Spice On Ice

About week ago, I was reading cache valley magazine at work & saw there's cooking competition called "Spice on Ice" held on March 26th in Logan. Considering myself gourmet food fan, I wanted to go but the tickets are $50! No way of spending that kind of money after spring break so I gave up. My boss Susan saw same article, seemed pretty interested & told me "Denny(our cook) wanna do this." Since he hardly speaks English, I had to call the info center to ask if we still could participate. We got the ok, then today, we went to fight! What we wanted to serve was our signature authentic Taiwanese food "Deep Fried Pork Sizzlin Plate" but since we have no equipment to deep fry right there & they didn't have place to cook food, we did what we could. We served "General Tsao's Chicken." Battered deep fried chicken in a little bit spicy sauce with fried rice. Other restaurants were serving fancy dishes, we felt a little bit out of place. But we served & we served & we served...total of 200 people. Unfortunately, we couldn't win any prize but had so much fun! Also after the cook-off, us & the other competitors started giving food to each others, bacon wrapped scallops with wild rice, indian curry, indian chicken something, bbq sandwich, braised pork slice, super juicy fillet steak & fancy layered cheesecake, etc etc...(probably should've taken pics of those food, too but couldn't wait to eat.) It would've been nice to win those prizes but we could eat fine food without spending money :P & it was really really a great experience for us.

What an accomplishment!

Spice on Ice is held at ice skate center, it was chilly.

Denny the cook

The dish prettied with the carrot rose & cucumber decoration

Andrew was a part of our team! He put sesame on chicken then put the flag on top of fried rice!

Bryants B-day Party

So Anna invited us along with a bunch of others to Bryant's B-day party for cake and ice cream. Of course she had us at cake and ice cream. We enjoyed the evening and the cake. The entertainment was provided by Cailey with a dance to the song dancing queen. The video was taken with a cell phone so the quality is lacking but it is still fun to watch. There is a brief appearance in the video by Makayla.

So enjoy ...

Finals, A Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year!!

I guess the best news since we last posted is that I passed all my classes and have successfully moved into my final semester. This last semester should be a little lighter and hopefully some more fun since I have been part of a team that is designing a dunebuggy type offroad vehicle. THis next semester we get to build what we designed, so in addition to 2 math classes and 1 business class I am taking a shop class.

After finals came birthday numero 26 for me. Naoko and I went down to SLC and played for a bit where for my present we upgraded our cellphones and I got the iphone.


We promptly used the google maps to find the restaurant we wanted to eat at and got turn by turn directions from the location we were at. We enjoyed a delicious Japanese cuisine at Matsu. As you can see we loved it. Rumor has it Naoko likes sushi...



Christmas is always a fun time of year. We enjoyed lots of presents and family. Here is a small taste of our Christmas.


You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen, Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen, but do you recall ... HOWIE???


Howie had a very merry Christmas too.


New Years topped us off with a lot a great food and celebration. In Japan New Years is where it is at for holidays. So Naoko went all out and made a lot of good food. See for yourself...


We couldn't really find a lot a stuff going on in Logan so we crashed the institute dance and after about twenty minutes someone yoinked the fire alarm and so there was no dancing going on after that. We managed to enjoy some refreshmants though and rang in the New Year with style.


Howie also joined in the fun!


We just want to wish every one a Happy New Year!!