Delicious and healthy dinner for busy people

I am good at preparing healthy meals in a short time. The reason why we keep our weight unchanged for almost two decades must be our healthy diet. 

So here are things we made this evening. The meat was chicken breast without skin. They were marinaded in soy sauce, ginger, sesame oil and a bit of sun flower oil  for about 10 minutes, Then Dust them with flour, and shallow fry them in a frying pan. The batter becomes crispy and very delicious.

Healthy dinner

While marinading, I prepared a vegetable dish. Stir fry carrots and Chinese cabbages, add Shiitake when vegetables are almost cooked. Microwave broccoli. and add them at the end. I cooked rice beforehand to go with the dishes. Cider goes well with Japanese food. I have a bad habit of starting drinkd whilst cooking. So when the meal is ready I am usually on the second glass! 

Desert was fruits. I have a kaki, persimmon. Mike also had tangerines and a banana.

After dinner, we prepared Pannacotta for tomorrow. Mike bought Dutchy's whole milk. It is very creamy and good to make pannacotta.

Whole milk, gelatin in milk, and single cream

Soak gelatin in milk, and warm up milk in microwave until hot. Then add vanilla essence and gelatin into the hot milk. Stir well until gelatin melts. Then whip the cream, and mix it into the hot milk. That's all. It takes about 10 minutes.

We used single cream because we had leftover. But of course the double cream is proper ingredient. I basically prefer single cream only because double cream clogs me so much that I can't eat them two days continuously.     

Pannacotta

New pots from the kiln

This is one of the best from the last firing of the year. Cream glaze broke to pink.It is the size of an ordinary mug.

Large Creamer

Large creamer

The handle of a large creamer

And this one is a bit shorter. Both had same glaze and in the same firing, but colours vary. This has paler cream color, and oribe the green glaze became matt. The mystery of pottery. 

Medium creamer

Medium creamer

This saucer is for our friend who bought a coffee cup at Open House. I hope she likes it.

Saucer for a friend

Sukiyaki lunch

On Saturday we had year end lunch with our new friends. They are animal lovers. Those who don't like animals often suffer in our house.

Scooter

Topaz the mad dog barks incessantly (we can't stop her), Pearl swirls around you with joy, Scooter, the grey parrot, flies over your head, Beeper, the another grey parrot, beeps and alerts with fire alarm sounds and Fifi screams to deafen you. When you try to get out of this madness, Pumpkin the very friendly but bossy chicken pecks your hand and legs, hoping that there are some peas to be given.

Not such worries for our new friends. They wanted to meet everyone. We introduced them to Pumpkin, Pearl and Scooter. We kept Topaz in the car inside the garage due to her own request.

Kaori greets Pumpkin

Scooter was quiet in front of our friends even though he was chatting away before he met them. He kept contact calls to Beeper who was still upstairs.

Preparation for lunch

Ben is vegetarian, so I made sukiyaki, and Kaori made powerful Korean dish for vegetarian.

Homemade pannacotta

On Sunday, we cleaned up the kitchen, and chilled.

The peak for my day work has passed, so I am hoping that I could start working on a new clay work sometime very soon. I have spent lots of time marketing and promoting this year. They are important, but now I like to experiment with new clay I bought in summer and also to create some DoGoo before our January course starts. I have got a couple of ideas, and they are taking shape in my head.

Pomona and Sliver birch

Most of my pieces are related with animals. But there are two pieces inspired from plants. One is this. I named her Pomona. She is our youngest apple tree in the garden.

Pomona

I am happy with how she turned out. She has some leaves and fruits on her head, and the impression of the leaf on her body is form a real apple leaf from the tree.

I made another tree themed lady. She is Silver birch in February. I wanted to capture the moment when the leaf buds are starting to swell and breaking.

Sliver birch awakening in February

I made Silver birch with grey modelling clay whereas Pomona is with white clay. I made lots of crackles like on barks on her dress and hair, as you can see some in the image below, but they didn't show up as much as I wanted.

Before firing

She was decorated with underglaze and fired at about 1240C degree in a kiln. After that I added enamel effect and she was fired in an oven. 

So she became somewhat different from what I expected in the end. But I am happy with how she looks now. But I will not make any figures with grey clay as underglaze don't show up well. 

Silver birch and the crescent

I was looking at silver birches which gave me inspiration during a walk this afternoon. Most trees lost leaves, but a few still have many leaves somehow. It was a really chilly day despite the bright sunshine. 

I had a short chat with one of neighbours whom I had never talked with even though we moved here in 1995! I am glad that we could finally have a meaningful chat today! What was the subject you wonder? Of course, it was about weather! 

Have a lovely weekend! 

Have a nice weekend!

Kiwi, the red fronted kakariki, and twitter

Brooch in the memory of Kiwi, the red fronted kakariki

I have never imagined I will start Twitter. Never say never. I started using email in 1992 when nobody I knew except for those in the University of Kent, had individual address. Then I started building my own website on our birds in 1998. At that time, there weren't various templates so I designed wallpaper etc. from scratch. I continued until 2002, then my beloved Kiwi the Kakariki died, and I lost interest in whole world for a while.

Kiwi photo: Mike 2001

Blogging was just starting at that time, but I have never taken it in until this year. Now I became a lady with certain age, I decided to catch up with everything! Because of my day job, I am up to date with new technology development and next big things. I even invested in the company with search and cloud computing. So I knew quite a lot about them, but I didn't know how to use them. I am not going to be an old woman who is behind the times. I fear that if I don't catch up with new things now, it might become too much and too late when I am really old.

So here I am with Twitter account @MidoriTakaki