Sylvia's Scenario

Merry Christmas from our family to yours! We are having a leisurely morning before we head over to my brother's house for a dinner of good food, good drink and good times to be had.  There will be 20 people there so everyone is bringing food.  I am bringing my  brussel sprouts with mustard butter , salmon dip, homemade rolls that I made yesterday that turned out very festive-looking and everyone is bringing  Christmas cookies  for dessert so I made my usual. My cooking has been on the light side, no complaints but enough to keep me satisfied.  Even last night was easy. Lauren, Ari, Bruce and I went out to our neighborhood   Salty's  for Christmas Eve and spent 3-1/2 hours at a wonderful and entertaining meal.  We indulged since it was Christmas Eve and had drinks, appetizers of oysters,  delicious special holiday's entrees and dessert of their signature White Chocolate Mousse Cake with Raspberry sauce  ...

Before Nick and Sachiyo left and returned to Japan, they made us a second dinner of one of their favorite meals; curry.  They eat curry at home for dinner about once a week in Japan.  Many countries have their traditional curry dishes and in Japan, the curry is brown and is made with beef.  We ate it a few times when we visited them in 2014 and I loved it.  I was thrilled when they said they would make it during their visit, especially after the wonderful  temaki and miso soup  dinner that we had on their third night here. We ended up with four additional guests coming over for this curry dinner including Lauren and three of Nick's local friends.  Since it was a weeknight, we had two different sittings because of people's work schedules.  First sitting included all of us plus Nick's childhood friend and his wife. The second sitting included Lauren, another local friend and then whomever wanted seconds which, I believe was ...

The weather has taken a turn on the colder side now, with the highs only in the 30's since Nick, Sachiyo and Hana arrived on November 28th.  That means lots of bundling up when taking strolls to the Junction or around the neighborhood. It also means no rain so that's a good thing. (It rarely rains when it gets this cold.)  We did get some snow flurries on Monday morning but they didn't stick.  With such cold weather now, we decided it was a good time to go to one of Nick and Sachiyo's favorite restaurants called  Little Sheep Mongolian Hot Pot ,  a restaurant that they like to go to in Japan.   When Nick and Sachiyo went shopping last week in the International District for our  temaki dinner , t hey noticed there was a Little Sheep restaurant across the street from Uwajimaya.  So, we picked up Lauren at her house and off we went for a hot pot dinner on a freezing cold night. This was our first night out as a family since t...