Doggy School

Saw this guy on the way to lunch today. For the non-Germans, he's advertising doggy training on the front of his bike there. And his dogs indeed seem to be well-trained. :-) I need to work on training Sammy and Sophie to ride in a basket on my bike...i wonder if I should give him a call...

East Wind and Flickr

We had dinner tonight with Christian and Anna, Lucy and Lorenz at a yummy Chinese food restaurant in Munich called Ost Wind- East Wind. Lorenz was a dinosaur this time and Lucy was just plain lovely. :-) What was super impressive was the fact that the two of them were able to simply switch between three languages during the course of the evening. They spoke Chinese or English with their mom, German with their dad, a mix of German and English with us, and Chinese with the waitresses. Quite often a conversation would start out in one language, and then end up in another a few sentences later. Mind boggling.

Meanwhile, we're getting ready now for the trip to India in earnest. Everything is booked, and now it is just time to get any shopping and cat planning, etc. out of the way before we leave. We leave a week from Friday, on May 16, and land in Delhi on May 17, early in the morning. I'm told that the temperature in Delhi is hovering at about 43 degrees...celcius. I am more than a little nervous about this. But...hey, we'll just bring towels and extra t-shirts (or Kurtas...) everywhere. We'll be in Delhi, Agra, Jaipur, Leh and Shimla. I have decided NOT to take a laptop for this trip, which should be a new experience.. ;-) Instead, the new mobile phone with a really really great camera in it, comes with, as well as an Ipod Touch. All I'd really like to do is occasionally check email and post a few photos as we go. To do so...I set up a Flickr account and have automated it to accept photos directly from my mobile phone. So..Julie snaps photo, Julie clicks the "post to web" button, and voila, photo uploaded directly to my Flickr account for you to see.

As an experiment, I uploaded a couple photos from tonights evening out directly to the account. Works really well. Now I just need a flat data tarif with flat roaming in India ....well, I guess you can't have everything.

You can find my Flickr account HERE.

We'll be in India from May 17 to June 5. Will likely get a blog or two in before we leave. But for the trip, count on following the action (unless I report otherwise in the interim) from the Flickr address.

Dumplings

Emily said that she wants me to write another entry on food. (She also said that the last blog was better because it had a theme to it. At which point I said that the theme was Singapore, not food. And she said that at least I posted on one topic consistently. But I say...this whole blog thing is teetering on oblivion anyway...so I am doing it as I want to...sigh. This sounds really mature.) Anyway, so I can give in though and do a food blog. Probably not so exciting for the Nathan women because they have seen/made/tasted this recipe ten thousand times, although this IS a very yummy variation.

Chinese (?) dumplings.
Taught to me by my first college boyfriend, who I newly learned lives somewhere in Idaho with his wife and three year old daughter, where he is a part time, amateur (but good!) folk musician and a full time...social worker, I think. I know this...because of...Facebook? No...not Facebook. I think Google.

The insides included (and so this is the new part..the new mix)
300 gms (about 2/3 of a lb) chopped salmon
about 3/4 cup soy beans
one large fat green/spring onion, chopped
1 chili, chopped fine (1/2 chili also enough)
about 3-4 tablespoons finely chopped mint
about 3-4 tablespoons finely chopped cilantro/coriander
about 2 teaspoons finely chopped ginger
about 1 tablespoon of vietnamese fish sauce
grated zest of a lemon (lime would be nice too)
couple splashes of oil (i used olive, which was fine) to hold things together

Mix it all together.

Make sure you have purchased dumpling skins. I like the round ones. Today's skins came...from Singapore, of all places.

Then here are pictorial directions on how to make them.

One step missing - the folding of the dumplings. Trick is to moisten one side of the skin with water and fold over the other side, being careful to press the air out. This is the hardest part of making these guys....takes some practice.

Also, the liquid in the pan is a broth. Fish broth is the best, but I used a vietnamese pho broth, which was also nice. In total, the dumplings should be browned for about 3 or 4 minutes - until brown - and steam fried with the broth for 1 or 2.

We ate them with a nice eggplant/mushroom asian-inspired side dish...also nice.

Oh, all photos taken with my new phone. Nokia n82. I have a love-hate relationship with the phone. Some aspects - camera - are great. But I wish it were an iPhone most of the time. :-( I could have bought the iPhone, but I am waiting for version 2. And I want a better camera than the iPhone offers...