Marathon Cooking and Eating

This year, we did more marathon eating, but we did manage to make a few dishes.

This is all the fixings for a traditional sticky rice stuffing (nuo mi fan) that my family makes in addition to bread stuffing. If you are lucky enough score an invitation to a Cantonese banquet, one fancy banquet food is a deboned, whole chicken stuffed with nuo mi fan, and then deep fried. In my family, when we make this at home, we skip the whole stuffing of the chicken, or turkey, and simply serve the nuo mi fan alongside the roasted poultry. I've turned my in-laws onto this traditional food, too, and they request "sticky rice" at the holiday table now.

I also made a couple loaves of whole wheat bread, sans starter (it died!), but I didn't bring them to the dinner table because they turned out like hockey pucks. I could've sliced it up and said it was German bread, but I suspected that there would be plenty of other carbs for us to enjoy. We speedily made some coconut pumpkin pie ice cream in place of the bread. No one seemed to mind the substitution, but homemade ice cream does have a way of covering a multitude of cooking errors.

I don't think I've posted this yet: the boy's first sweater. He knit the parts on the knitting machine, and it took me about twice as long to seam the sucker up. And, apparently, it takes me a million times longer to post the finished product. He is almost done with another sweater, but I told him in no uncertain terms that I am not seaming it again, so this one will be seamed by sewing machine. He sealed the deal (of me not seaming) when he said that it would only take him 10 minutes to seam up his sweater. Fine. Knock yourself out, kiddo.