Independence Day 2011

We spent this fourth of July with my mom and her family in DesMoines, WA. To start we played on the shore of the Puget Sound. Beautiful weather. Beautiful little boy.   

throwing rocks - favorite activity of the day

and the fireworks...

we watched them from the porch at a friend's house and could see  the shows of  Tacoma, Vashon Island and DesMoines. As usual, Vashon's were by FAR the best display. 

Koze maintained this pose through out almost the entire show.  And afterwards he begged for more. "Me, me" while using sign language for more. 

Cold Soba Noodles - the simple version

With the weather finally warming up I have been craving one of my favorite summer-time foods - Cold soba noodles. My favorite thing about making this dish, apart from how tasty it is, is that it is one of the few ways I can get Koze to eat nori (dried seaweed). Seaweed contains sodium alginate and iodine, which acts as a sort of shield from the harmful effects of radiation. Goooood stuff to include in your diet these days! There are SO many different ways you can make this...Here's what we did tonight: 

Ingredients: tsuyu sauce, soba (buckwheat) noodles, toasted sesame seeds, finely cut nori seaweed. You should be able to find all of these ingredients at any asian market. Uwajimaya is great if you live in Seattle or Portland...I could seriously spend hours wandering the aisles of Uwajimaya. 

Tsuyu Sauce (concentrated). Use two parts water to one part sauce.

  

Soba (Buckwheat) Noodles

Boil some water

toss the noodles in...cook for about 10min

strain noodles and rinse with cold water for 2-3minutes or until noodles have cooled

get some bowls out. I got these for my mom for her birthday this year from anthropologie. They are little measuring cups and were the perfect size for this late night snack. 

scoop the cold noodles into your bowls

You can either pour the tsuyu sauce directly over your noodles (easier) or put the noodles and sauce in separate bowls and dip each individual bite of noodles in the sauce. I think the latter is the traditional way of doing it but for convenience sake we just put it all together in one bowl.  

you can buy nori already cut but we only had the full sheets so we cut it up ourselves.

mmmm...sesame seeds!

the finished product.

Oishii! (おいしい)

itadakimasu (いただきます) - Let's Eat!