When it’s this hot outside you can either cool off in a pool or hide inside an air conditioned room. As a converted sun worshiper, I’ve been chilling inside malls, my parents’ kitchen, and lots of restaurants in Dallas. Today I want to plug a cousin-in-law’s place, Sushi Axiom (www.sushiaxiom.net), in the Knox/Henderson area.
I’ve had the tuna and hamachi sashimi, tuna tartar, and some other specialty dishes here, along with the usual suspects of the spider, spicy tuna, and salmon rolls.
They all taste great whether I’m sitting at the cool, long bar or in a more intimate booth.
My favorite is the wine room, though, that you see when you first walk inside the restaurant. I totally want to have one just like it in my next house!
I’ve probably been hatching the plan to visit my final continent of Antarctica for about 3 years now. But what better way than to go on someone else’s dime, as their guest blogger! When I got an email from Quark Expeditions (www.quarkexpeditions.com) about their contest, I knew I had to rally everyone for their votes. So this link below is now plastered on Facebook, Twitter, this blog…and who knows how many other mailboxes I’ve spammed. If you want to stop hearing me plead for your votes, please click on the link below, register (sorry about this–and don’t forget to fill in the captcha at the bottom of the form), wait for a confirm email, and then vote. Thanks for your support, and I can’t wait to blog from the ice!
http://www.blogyourwaytoantarctica.com/blogs/view/127
PS: be sure to check your spam box for the confirmation email from Quark!
One of the photo albums on my Facebook page is entitled “Larkie Chases the World,” and my brother-in-law asked me if I’d ever catch it. My knee-jerk reaction was to answer him I sure hope not, because what else would there be for me to do? But the more I think about this, the more I wonder what really fuels my drive to travel. Because it’s definitely not the packing and unpacking or the uneasy hours of waiting at airports and sitting on planes. Once you yourself can perform the cross-check routine in five different languages it means you’ve been on more planes than humanly necessary, unless you are part of an international flight crew.
Is it some great desire to see the world at large just to see for myself what I’d be missing out on had I stayed home? Translation: nosy curiosity. Or is it something more primal, like a need to keep moving so the roots can’t get thicker and deeper in any one place? Translation: commitment phobia. So this begs the question, am I wandering to run toward or away from something?
Historically, nomadic cultures roam to follow plants, game, and/or trade, and seasons generally dictate their mobility. Along their paths of roaming (usually not so aimlessly), some inevitably stray from the nomadic life and become absorbed back into a more industrialized society where maturity and responsible behavior are defined by the number of roots that laid beneath one’s feet. Mortgages, tenure, lifetime club memberships and a zillion other social inventions serve to bind you to your community and keep you, for lack of a better word, committed. The great American dream of a white picket fence existence comes to mind when I think about the total opposite of a nomadic lifestyle. For me, a mostly responsible adult who thrives in a high-pressured big city environment, full of land mines that require nothing but commitment (to the job, the networks, the community, the family and friends, the standards, etc.) to disarm, it is all I can do to suppress the call of my nomadic urges to just be somewhere else. I certainly can’t say a nomadic life is irresponsible though, when in fact these cultures must roam in order to survive. If anything it is a huge responsibility to exist as a tribe when the tribe is always a moving target. If that’s not commitment, I don’t know what is.
OK, you are asking yourself has she gone nuts? Or perhaps you are saying why am I still reading this dribble…how is she going to tie this story up within the context of fashion or travel? Well, I think my conclusion is that I am living a life in grey, and that’s why I roam. Before I explain this statement, I have to tell you that a friend of mine recently chastised me for always thinking in greys, typical of a lawyer he said, always muddying up issues that could be distilled to simple black and white. I bristled at the half-joke then but as the thoughts flow now from my head to my keyboard in this one morning of self-observation, I do see shades of grey in many areas of my life. I function in the traditional confines of your typical modern society, but I also give myself a long leash from this daily life so that I can hit the road when the call is too great to ignore. Grey is my favorite color in every sense of the word; it is neither a yes or a no, a strict black or a stark white. Something in between and neither outside nor inside the lines. It is a comfort zone for someone who reserves the right to change her mind because everything in life is mercurial. If things were always black and white, life might be easier but perhaps a little less interesting.
Hey, I’m just another voice in the Blogosphere. Not always the voice that makes a lot of sense but I know there are you other grey soldiers out there, marching to a beat not quite the same as most people’s. If you meet up with me along some dirt road in Calcutta or even some swanky alley in Dubai, tap me on the shoulder and I’ll buy you a drink. Or take you shoe shopping.
Ingredients + Condiments
- 1.5 pounds fish filet (orange roughy or any white fish)
- 1/4 teaspoon salt and black pepper mixed together
- sprinkle of garlic powder
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
- 1 head of lettuce
- 1 bunch cilantro
- 1 bunch of various mints
- 2 shallots
- 1 bunch green onions
- 1 plantain banana
- 1/2 green mango or sour apple
- 1 small cucumber
- 1/2 cup julienned carrots
- 1 cup fresh bean sprouts
- 6 ounces of thin white vermicelli rice nooodle
- 2 teaspoons of red wine vinegar mixed with 2 tablespoons water and 1 teaspoon of sugar
- 1/2 cup ground, unsalted roasted peanuts
- rice paper 15″ diameter
- dipping sauce (nuoc cham)–see instructions separately below
At the end of this blog I am posting some photos as shopping and visual aids.
This recipe yields about 10 rolls
Instructions
- Place fish filets in a mixing bowl or deep dish. Marinate both sides of the fish well with salt, black pepper, olive oil, and garlic powder. Cover and let fish marinate for about an hour in the fridge. Place fish on a baking rack on top of the baking plate then bake it uncovered in 350F for about 20 minutes. Do check after 15 minutes as some fish will cook faster depending on the thickness of the filets. If you cover the fish with aluminum foil while baking, the fish may become too moist and crumble.
- While waiting for the fish, boil the rice vermicelli per instructions on package. It should taste more well done than al dente but not too soft. Be sure to drain it well in cold running water before plating it. Then set it aside.
- Clean and drain the lettuce, mint, bean sprouts, and cilantro and only keep the leaves and young stalks. Cut the lettuce leaf lengthwise in half and remove the stalk for easing wrapping later.
- Slice the plantain banana, cucumber, and green mango/sour apple into long, thin pieces.
- Grind the peanuts in a food processor till they are small chunks.
- Thinly slice the shallots then quickly stir fry over medium high heat in olive oil until they brown and become somewhat crispy (this can be substituted with the already dried onions/shallots found at Asian markets). Slice the green onions and do same. In my picture above we forgot to grill the green onions and they should NOT be served raw like that.
- Remove the fish from the oven then drizzle the shallots, green onions and peanuts over it.
- Wet the rice paper and when it is soft enough for wrapping, layer it with the condiments, noodle, then fish and roll. See photos below for rolling sequence.
- Serve nuoc cham (fish sauce based dipping sauce–see video below) in individual bowls and add julienned carrots to each bowl. Dip the roll in the sauce and enjoy!
Photos
Video
This is a reminder of how to make nuoc cham:
Tags: ca nuong recipe, nuoc cham, orange roughy
If you’ve been to Texas in the middle of the summer you’d know what kind of heat I’m experiencing. The kind that sends perspiration trickling down your spine while you are trying to stand very still in the biggest shade you can find. No amount of thinking about building igloos in the North Pole can make the discomfort go away. There’s no tricking your body with mind games when the heat and humidity tag team you. I suppose all you can do is surrender to the elements when you absolutely must go outside, as I do to take these pictures of my mom’s burgeoning garden. Her tomato plants are wilted and I feel their pain. In the five minutes that I’m in the sun, I, too, am fried.
Even late at night it is warm outside. How do I know this? Because I did a drug run for my dad last night. When I arrived Wednesday night he was suffering cold symptoms. By Friday afternoon they were really dogging him, and around dinner time my mom was on the internet looking up swine flu (she had just come back from a location wedding in Mexico so that’s where the thinking was). Now I know I recently wrote about how much my life revolved around electronic data, but c’mon, the amount of information you can find on the internet can really make you nuts. Not only do we seem to become armchair experts in all topics that we can google, but apparently we also become major hypochondriacs.
At 9.30pm my mom insisted that we go find a specific brand of flu medicine so that she could dispense it to my dad, herself, and me. Symptoms or no symptoms, she was on a mission to exact a pre-emptive strike on this A/H1N1 virus that was going to plague us all at any second now! Of course all of this hullabaloo is happening while she’s making tea and dessert with one eye on the Dateline show, which BTW she is retelling me, fact by fact, as the murder mystery unfolds on the TV. So what I’m really saying here is that even if my personality appears a bit hyper in some of my blog entries, I am a mere breeze next to my mother’s hurricane.
Admittedly she has zen’d out a lot over the years, but sometimes when I’m home and observe her and my dad slyly from my ten simultaneous activities, I know my controlled chaos is the very genetic collaboration of my parents’ distinctive personalities. My father’s idea of a vacation is to accompany my mother to the ends of the world (well, it was just China last time but it might as well have been that as he detests long flights, foreign food, and any bed other than his own) and sit in a chair by the window to read any book that he happens to have at the time. So if I’m that aforementioned breeze, then he is the absolute stillness that you find in the middle of the Arizona desert. I believe when he is engrossed in his reading (and it’s never light reading), he is in the same meditative nirvana that people reach from years of learning how to tune out the noises around them. That’s how he rolls. My mother, on the other hand, will observe all the fine details most people miss, want to see everything, try anything, and instantly sum up how the world could run better if they had only done X instead of Y. How my parents operate on such opposite energy waves may be the very reason that they make a successful team now after decades of tumultuous experiences.
This was supposed to have been an entry about my dad, for father’s day, but I am relating a story about my mom as well as it is no longer possible to think about my father outside of the context of his wife. So father’s day and mother’s day blur into parents’ day for me. My mom jokingly tells me that they are now joined at the hips and sure enough, when she’s out loitering with me, she always has to call him to check in as if with a parole officer. I smile to myself when I hear her on the phone with him. They are the greatest gifts to each other now. There’s no present my sisters and I can possibly give him for father’s day that can rival the gift of spending every day with my mom. But I suspect a shiny new gadget is always appreciated.
Happy Father’s Day everyone!
PS: a big first happy father’s day shout-out to my brother-in-law D 
Tags: Father's Day, swine flu
