinner cruise, but got to watch as hotel staff loaded up their fleet of rice barges for that evening's tour.

We ate at Trader Vic's. Chris and I shared a rum bowl, which turned out to be exactly as it sounds. Madeline liked watching the Thai dancers, and Chris left regretting not noticing the wine buffet sooner. I mentally made plans to return on my birthday to dine at the Numero Uno cafe. They had a chocolate fountain and a hummingbird cake!

Wow. Just wow.

This morning, I went to the local salon for a pedicure. A few of my friends recommended the place, and frankly, the barefoot Bangkok lifestyle is pretty hard on my feet. It was the same as any other pedicure that I've ever had, really, except for when I'd have a paraffin treatment as a spa. The difference is that my pedicure here only cost me 130 baht. Or $3.57 Cdn.

america's next top yarn model

  Knitty's Spring 2007 Monica, all glammed up 
  Originally uploaded by goingdomestic

So, I'm three weeks into an adult education photography class.  I registered in the hopes of better understanding how to take good candid photos of my kiddo with my new camera, not so that I could take a photo of yarn under studio lighting ... but that's what I did on Thursday night! Has anyone ever seen a better-looking work-in-progress from me?

I'm enjoying this project. It's my first knitting since finishing up a slew of hats back in May, before we moved to BKK, and my first project on my set of Options needles, which I really like. The flexibility of the cable is amazing (I must try magic loop with the Options needles, no?)! I started the Monica tank because I had about nine balls of Shine Worsted in my stash. They were meant for a shrug, but that idea turned out to be a bad idea, but something like this tanks seemed to a good match for the drape of the yarn.

Back to the photography, this shot was taken in a light box that my instructor and I fashioned. We used holes in a curtain to get the highlights on the stitch markers (a birthday present from my sister, from zero markers) and the yarn, and pieces of coconut husk to create the shadows. Really crazy!