6/16/2010

Happy Birthday, Roalnd.
Hate these days of limited,very limited resources. Steve goes on to graduate school this August and there will be more income then but getting through summer is grim although I understand that I am slowly redeveloping a career as astrologer and tarot reader thanks to Josie showing up in my life again and relying on me for astrology and tarot. I rely on her for psychic readings and will definitely refer people to her who ask me for someone who can be trusted. She is goood very good and makes a very good living with her own office,etc. I am so excited that she will be living out here and I will see her at the end of the month when she is here visiting her darling. I love the romance that they were married before and will be remarried now.
The kittens are tearing up the house. Jeez!! the little guys can't go outside because we live right on a major artery through town and next to a huge preschool with elaborate grounds and they are known to be ours and the gardeners and my neighbor do not appreciate them using the gardens for cat boxes.
Making hot and sour soup. Mine is so good that I am always disappointed when served this soup in cheap Chinese places and the soup is made from dry mixes. the soup is really very cheap to make. The only real expense is the mushrooms because I am afraid of buying imported mushrooms and so I but domestic dry orqanic mushrooms either Shitake or Miatake (spg?) both of which are very fragrant. I sometimes buy clouds ears or tree ears if I can find a good source. What I really wish that I could do is hunt fresh bamboo shoots like Muey reports that her mother and aunts do. They go up into the Berkeley Hills to find their bamboo but I don't know what to look for although I have seen some peeled and raw bamboo shoots in some markets.Muey said that when the family went to Hawaii she had to go with her mother and aunts to hunt the rarest bamboo shoots that grow only in Hawaii. The shoots are world famous in the Asian world that I only know from the edges through my lovely Muey born in 1975 in a refugee camp in Thailand. Who would have thought we would come to be close friends. God I remember how some in my office hated those refugees following the fall of Saigon-I always felt that we owed them and what a wonderful investment in her family.

Well I guess I should have made a few paragraphs there but really everything goes into me making hot and sour soup today. Off now to cut the tofu into strips and to then thicken the soup with corn starch and to flavor it with sesame oil-yummm!