Kitchen Remodel: Week 3

While the plumbing was being done our contractor offered to start on our next project — the “sink” room. After the kitchen is complete we want to turn this room into a breakfast nook/mud room. Unfortunately the room is little more than a shack tacked onto the back of the house with hardly any foundation and lots of rot.

Jim managed to sweet talk the building inspector into calling it legal and giving us a permit, then started on rebuilding the foundation and cleaning out the rot. We were still able to use the room as our kitchen in the meantime, and it gives us a leg up in the construction when the real kitchen is done.

Jim ended up hiring out the foundation work to another contractor who brought in these guys:

Who built this:

And poured this:

All in one day!

Kitchen Remodel: Week 3

We have plumbing!

Also, it rained in our house. There was a big storm with “wind-driven rain” — i.e. the rain was coming in sideways. The inside of the kitchen got pretty wet with a puddle on the floor and water dripping down the boards (bottom left photo). It looks like some cracks on the back side of the house on the second floor we will need to get sealed up before the drywall is installed.

Kitchen Remodel: Week 2

The kitchen window before (left) and after (right). The new one had to start higher off the floor to sit above the counters so we made it wider to compensate. Unfortunately this is the only window allowed by the SF building code — otherwise we would have put a couple on the wall to the left.

We finally patched the holes where the brick pillar used to be. This required three patches; on in the ceiling of the laundry room, one in the ceiling of the kitchen, and one in the ceiling of the office.

And we had to rip out the ceiling in the laundry room to do all of the electrical and plumbing for the kitchen.

Kitchen Remodel: Week 2

This remodel is going too fast for me to keep up with blogging about it, so I’m going to go to a weekly summary and see if I can catch up with the present.

First we had a wall between our dining room and kitchen. A wall with a very inconvenient doorway.

And then we had none.

Halloween 2009

I dressed up twice for Halloween — once for work and once on the actual night. Peter dressed up with me for work — not necessarily as anything (I wasn’t really anything) but he was dressed up, which is always great.

Me with my coworker Anna on Halloween night. I tried making the makeup more dramatic but I’m not sure I liked it more. I think I need a little more practice, which will be slow going because you only really get to dress up dead about once or twice a year!

My coworker Gina and housemate Holly. Gina was dressed super inappropriate for work but got away with it because her costume was so creepy.

This was my favorite costume of the night. I don’t actually know these people but they were really adorable in matching costumes. Luckily it wasn’t too cold this year.
Unfortunately I was so sick of putting on makeup by Monday night that I didn’t go to the Dia De Los Muertos parade where my costume would have been really fun.

Fried Green Tomatoes

I went to a house warming party the other day and met a girl there who was frying green tomatoes. Her name was Kelly and she said that it was actually pretty hard to find green tomatoes since you can’t buy them in the store that way, which was sad since she really loved fried green tomatoes.

The tomato plant in our back yard, after giving us an amazing yield, has a load of new tomatoes on it which don’t appear to be getting ripe, probably because the weather has changed and the nights are colder now. So I invited Kelly so we could help each other out and another friend joined us for the experiment. My kitchen is in the middle of a remodel so we put together a table out of saw horses and hung out in the dark.

The recipe went something like this:
Pick a bunch of green tomatoes, preferable ones which are just about to be embarrassed, but not quite.
In one bowl mix two eggs with some milk.
In another bowl put about a cup of regular white flour (we don’t recommend wheat, it tasted strange).
In a skillet pre-heat about 1/2 a cup of vegetable oil (we used canola).

Slice the tomatoes about a quarter of an inch thick. Dunk the tomatoes in the egg mixture then coat them completely in the flour.
Place the tomatoes in the skillet and let cook on each side until golden. Place cooked tomatoes on a plate with a couple of paper towels on it to soak up the excess oil. Salt to taste.

They were good! Not quite like anything else I’ve eaten, the tomatoes tasted almost fruity.

Another interesting thing I learned is that the tomatoes which had already started to change color, and therefore weren’t good for frying, but were far from red, were delicious! I’d been avoiding them, but had never actually checked to see what they tasted like. It ends up they are delicious, and taste almost salted. Since that night I’ve been eating them over toast and cream cheese. Mmmmm!

Happy October!

I was hoping to make pumpkin pie this year from pumpkins grown in my garden, but unfortunately this is the biggest one we got. Beautiful, but not good for much more than roasting.

Kimono Shopping, Tokyo, Japan

Jackie and I spent a day walking around in the Asakusa neighborhood shopping and relaxing. It was raining cats and dogs. We tried all sorts of novelty foods and looked at every shop for kimonos. My sister really wanted one but we had no idea how much they were supposed to cost and the different quality levels. After several hours we got a pretty good feel for it — there seemed to be cheap packages at the tourist shops which contained a cotton or synthetic kimono, an oobe (belt) and sometimes shoes. There were used silk kimonos for around the same price or up, but they didn’t contain the belt, which is required to really wear the kimono, and the selection wasn’t as good. Then, after we had just about given up, we found a store which sold new silk kimonos for the same price, and cheap belts too! Jackie was so overwhelmed at this point she wasn’t sure she even wanted to buy one anymore, but the women in the shop were *very* good at sales and convinced her that she should try it on.

This ended up meaning they would dress her up properly in the kimono, which was a rather long process.

First there is some sort of undergarment which keeps the collar of the kimono in place.

Next they put the kimono over it and tie a small belt around your waist to pull the extra length of the kimono up.

Then they tie another two layers of belt around your waist to really cinch things in. Jackie said it was really tight.

The oobe goes over that. Unfortunately Jackie couldn’t see what they were doing, but it was some sort of crazy complicated knotting method we will never be able to reproduce.

When they were Jackie looked pretty happy! I hate to say shopping is satisfying, but we were pretty happy by the time we left that shop. I even almost bought a kimono, but I managed to stop them from putting it on me, which would have been the kiss of death. I almost regret it, there was a beautiful orange and cream one that was totally “me”. Jackie is going to hang hers on the walking stick from Mount Fuji (more on that later) in her bedroom, which I can’t wait to see.

Interestingly, the oobe isn’t supposed to match the kimono. We had a hard time with that, so ended up picking one that matched on one side and was a contrasting color on the other. I think the combination looks great.

And for when Jackie does want to attempt to tie that crazy oobe again — there is an whole instruction book to go along with the kimono!

Tsukiji Fish Market, Tokyo, Japan

My sister and I went to Tokyo, Japan from August 8th-15th. Jackie was lucky enough to go to Kyoto the week before that but I had to go to Sapporo for work.

I’ll try to post our Japan photos over the next couple of days — posting them all at once has been a little intimidating. So here are our photos from visiting the Tsukiji Fish Market. We got up at 5am to try to catch the auction but somehow missed it still — either it was not on that day or we were too late. It was also POURING that day so we spent most of the time walking through foot high fish-water.

The fish were HUGE! The process seems to be to freeze the fish, cut it with a table saw (look how dangerous that looks!), thaw, clean up with a crazy huge knife, then haggle!

New Glorious Mini-Camera

Thanks to Peter of course!