I Feel a Ramble Coming On

Let's start with today and work our way back through some random photos of the past week or so, shall we?

Yes. We shall.

It snowed off and on all day yesterday, and this morning I woke up to this.

I may have said out loud, "You must be kidding me." Except I didn't say "kidding."

But now I have some black-eyed peas simmering away on the stove, so I'm making the most of what I hope is the last snowy day we have for a long time. I know, it's not New Year's Day and therefore it will not do much perhaps for my happiness in the future, but simmering stuff helps to warm the house up. Plus, they taste so good they'll ensure happiness for the duration of dinner anyway. And I had half a bag of dried black-eyed peas to use up. So there you go.

Speaking of Food I Make (which I usually am) . . . behold, the only sushi just south of the Canadian border.

Well, maybe my neighbors eat this all the time, but I really doubt it.

They were very easy to make. I ordered most of the ingredients from Amazon, as my local stores don't carry anything like nori (the dried seaweed sheets everything is wrapped in). Honestly, the hardest part was getting the nori sheets out of their bag without catching them on the edges and tearing them.

So what I did was, I made the rice as instructed on my bag of rice and seasoned it as suggested in this post. While I was at it, I also made some quick-pickled carrot and cucumber sticks loosely based on a recipe from here, but with a little salt added, because a pickle without salt? No.

I did not use raw fish. There is no sushi-grade raw fish anywhere within two hundred miles, I'm pretty sure. Well, unless I had A. catch me a fish, and then I froze it to guard against worms or something, and sliced it reeeeally thinly, and . . .

Yeah. I used imitation crab meat.

I made a test roll with pickled vegetables and green onions in it and ate it all myself with pickled ginger and soy sauce while everyone else was either at church or sleeping. I found that even my relatively dull and cheap chef's knife sliced just fine, if I cleaned it off sometimes.

Test completed successfully, I then made one sheet with pickled vegetables and the, ahem, "crab," and one with those plus minced green onions. Then I made a sheet with cucumber and cream cheese, and one with those plus green onions.

My very professional equipment. I declined to buy a bamboo sushi-rolling mat.

Each rolled sheet resulted in about eight pieces. We had no trouble eating all 30 or so pieces I ended up with (not counting the test batch already in my belly).

Everyone except Charlie loved them. But then, Charlie told me last night that he doesn't like (homemade!) pizza, so you can't trust him.

Cubby ate most of the crab ones himself and brought the few leftovers to school for lunch the next day. I mostly ate the cream cheese and cucumber ones, which are my favorite. Jack and A. ate everything.

It was fun. They were good. Good thing, since I have about 45 nori sheets left.

And last but not least, baseball/T-ball season has begun!

And I have a really blurry picture to prove it.

Marginally better, if shaded.

This is the first year either of them has played. Cubby LOVES it, and shows promise of being a good player. Charlie . . . well, Charlie is "saving his energy for soccer."

He doesn't love it*. Not that I blame him because, let's face it, four-year-olds can't actually play T-ball, and it's about the most boring thing ever standing on the field watching eight kids in a row swing and miss or whack the T or hit it all of two feet or whatever.

Anyway.

Two games a week for both of them for the next month means a lot of time spent on ball fields for all of us. I guess it really is spring. Despite the weather.

* You may be asking yourself, "Does Charlie love ANYTHING?" Good question. The answer is: Not much. Though he was very enthusiastic about the desperation meal of scrambled eggs and tater tots I made when I was sick last week, so I guess that tells you a lot about Charlie's preferences. He definitely landed in the wrong family.