February

February went by quickly. I went on two ski trips, one awesome one to Mount Snow with the Szinger family and the Puzak/Contreras families. I’ll be doing one more trip to Jiminey Peak this weekend, driving back Saturday night so I can make Marco’s State Youth Wrestling CHampionship. Go Marco!

Work has been going well, doing some interesting coding projects with grails. I don’t have a huge familiarity with a lot of the web frameworks that have gotten popular over the last 5-6 years, but grails seems decent enough and almost fun to work with. Fun, until you work with date types in Java and you want to fucking kill someone. Lots of my earlier experience with HTML/CSS is coming into play, and now I feel like I’m learning it all for real rather than for play as I’ve been doing for the past decade. Good stuff.

I drew this picture one day, when all of us were at the table doing arts and crafts.

World Nebula

The kids drew some cool pictures, too. I’ll try and scan and post those soon.

March will see the start of a second session of wrestling for Marco and Antonio, CYO track for all four kids, flag football for Marco and Antonio, and a pause on my Tae Kwon Do membership until probably June. Just about every weeknight will be filled with sports so there will simply be no time to attend class. Oh well.

 

Seafood on the Barbie

I have discovered a new favorite hobby. Cooking scallops and shrimp on the BBQ. My dad was in town and I decided to try something new.

At lunch, we sat with a pad and thought about what we wanted for dinner. Seafood came up and since I had been wanting to grill some shrimp at some point, I thought this an excellent time to try it. Shrimp went on the list.

When I got to the seafood store, I noticed how good those scallops looked and I thought they would cook equally well on the BBQ. I was a little torn over bay or sea scallops. Bay scallops are much smaller than sea scallops and I wondered which might fare better on a skewer.

When I got home, I rubbed some Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Seafood Magic on all of the seafood and stuck all of the meat onto skewers. I fired up the BBQ and layed down some tinfoil as I was afraid the scallops would fall apart. You can see here a mixture of bay and sea scallops simmering.

As it turns out, sea scallops suck ass on the BBQ. They get all tender and fall apart, leaving behind a big mess. The bay scallops clung happily to the skewer and came out fantastic! Once the scallops were done cooking on the tin-foil, I placed them directly on he grill so they would get seared a bit to add to the flavor.

Still, the king of the BBQ today, in my eyes, were the shrimp. Shrimp are extremely sturdy on the skewer and cook in moments. It took about 60 seconds on each side and they were done.

We served a salad with dinner and I made some homemade guacamole. My dad bought a raw piece of tuna and sliced it sashimi thin. We mixed up some of our own wasabi from powder, poured on some soy sauce and enjoyed some of the best tuna sushimi I ever had. Sorry, no pictures.