Happy Chinese New Year Deacon!

Here he is. Deacon Hung-Ji Tang.

Here he is. My eldest brother's first child. My first nephew. Incredibly adorable huh?

I had to post this picture because I sent him a red envelope for Chinese New Year. It's his first. 

In this case the envelope is in gold cardstock, I made it by myself. 

The scribble on the front is my artistic way of writing the Chinese character 福.

And he's holding the envelope by himself!!!

I'm a proud Auntie.

Pee Wee Marathoners

Sup? So this is my maiden post. Lets hope its a good one-I don't have any champagne bottles to christen it with. Actually I may have posted before now that I think about it, but I don't feel like deleting that brilliant and witty imagery.

Life is so good right now. Seeing as I'm married to Jessica that is probably obvious to everyone. One of the fun things we've been doing recently has been training for our upcoming race: the Morgan Valley Marathon. We've been training for a while now and we are starting to get a little better at running. So far we have run about 77 miles in small chunks. We are getting a little faster too- our last run knocked out 5 miles at an 8 min mile pace, which is a lot faster than we started.

I think we've learned a lot already by running together. Some days are a lot easier to run than others, but so far we haven't broken from our training schedule. We're getting better at running as a team and supporting each other where it gets tough. We are able to run farther faster now than we could before because we are consistently working together towards a goal. She teaches me persistance: a week ago she dragged me out into a blizzard to run the last two and a half miles of our run when the indoor track closed. Most importantly, we have learned how to look good in spandex while waddle running over ice and trying really hard not to slip. (unfortunately, we don't have any pictures of that to share)

Basically what I'm trying to say is that Jess looks great in spandex pants. Everyone knows that's why I'm in the race.

Healthy Muffins? Wha........?

So before Caleb and I were married, I flew out to Ohio with him to meet his family. While we were there, Caleb's mother made these really delicious muffins that were jam packed with good things. Super tasty AND super healthy, as far as muffins go. But really, they are pretty healthy, period. I asked for the recipe and she emailed it to me right away. This was back in April last year.

Ten Months Later...(the present)

I'm digging through all the recipes that I have saved and I found her recipe!! They are called Morning Glory Muffins. I don't know where "morning glory" comes from, but seriously, these muffins will give you all the "morning glory" you need to feel good about yourself and your diet.

You're probably thinking that I then pulled out this recipe and made it myself. WRONG. This was all Caleb. He is quite the little baker around here. I can only take credit for the pictures. Thank you Mom for the recipe!

Morning Glory Muffins

2 ½ cups wheat flour

1/3 cup sugar

3 tsp. cinnamon

2 tsp/ baking soda

½ tsp. salt

3 eggs

¾ cup applesauce

1/3 cup oil

1 tsp. vanilla

2 cups grated carrots

1 med apple, diced

8 oz. crushed pineapple, drained

½ cup coconut

½ cup raisins or craisins

½ cup chopped walnuts (opt.)

1 TBSP flax seed

Combine dry ingredients in one bowl. In another bowl mix

the eggs, applesauce oil, and vanilla. Stir in carrots, apple,

coconut, raisins and nuts. Stir just until mixed. Fill paper

cup lined muffin tins. Bake at 350 degrees for 23 minutes.

As you can tell from the recipe, there are a lot of different ingredients, but it is totally worth it. 

恭喜發財！

Happy Chinese New Year!

Caleb and I celebrated Chinese New Year over the weekend by going to a coworker's party on Saturday, and then having our own family dinner on Sunday. At my coworker's party, we made traditional dumplings and also lit up paper lanterns. The paper lanterns were about three feet tall, and looked like this:

I didn't take any pictures at the party, but this picture was from Mid-Autumn Festival last year and we used the same exact paper lanterns. It was super fun. One of my coworker's friends bought about 100 of these and we lit them all up. It was lightly snowing at the time, but they still went up high into the air. You can imagine it looked a little bit like this:

(www.ecorazzi.com)

Well, maybe not THAT many; we really only had like maybe five or six up in the air at a time. Still, it was really fun.

On Sunday, we had all the cousins over from my side of the family. Since I was not able to be with my parents for Chinese New Year, I decided to take ownership of my own Chinese New Year festivities. Basically, that means I get to choose what kind of food I want to prepare. I'm so disappointed that I forgot to take pictures of our little get together, but at least I can provide internet pictures of what we ate. I'm so proud of the cuisine selection, it was all moi. Well I mainly planned the menu sinceI wanted to get together, and partly because my cousins either don't know what to cook for Chinese New Year, or they just don't know how to cook the food. So I thought it would be nice to have them over and cook homemade traditional Chinese food. Here are pictures of what we ate:

West Lake Soup (image from foodgawker.com)

Cha Siu Buns (image from biggestmenu.com)

Not too bad for our first time

Potstickers is a Must! (I got this image from somewhere, but I couldn't locate the source.  However, mine TOTALLY look like that. Ask Caleb)

Cantonese Pan Fried Noodle (image from rasamalaysia.com)

Deep Fried Milk (image from gbtimes.com)

Caleb made the fried milk, this is a pic of how it turned out. It was incredibly tasty!

And of course, tong yun. Glutinous rice balls with red bean filling, boiled in a sweet soup. 

The aftermath in the kitchen

I also had some of this on the table, a childhood favorite of mine:

White Rabbit Candy

I was so busy with the food planning that I didn't have time to make my own red envelopes!! But I will get to that soon. Technically, I need to give a red envelope to my nephew. I'm not rich, but at least I should give something. So I'll be working on that soon.

It is the year of the Snake! May it be a good one for you! Cheers!

Christmas and January 2013 Adventures

  First of all, I hope everyone had a great holiday. Our Christmas vacation was amazing! We went to Ohio to spend Christmas with Caleb's family. Mom and Dad took all of us to see "Joseph and the Technicolor Dream Coat" at a local theater and the new Les Miserables movie on Christmas day. We had a family craft where each of us created our own sweatshirt design. Mom and Dad also spoiled us with way too many gifts, but we are very very grateful for their generosity. Here are some photos from our trip.

January has been a good month for us this year. Caleb has finished all of his grad school applications and so we are waiting to hear back from them. I'm working part time and just enjoying life with Caleb, the most perfect person for me. Caleb took me to the Y Ball at BYU and this is how he asked me:

Inside was a letter asking me to go to the Y Ball 

And so of course I say yes. We had a really good time. The dance was only for engaged/married couples, so it was a very love-filled event. They had some stations to take pictures. We are such a photogenic couple. :)

I've also made the goal of choosing recipes to follow for dinners instead of just making something up on the fly. It's been really fun, sorry the photos are terrible, but I can assure you it tasted like you were at a five star restaurant.

Pizza recipe from Costco book

Happy husband with lemon chicken and green beans

We also just went last night to see the BYU production of The Phantom of the Opera and it was outstanding!! It was worth every penny. We bought our tickets super early in December and apparently every show sold out by the end of the month.  I'm so grateful that Caleb did some very good planning on his part. Neither of us are very good at planning dates. 

Also, for my mother's birthday, the Tang clan made a special family photo. Happy Birthday Mom!

I'm very excited for February...Chinese New Year and Valentine's Day!