bonnie & jason

Alissa’s fifth birthday party

We celebrated Alissa’s fifth birthday today with friends and family at Sweet Connections in San Bruno. Bonnie discovered it while walking past on the way to Alissa’s swimming lessons at La Petite Baleen. It’s basically an ice cream parlor with a room in the back but we were able to rent out the entire store for a few hours and let everyone loose with food and fun.

Speaking of food… the cupcake factory started up a few days ago and didn’t finish up until late this morning. Bonnie made red velvet, carrot cake, and chocolate cupcakes with either a chocolate frosting or a cream cheese frosting. All from scratch. With fondant flowers. And fancy sprinkles. They were a hit and now I can sort of appreciate how people get away with charging $4 for a cupcake.

Chocolate:

Carrot Cake:

Combined with the Red Velvet in the cupcake tower:

Bonnie also made sugar cookies with a “Happy Birthday Alissa” message imprinted on them.

Needless to say, the Kitchen Aid mixer got quite the workout the last few days. Speaking of working out, I’ll need to hit the gym to burn off all the butter, cream cheese, and sugar that I consumed while doing “quality control” along the way.

As for the party itself, we had almost 80 people between all the friends and family with kids around Alissa’s age. For entertainment, we hired a balloon-ist who played a few games with the kids and gave our prizes. And of course, we had to supply ice-cream to anyone who was interested in more sweets after partaking in the cookies and cupcakes bounty. Otherwise, we had bought the requisite Chinese fried chicken along with a few noodle and veggie dishes.

Of course, I can’t just leave the post with pictures of the cupcakes and cookies, so here are a few others from the festivities:

Next time, I’ll flex my bicep harder. Or wear a tighter shirt.

One of the games the kids played:

Ashley and Amanda enjoying the sweets:

Enjoying the balloons after opening presents:

Happy Wangsgiving

We hosted a small gathering of folks for Thanksgiving this year. Bonnie made a “fruit turkey”, a cranberry mold, salad, and layered jello. I made garlic mashed potatoes (Alton Brown recipe), wild rice stuffing (made up based on what I remember from a recipe from 2 years ago), a 16 lb turkey (Alton Brown influenced), and giblet gravy. And of course, all our guests brought even more food. Ham, korean short ribs, meatballs and sausages, apple pie, cookies, sweet potatoes, dim sum, creamed corn, 7 layer brownies, cake, potato salad, mango pudding, and probably a few things I’ve already digested and forgotten. It was an obscene amount of food for the number of mouths available.

Needless to say, everyone stuffed their faces but barely made a dent in all the food. So everyone also did a good job taking lots of leftovers home.

Turkey turned out pretty well. I brined it for a day before roasting. And I also used the techniques Alton Brown recommends in order to keep the breasts moist while still making sure the thighs cook through.

Here’s Bonnie’s “turkey.”

Halloween party at Tommy and Phyllis’

We went to Tommy and Phyllis’ beautiful new house for a Halloween party. They had great decorations, food, and provided a safe and enthusiastic neighborhood full of houses to go trick or treating.

Here’s a picture with the grandparents before we left.

Amanda fell asleep during the trick or treat walk:

Phyliss’ salad with carmelized “brains”:

And her eye-meatball sandwiches:

Plus stromboli (can’t remember what the scary name was):

She also made a really good french onion soup and had punch and dip. That plus all the desserts everyone brought made for quite the feast. We brought a pumpkin cake that I forgot to take a picture of. I did a bad job with the frosting so it wasn’t all that pretty anyway. It did have a Hoho stem that was pretty funny though… till Terry broke it off and ate it.

I’ll have to get some pictures from the other folks who were there. I’m getting worse at photographing everything… need another set of hands to take pictures while holding babies.

New beds and a new farmer’s market

Alissa has been sleeping in her big girl bed the last few days. She actually made the transition with no fuss at all. As a matter of fact, she was quite excited to sleep in it. Funny thing was that she decided she wanted a new stuffed animal to go with her new bed. So Monkey has been cast aside in favor of Blueberry. Unfortunately, Blueberry has a rattle inside which is kinda annoying at 6:00 am when Alissa makes her own way out of her bed and into ours. Oh well… maybe we’ll be able to convince her to “upgrade.”

Ashley and Amanda will eventually end up in the cribs.

We also checked out farmer’s market #3 today. (#1 is the one off I-280 at Alemany and #2 is the one behind Target at Serramonte.) This one is behind Macy’s at Stonestown Mall and is probably our favorite due to the proximity and the variety of stuff. Alemany is still the king, but it’s harder to get to and too hard to park. In any case, we were happy with a lot of the food vendors at this new one. We tried some hard cheeses and ended up buying their vanilla bean cream cheese. I also tried some goat cheese from Healdsburg which was tasty but Bonnie wasn’t a big fan. There was also an olive guy who had some interesting stuff. I ended up with a small container of olives stuffed with cream cheese marinated in balsamic vinegar and fig reduction. Super tasty! We got Alissa kettle corn as we always do (she calls it copcorn) which she ate while walking around listening to the guitarist that was there. He even played her the rubber ducky song. And lastly, I ended up with a $1 Samosa (I thought it was fresh… it wasn’t, but for $1, can’t go wrong) while Bonnie got a really tasty Belgian waffle. Anyway, we were there for less than an hour, bought no produce, and yet somehow ended up spending nearly $20.

Amanda’s turn at solids

While Alissa eats a piece of pizza.

And daddy got a little bit of project work done:

It’s the front panel to a DAC (digital to analog converter.)

From rags to riches

Rags… (shingled half of the shed Sunday… hopefully finish the whole thing this weekend.)

… to riches

We visited Jef, Xiao Yi, and Gavin this weekend at their beautiful new place in Burlingame. Xiao Yi made a fantastic dinner as always. Beef noodle soup and onion pancakes. Very Taiwanese. And very tasty. Afterwards, we went for a short walk.

Alissa is getting faster and faster.

And she likes to push rather than ride in her stroller.

(I had to make her walk in the grass because the road was too steep and she would certainly have face planted on the way down.)

Gavin is so much bigger than last time we saw him.

And finally, here’s a random pic of Amanda.

Amanda and Ashley’s Red Egg and Ginger Party

Two years ago, we hosted a couple hundred people at the Moonstar in San Francisco for Alissa’s red egg and ginger party. This time around, we ended up with mostly the same crowd at the Daly City Moonstar since the San Francisco one closed down (I think.) Also, the Daly City one is newer and nicer, probably a little closer to us in driving time, and parking is much easier.

We did Kit Kat bars along side bubbles for the kids and twin lady bug magnets for every family instead of the Trades Joe’s chocolate bars this time around. (Happy to offer these up for sale similar to how we did the ones for Alissa for those of you who are interested.)

My mom was able to make it out this time.

These are the four pictures we used in a big frame.

Otherwise, we feel very lucky that so many of our friends and family were able to make it out. Too bad it’s impossible to spend as much time as we would like with everyone, but hopefully, we’ll be able to see folks a little more often now that the twins are a little bit older.

I’d write more, but we’re all pretty pooped out. Here’s the rest of the pictures: http://flickr.com/gp/jasonwang/106988

Family dinner for Bonnie’s birthday

We had a bunch of Bonnie’s family over to help celebrate Bonnie’s birthday today. I can’t believe how big the family has grown. Between myself, Tony, and Calvin marrying in and then Abigail, Alissa, Megan, Amanda, and Ashley (and Yau girl #2 on the way), the immediate crowd has practically doubled in the last five years. Anyway, here’s most of the crowd in our living room:

And then Alissa helping Bonnie with the cake. She even blew out the nonexistent candles.

Dumplings, two ways

It seems that chefs are always doing some sort of food multiple ways. We were watching top chef the other day and one of them did eggs, three ways or something like that. The Iron Chefs seem to use that idea as well presenting the same main ingredient in bite size pieces in two or three different ways.

So, as life imitates art, here are our dumplings plus actual dumplings that I pan fried up for dinner the other night. Mmm… dumplings two ways.

Alissa’s second birthday party

We just had a small group over for Alissa’s birthday party this year. Bonnie made a request for chicken cacciatore and a Panormous Pizza Hut Pizza. So I got up early and threw all the cacciatore stuff in the slow cooker for four hours and picked up a not quite ginormous panormous pizza after picking up the cake.

Here’s my attempt at making the pizza look bigger than it actually was:

Here’s Alissa enjoying my chicken cacciatore:

The Elmo and Big Bird cake from Lucky: