liu-party time!

saturday was a fun productive day, mostly spent mostly within the confines of our kitchen and living room. after a short run along the west side highway and a quick lunch in chinatown, i decided to give my new heat embossing tool a whirl and make a personalized card for my friend, sharon's, baby shower!

the card reads, "good things come in threes!" and there is a cartoon picture of a hatching chic above it. the quickie glue pen was easy to use, similar in flow like the gelly roll pen, and created a textured glue surface for the gold embossing glitter powder to adhere to. unfortunately the stamp was not as successful due to the lack of texture in the stamp ink, and my poor choice in using brown kraft stationary with the gold glitter. it's there, but it's not as clear as the quickie glue pen. nevertheless, fun! and this means i'll need to get some more embossing glitter powders :)

i spent the rest of the afternoon prepping in the kitchen for a small liu-party! my parents arrived around 5pm, and my aunt and cousins a little later around 6:30pm. for dinner, we prepared the following:

dinner menu

pork larb with butter lettuce wraps

pea shoots with garlic

wild-caught shrimp with garlic

braised beef with carrots, daikon, and tofu skin

sweet & spicy sichuan style cucumbers

homemade kimchee (aged 2.5 weeks)

the pork larb and kevin's cucumbers were the stars of the show! two pounds of ground pork with cups full of fresh herbs and three taiwanese cucumbers marinated in sweet and spicy chili oil, ground peppercorns, sugar, and soy sauce were demolished.

conversation was plentiful and everyone was in great spirits. i can't remember the last time we all got together like this in an intimate setting, probably long before jess and my weddings. we even dialed in my 96 year old grandmother in taiwan on skype and she chatted us up for a solid 30 minutes, mostly heckling kevin and me for a great grandchild *slap on forehead*. that woman is not so subtle even when she's trying her best.

after dinner, we walked over to fifth avenue to enjoy the illumination of the empire state building, "racing extinction". the collaborators of this incredible event, travis threlkel and louie psihoyos, projected digital light images of endangered species onto the building to draw attention to the a "noah's ark" of endangered animals. it was my first time to see the empire state building lit up with images - it was quite extravagant and moving, and people were stopped in their steps, cars pulled to the side of the streets, and tour buses pulled over, all to catch a glimpse of the giant ape climbing up the empire state building, the blue whale, snow leopard, and more.

there wasn't any music that could be heard from the streets, in the racing extinction video below, it's pretty awesome.
 

 

happy 33rd birthday to my brother, jon gunjak! :)