I have a Six Year Old!

Today is Liam's birthday. That is pretty exciting for him. He woke up this morning in our bed. He had snuck in during the night and slept at the foot of the bed. When he woke up, he wanted a fruit smoothie and toast with butter for breakfast, but he wanted it in bed. When ever it is ViviAnne's or my birthday or father's/mother's day we get breakfast in bed. It is cute that he wants to do the same thing.

We are going to the Science Center today for his birthday. They have a birthday package that includes a magician, so Liam thought that would be super fun. He likes the sciences center a lot anyways so this is a nice gift to him. We made cupcakes last night for the party. When I took Darius down to the kitchen this morning he saw them and wanted one. I didn't give him one and he got mad and through a little fit. He will just have to wait a couple hours. My parents are going to come over tonight after dinner to give him there present too. I think that they are going to give him swim lessons, a swim suit and goggles. He has been asking for goggles for the last three or four months. I guess he really wants to do some swimming under water.

The last of our Arbor Day Society trees came in the mail yesterday. I am going to try and plant them tonight. We are going to put all the spruce tree in the wind break and the rest we will put around the house and in the field. I was also thinking about getting my riding lawn mower hooked up so I could try it out on the field. The weeds and grass are still really small, but there are some left over stalks of weeds from last summer that I would like to knock down. We'll see if there is enough time this afternoon. Liam would probably love to ride around on it with me.

Birthday Party for ViviAnne

Tuesday was ViviAnne's birthday. We had a nice party for her at our house with home made sushi, chocolate icebox cake, and the movie Juno. A bunch of people came over including family and friends. The sushi rolling was fun, a couple of people had never done it before so it was nice to see them learning how to do it. So for today I will post our sushi recipe that we used last night.


Some essential tools:
sushi rolling mat
julieanne peeler
sharp knife

How to do the rice:
2 cups sushi rice
2 cups water

Wash the rice in cold water and combine rice and water in pot. Bring to boil with occasional stirring and then reduce heat to simmer and cover with lid for 15 minutes. Remove from heat and let stand for 10 minutes.

How to do the sushi sauce:
5 Tbsp rice vinegar
5 Tbsp Murine
3 Tbsp sugar
2 tsp salt

Combine in small sauce pan and heat over medium heat until sugar and salt are dissolved. Once rice has set for 10 minutes, drizzle sauce over rice and let rice cool in fridge for a half hour.

What to put in your sushi? Any of the following
Cucumber, carrot, crab (imitation or real), green onion, avocado, raw tuna, raw salmon, pickled radish or cucumber are just a few.
The big thing here is slicing the different fillings so that they are long and narrow, shoot for a 1/16 to 1/8 of thickness and about 4-5 inches long. The best thing to use is a Julianne peeler in my opinion. This is a great activity to do with older kids to get them to help out in the dinner cooking process.

How to roll'em:
Have all your ingredients spread out in front of you. Also fill a small bowl with rice vinegar. Take a sheet of seaweed wrap and place it rough side up on the mat. The mat is bamboo and you want the bamboo running across and not up and down, when you place a sheet of seaweed on the mat, you want the lines in the seaweed to run up and down. Use your fingers to put a little bit of vinegar on the wrap, make sure you put a thin line of vinegar across the top. This will help seal the wrap when you are ready to roll it. Put about 4 Tbsp of rice on the sheet. Dip your fingers in the rice vinegar and push the rice on the wrap out to the sides so that there is a thin layer of rice covering the wrap (maybe one to two grains thick). Use your hand and make a 1/4 inch wide trough in the rice on the bottom third of the wrap. Place your choice of thinly slice veggies or meat into the trough. Now using the mat, roll the wrap up so that it looks like a large cigar. Place on a cutting board and using a sharp knife, cut the roll into approximately 8 pieces. Eat one of the ends for fun. Repeat the wrapping process until you run out of rice. You will probably get from 6-8 rolls out of 2 cups of rice.

Some popular combinations are:
Avocado-cucumber-carrot
Avocado-tuna-carrot
Avocado-crab-cucumber
Crab-green onion-carrot
Crab-pickled radish-cucumber
Tuna-cucumber-carrot
Salmon-cucumber

Have fun with it!

Spring Planting Continues

Welcome to another addition of the spring planting update. We decided to reseed our lawn, as our current lawn is spotty at best. I borrowed a harrow from my friend Brad and drove around the lawn for a couple of hours digging up the ground a little bit for the new seed. ViviAnne and I then raked all the dried up weeds from last year and spread the seed around. It is suppose to rain today and now that I have a window in my office I can see that it is indeed raining. Good! We also have a bunch of compost to spread out, but that will have to wait until tomorrow. All the kids played outside the whole time. Darius loves to be outside, here he is trying to eat lunch. After we got all the seed out, we went to the park for dinner with some friends. It was a good end to the weekend and great weather.

Tomorrow is ViviAnne's birthday, we are going to eat Sushi and watch the movie Juno. She has seen it, but I have not. We will also have a bunch of people over to do all this with. So expect a sushi recipe soon! I have not gotten a present yet, but have a couple of ideas in mind. I am going to take the kids after I get home from work to buy her something. Fun, fun! If anyone wants to get her something, you can send trees from the Arbor Day Website as gifts. So send us a tree, email me for an address.

Spring Planting 08

Well, I have started my spring planting. This weekend I planted 10 Idaho Hybrid Poplars and 7 Colorado Blue Spruce Trees. They are for the most part all in my windbreak. I have 10 more spruce tree being delivered some time in the next couple of weeks. They are Norwegian Spruce and grow a bit faster than the Blue Spruce; more than 24 inches a year. The Hybrid Poplars are great for wind breaks and for harvesting as they can grow in excess of 7 feet per year. They key obviously is to keep them well watered. I have a drip system that I will be setting up once the Norwegian Spruce arrive. This will be a great start to the wind break. It will be three rows deep with both deciduous and evergreen in the wall. I also plan on putting in a row of large shrubs but that will most likely be next spring or the one after.

I put a couple of the Poplars at the west edge of our property and plan on putting in a small grove of quaking aspen down there as well. The north west corner of our land is very wet, it gets all the drainage from the surrounding hills which continues north onto our neighbors property. The nice thing is that even in July and August it was still fairly moist down in that area. So I might not need to water the tree very ofter, if at all.

Finally, we have a ten tree mix coming in from the arbor day society. This has a variety of trees including oak, maple and evergreens. These are going to spend a year in pots before we put them out in the field. I want to make sure that they have a good year to grow first as the wind and dryness of the palouse can be pretty harsh. I am thinking that most of these tree will be planted closer to the house to provide shade and landscaping.

On the vegetable front, my tomato plants have already sprouted so that is good, I will plant the veggie garden in the middle of May and early June.