the world is your acorn

The Little Red Haired Girl and I have been reading a lot of poetry this last month or so, trying to find appropriate readings for the wedding ceremony that we both really liked. I thought it might be nice to have some Chinese poetry, so I took a couple of books out of the library. We didn’t find anything we really liked, but we did find some that we laughed hard over, imagining including them in the ceremony:

Impromptu on a Hangover
P’i Jih-Hsiu
I block out the midday brightness with a screen depicting dark woods,
burn a stick of heavy incense, nursing my hangover.
What’s this? As evening comes, I’m ready for a drink again!
Beyond the wall I hear the cry of someone selling clams.

Words of the Newly Wed Wife
Wan Chien
The third day I went into the kitchen,
washed my hands and made the soup.
Not yet sure of my mother-in-law’s tastes,
I sent some first for my sister-in-law to try.

The other day I tried something new: a calamari steak. I’ve cooked calamari before, but not just a steak. In my head I knew I wanted to do a grilled calamari salad of some sort, but when I got home I discovered that, in fact, I was way too lazy to light the grill. I then discovered Sam the Cooking Guy’s Calamari Steak with Garlic & Capers recipe. It’s super easy, and just involves searing for a couple of quick minutes, then adding butter, garlic, capers, lemon, and some fresh herbs. I also seared some squash and eggplant slices with some garlic to make a pseudo-grilled veggie salad and put it all on some lettuce. It turned out to be a delicious lunch that I’d do again. Maybe next time I’ll get a picture before we eat it all.

The other day I got a package in the mail. The timing was such that it could have been a birthday gift or a wedding gift. The return address was from a friend of The Little Red Haired Girl’s mom, so we guessed that it was a wedding gift. Although it was confusingly addressed to me. She opened the box, and discovered a card inside that said it was an engagement gift for me. So I opened the gift inside, and found a framed photograph of The Little Red Haired Girl at age 6 in the bath. Weird but hilarious. Not sure where we’ll hang it. In the bathroom? What’s appropriate? Even better, we turned the photograph around, and found this:

I’m sort of tempted to display that side instead of the photo itself. Is there a way to show both?

I’m in NC hangin with Superheroes for my birthday weekend. Yesterday we went bowling in Raleigh at a place that still scores on paper. I think the place might be called “Bowl.”

The Little Red Haired Girl and I went back to Ouyang House yesterday with another friend of ours to give the dim sum another go. There seemed to be more people there this time, and twice as many carts. We had some new things this time, including pan fried dumplings, stuffed chive pancake things, sesame balls, and crystal shrimp dumplings. We also ordered salt and pepper shrimp, which were perfect and delicious.

We also talked to the hostess, who remembered us from last time. She is, apparently, off to New York soon to pick up some ingredients for the chef so he can expand his menu. They are also waiting on a noodle machine so they can make the rice noodle roll things. I was happy to hear that this dim sum venture is looking successful so far, and I’ll definitely keep going back to see the new things going on and to support what they’re trying to do. You should go too.

Yes, there is dim sum in Nashville! After I read about Ouyang House on the Scene’s Bites Blog last week, I immediately made plans to go. We got there at around 11:30 this morning, and saw right away the rows and rows of buffet. When they were ready to seat us I asked if there was dim sum, and the led us off to a room to the left where just two tables were occupied. Our server came over and immediately addressed me in Mandarin (the other two I was with are white), asking what kind of tea we wanted and saying that she’d bring a menu. It was kind of hilarious, since I haven’t been mistaken for a Chinese-speaker for a long time. I can actually sort of hold my own in basic conversation, but my vocabulary recall gets worse and worse and my accent has become embarrassing. For the rest of the meal I sort of bumbled along, trying to stick to Chinese when I could and switching to English when I had to.

The menu was clearly the special Chinese-people-menu, and had some dishes listed only in Chinese on one side and the familiar dim sum items on the other. That side had English translations, but soon our server rolled a cart over with a bunch of different things on it and I just picked from there. I’m happy to report that they had just about everything that we generally expect from dim sum (although we didn’t see the head-on shrimp that The Little Red Haired Girl loves), and it was all quite delicious. I wasn’t responsible enough to take pictures of any food, but imagine steamed pork buns, shaomai, short ribs, bean curd skin roll, eggplant stuffed with shrimp, fried sweet rice and pork dumpling, taro dumplings, and a couple other things I can’t remember. Probably because of the small number of occupied tables there wasn’t that much variety in the cart, but we could have ordered what we wanted from the menu.

The service was really nice; our server brought over the taro dumplings as soon as they came out of the fryer to see if we wanted them. She kept recommending things on the menu to me too, but I could only partially follow the things she was pointing out. We did order one bigger dish that was a wide rice noodle and shrimp thing, which was fantastic. So, it’s not quite the cavernous banquet halls of restaurants in New York with a cart rolling by every few minutes with new piping hot items. But it’s a great start. We’ll go back, probably soon, just to support their endeavor. We think you should go too. I think you can always order the dim sum items, but it’s weekends when they have the cart(s).

Oh, and we spent just over $30 between the three of us, including tax and tip.

Ouyang House is at 4523 Nolensville Pike, just South of K & S International Market. They open at 11am. Let me know if you go, I’ll come with you. Especially if you read Chinese.

I need this:

“Viscous keyboard-cleaning goop ” [via BoingBoing]

Chicken taco salad tonight. Mangoes, tomatoes, cilantro, scallions, and lime over shredded chicken over cukes and lettuce. I did my own spices on the chicken and it was a little too cuminy, but otherwise it was a winner.