Author: Pam Kocke

NOLA mom of identical triplets. Talent Acquisition at Automattic. Enjoy reading and photography and sewing and bookbinding.

Crunchy roll bowl – kind of a recipe

The boys love to get sushi. Well, what that really means is they love to go to sushi restaurants and eat their body weight in crunchy rolls. But they can only include rice, snowcrab, crunchy, and a seaweed wrap.

We’ve made them at home, but I’m terrible at the rolling part and not particularly interested in getting better at it. And I love a poke bowl, so it occurred to me that I could go this route with crunchy rolls.

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So here’s what you do:

Make a batch of sushi rice. That includes seasoning it with a vinegar mix. I wanted to use my Instant Pot, so this is the recipe I used. Use whatever recipe you want!

Get some krab. You know, imitation crab. Chop it up finely. Mix some mayo up in there. Just enough to bind it. I’m sure there’s some fancy Japanese mayo you could use but I sure as heck don’t have it. I use Duke’s. Not that it matters. Just saying.

Dig that package of nori out of the back of the pantry that expired last summer. I mean how bad could it be? Maybe tear off a bit and taste it. If it tastes okay, go ahead and cut it up into little strips or whatever. I used scissors, and it was very satisfying. If you don’t have nori sheets, maybe you have some of the seaweed snacks? I’ll bet those would be even better.

So layer that in a bowl, and then take a box of unseasoned panko and sprinkle that generously on top. You could be ambitious and make tempura batter and fry it and crumble it or something. I’ve thought about that, and even have a box of tempura mix in my pantry, but then I realized that panko is even easier. I also wonder if Rice Krispies would work. I mean, in a pinch.

Serve with soy sauce, maybe mixed with a bit of wasabi.

Now of course this is infinitely customizable if your kids are less picky than mine. Things you could add:

  • edamame
  • avocado
  • green onions
  • smelt roe
  • cucumber
  • omelette strips
  • raw fish!

I realize some of these options are unlikely these days, but after this is all over, GO CRAZY.

PS I’m fancy and I didn’t know it. A friend of mine informed me this is called chirashizushi.

Goings on

I mean, nothing exciting. Same old, same old. Just like everyone else on earth, right?

Sigh.

Well, okay FINE I gave up again on my daily photo challenge. Not that I haven’t taken photos every day, but I keep getting so far behind, and no one needs to see boring pictures anyway. Blah. And I mean, since we’ll be at home for the next month, it’s gonna be even worse.

Anyway.

I had my day off with Miles last Monday. We had a great day. Walk to the coffee shop, breakfast at home, went to a park, lunch at a diner, and capped it off with an escape room, which we escaped from! So fun. And I got an email from LSMSA saying Miles had been awarded a scholarship to the summer camp! (Who knows if that will even happen?)

Crescent Park (you can almost see our house from there!)

Lunch and escape room

Oh and I never talked about everything Linus and I did.

We had coffee, and then shopped, and had lunch (steak!) and escaped from a room, and got froyo. Lovely day.

Poor Oliver was supposed to have his day on Friday, but their school closed on Thursday until April 13th at least. (Spring break starts on the 13th, so not sure if they’re going to roll into that, or pretend it was during the quarantine time.) But we’ll do it eventually. Hopefully during this school year.

The boys were at soccer practice when I got the email from their school about it closing the next day, and that was the last soccer practice for the forseeable future. Sad. But they’ve been playing outside plenty. Their new thing is playing basketball in their room with the “hoop” we fashioned out of a small cheap plastic soccer goal and plenty of duct tape.

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I mean, you gotta admire their inventiveness!

Tomorrow “school” starts for real – their teachers will start putting up assignments on Google Classroom for them to do.

Let’s see. I also made this cute clutch:

If you happen to have an appropriate zipper lying around, it’s a good, quick, satisfying project. And free! Here’s a link. I made it out of leftover denim, which I was glad to use up.

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pamchops.com!

Fundraising update: Well, the St. Baldrick’s event was supposed to be on March 29, but it looks like I’ll be growing my hair out for a bit longer than planned. Now it’s going to be (hopefully!) at the end of May. So I’m going to stop begging people for money for a while. But I mean, you certainly still can. My friend Hadley also set up a Color Street party to benefit my fundraiser, so you can also have fantastic nails while you’re at home. Honestly, it’s a great and easy pick-me-up anyway. I think I’ll put some on later today.

So. I guess that’s about all of the excitement for now. I have lots of sewing I can do, but I honestly don’t really feel like it. Argh!

Feeling very grateful to have a remote job right now, so I’d better get back to work!

(Oh, and I wrote this post about working remotely.)

03/02/2020

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Linus and I had our day off together on Monday and we escaped from a room! Sure. We got lots of clues, but it was just two of us! The person working said she didn’t expect us to finish but WE DID. With three minutes to spare!

02/29/2020

Finally got my new lens! It’s not as nice as the lens I have been using, but it zooms a lot more, so it’s a trade off, but worth it. (Especially since I got it for only $50 or something, used.)

02/28/2020

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Thanks to my uncle, I have this perfect table for my grandmother’s Singer! It’s 70 years old now. Time to sew with it!

02/26/2020

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I’m sorry to say, this is probably the best picture I took on this day.

IKEA to the rescue!

When Kristina was visiting, Mary Catherine came over to consult with her on the mess that is my house. After looking at my teeny-tiny closet that was stuffed full and the two random dressers stuffed full and covered in more stuff (so much stuff!) Mary Catherine declared that I needed to get rid of the dressers and get a wardrobe instead.

Mismatched ugly dressers
Tiny closet

 

I loved this idea and hopped on the IKEA website and planned and eventually ordered a PAX wardrobe.

The space I had to work with was just about 66″ wide, and I was able to pretty much fill that area perfectly!

So what I needed from this wardrobe was lots of hanging room (well, more than the 25″ I had in my closet) and more drawer space than I had in my two dressers. That seems like a lot, but I was able to accomplish it with the use of pull out baskets and shelves. The fact that I was working with the 93″ tall PAX frames helped a lot.

(Also I didn’t realize how tall 93″ is. It’s TALL.)

Here’s what I planned on the IKEA website and how it turned out IRL:

Doors open:

Doors closed:

I’m especially excited about the mirrored door. It’s the only full-length mirror in the house! Up until now I had to carefully balance my phone on the mantle and take a picture of myself if I wanted to see what an outfit looked like.

Putting it all together wasn’t easy but it wasn’t too bad either. Probably the worst part was just the sheer size of the thing and the lack of space in the room to put it together. But it all worked out in the end, with help from Linus and George.

Oh, and my old tiny closet? I got a shoe rack that basically takes up all of the closet floor space and then got some hanging cubes for now to put fabric in. It’s a temporary solution until I can get built-in shelves.

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Much better! (Really!)

My grownup room:

So that is the story of my wardrobe. Now I can sew more clothes! Yay!

 

Things other than pictures

While I’ve been posting a ton, it’s just been the daily photos, really. So I haven’t posted updates or anything. So let me get all caught up on that.

I posted about Lisbon already…

Kristina came to visit! We were chatting on the phone and I was expressing my stress about being overwhelmed by the mess that is my house. I didn’t even know where to start with getting it organized and decluttered. I swear this wasn’t my plan, but within hours she had booked a week-long trip to visit and help me out. I took some time off work, and we organized and cleaned and ate delicious food and also took a road trip with the boys!

The road trip was to Alexandria for Linus’s archery tournament, and then we drove another hour to Natchitoches because why not? We were so close!

Linus did really well in the archery tournament, especially considering he had only practiced a few times. He got the third highest score from his school!

I’ve signed the boys up for summer camp at LSMSA, which I’m very excited about. Less exciting is the thought of making the 8 hour round trip twice in a week.

Coming soon: Posts on my new wardrobe (like, the furniture, not clothes) and the Mardi Gras dress I made.