Shen Bei Bei's Chicken

Shen Ye Ye sneaking Lily a cookie at church.

Numerous times people have asked for this recipe and I can never answer since I always just throw it together without measuring. But I'm not always fabulous at the 'ol eyeball method and while it usually turns out great, sometimes it...doesn't. So the past couple of times I've tried measuring and have come up with a recipe for:

Shen Bei Bei's chicken

6-7 lbs chicken thighs
1/3 cup soy sauce
3 T sugar
1 T pepper

Throw everything in a bowl (or two) the night before you want to cook it and let set in fridge until the next evening. Place on baking sheets skin side up. Pour over marinade. Bake at 300 for about two hours or until very tender.

Recipe notes:
1. If you find 6-7 lbs of chicken to be a ponderous amount, remember I have 5 kids.
2. Don't even think about using boneless skinless frozen chicken thighs. It would mock Shen Bei Bei's culinary genius. The Shen Bei Bei who makes pumpkin pie filling entirely on the stove top. The Shen Bei Bei who drinks a peanut butter jar of water and does 100 leg kicks every morning. The Shen Bei Bei who faithfully eats 7 pieces of fruit daily. The Shen Bei Bei who despite being nearly blind from macular degeneration, would every Tuesday and Thursday painstakingly cut up fresh fruit and put it in bags then bring it to the courtyard for my kids to eat while they played. The Shen Bei Bei who sings American Christmas songs from the '30s and '40s every ward Christmas party for at least a half hour wearing his purplish/plaidish suit and bowtie. The Shen Bei Bei who is, I believe, the one and only Chinese man of his generation who likes to cook and sew. You see where I am going. This is Shen Bei Bei's chicken. It's simple, yet brilliant and I can just see the look on his face if he was told someone were to use bonesless, skinless chicken in his recipe. So don't do it. Please. However, feel free to frig with the other ingredients as Shen Bei Bei doesn't have set amounts since he really is good at the 'ol eyeball method.
3. This recipe keeps on giving. Pour the chicken oil in a bowl and use it during the week for stir frying and egg frying or for frying whatever it is you like to fry. Scrape up the rest of the junk from the pans (except the stuff that is REALLY stuck), put it a bowl and away in the fridge. The next day heat it up in a pan with the leftover rice and eat it with a fried or soft boiled egg.
4. Soak your pan for at least an hour before you attempt to scrub it.

Shen Bei Bei, Shen Ai Yi, Lin Ma Ma (standing)

P.S. It's possible Eliseo has a booger on the end of his finger.

Feel free to be impressed...I made a quilt!

I decided if I was going to stay home and call myself a homemaker then I might as well do something homemaker-ish. So I made a quilt.

It looks sort of blue here, but in reality is a solid purple. If you are really impressed by the pattern I, sadly, cannot take the credit. Grant was the mastermind there.

Detail of the binding

I lied. I didn't make a quilt to elevate myself to talented homemaker status. I did it because a really talented person in my ward made the below quilt for Violet and gave it to me at my baby shower. I love it so much that I just had to have one for myself, in my favorite color..purple. And since I thought that my talented friend probably wouldn't super want to make one for me I figured I'd have to do it myself. My motives were purely selfish.

Isn't this quilt awesome? If it had a Hello Kitty on it somewhere it would be the pinnacle of my girlish dreams for Violet. And the binding! I would never think of something so clever.

Am I going to become.....A QUILTER???? I don't know. It was pretty fun, kind of tedious, fairly expensive (like $80!), all in all a good experience but I think I'll mostly stick to projects that can be done in an afternoon. Like this.

A dress for Violet made from the leftovers.

TV show vent

We don't have cable and generally don't miss it, although it does mean that we are horribly behind media-wise. I mostly have no idea what people are talking about when they discuss the latest shows. It's occasionally embarrassing.

Then we signed up for Netflix and have been having fun renting movies that everyone on the planet has seen except for us (because they came out at least 5 years ago) and watching fun things on instant play like Scooby Doo movies and old Dr. Who episodes. Then we had the brilliant idea that maybe we will watch one of those TV series that everyone seemed to love and we would no longer be the freaks that don't even know what is playing on TV. So we started watching Heroes. And to tell the honest, embarrassing truth, I didn't even know the show existed until a week ago. Four episodes later and I'm torn. The story line is very interesting....BUT here is a list of the character vices I've noticed so far:

1. Violence
2. Murder
3. Rape
4. Underage drinking
5. Purposeful drug abuse
6. Fornication
7. Adultery
8. Internet "soft" porn

Could they have packed any more sensationalistic depravity and debauchery into FOUR EPISODES??? It's bordering on ridiculous. I mean, has our culture slipped so far that an engaging plot of ordinary people discovering they have super powers is no longer sufficiently interesting? We need all of the above listed items to hold our attention? Apparently so. Good grief. I guess this is why I gave up TV in the first place and I'll have to go back to my old TV show inexperienced ways. Sigh.

FHE poetry

This was FHE tonight. We were attempting to pass off one of the talent portions in the Faith in God booklet. Here it is, unadulterated, all punctuation and spelling exactly as written.

Rune:

David slew a lion, with a little knife,
he was surprised with such a sight
with very little strife,
he went to war, to fight till sore,
but 'ol goliath stopped them,
so the army needed more,
David went right up and let that slingshot fly,
and then when the rock fell off, it was a red bullseye.

Eliseo: (spelling and punctuation are not his strong point)

The gold plats are so vary golde.
my eys wer rolen. I'v neve-
r sene plats of gold. I neve-
r sold the gold plat's. the ange-
l Maroni bared the gold pla-
ts. in the hill of camora.

Lily: (This poem was a collaboration. Lily gave me a line and then the rhyming word of the next line and I would provide the bulk of the second line. All Lily's contribution will be in red.)

They ate the tree of knowledge of good and evil,
They were no longer as dumb as weevils.
They were naked in the Garden of Eden,
It was a place that didn't need weedin'.
Satan told a lie.
We all know why.
He wanted them to die.
They went out of the Garden of Eden,
To a place that did need weedin'.

Winter etc.

I'm sure the whole of Internetdom knows by now how much I hate/loathe/abhor/detest/despise etc. etc. (my mental thesaurus ran out) winter, but it does make for some cute pictures of the kids. Don't get me wrong, I would trade cute winter pictures of the kids in a second for cute beach pictures, a tree ripened mango and some coconut water.

I don't know, I don't think I would trade even 80 degrees and a mango for this picture. Except, could someone please photoshop out the dried boogers?

Grant caught a 20 inch trout. We smoked it. He also likes to chew tuh-backer. Not really, it's sunflower seeds. He's addicted.

This is Violet nowadays. She defines adorable.

I'm just posting this picture because it will mortify Grant. I don't know why.

Better Late Than Never

is almost never my motto--except when it comes to finally posting Christmas morning pictures in January. Oh, and sending out Christmas cards--I still might do this under the guise of Happy New Year cards.

The Tree

The Stockings
(the reason they are so cute is because my mom made them)

The Morning...

Kung Fu Panda

Plastic Cowboys and Indians stocking stuffer

The DS

The Educational Computer Game
(or ECG for short)

The Omnitrix
(I don't know what it is either..something to do with aliens.)

The Rolling Monkey

The Carnage

Christmas Chronicles Continue

Because it was so much fun I took pictures of more ornaments, some Christmas cards and my tree skirt.


I beaded 18 of these gold snowflake things around my tree skirt. I don't know why I get myself into these things.

Here's another clip on bird

Taiwan has the coolest Christmas cards. The two following are detail of a card full of Santas eating hot pot and singing karaoke.

These Christmas cards are from our friend Shan who sends us really cool cards every year.

This one has a mini 12 month calendar.

A pretty pink Christmas tree.

A fun church with a bell. Notice it can actually be hung on the tree.

This one is just classy.

Here's a star I made when I was like four years old or something. It's made of cardboard, aluminum foil, glitter and yarn. And it still persists after 30+ years.

More toothpick ornaments.

This one is looking at Bethlehem's skyline through a window. I know, the realism is astounding.

This ornament belongs to a full set of cartoonish Christmas pictures drawn by our friends' (then) 10 year old boy when we were in Taiwan and didn't have any ornaments for our poor little bare tree (these and the origami birds constituted our tree that year). He's pretty dang talented, huh?

My visiting teacher gave me this one last year. It's made of olive wood.

Okay, okay, I won't post anymore pictures of my ornaments. Anyway, they are all put away. Oh, and by the way, Happy New Year. Here's hoping this is the year I get to move back to Taiwan. Yeah, I know, fat chance.

This picture has nothing to do with ornaments. It's just goofy.