MON. Dec. 10 – A Day (or Weekend) in the Life. What did you do on Saturday, December 8th … or that weekend – December 8-9. Let’s take a peak into each others lives as as we chronicle what we all did on that day (or during the weekend).

Well now I seem to have forgotten to chronicle my weekend! So I’m scrambling to write up this post on Monday at 630am. So instead of what exactly I did during the weekend, here are some things that did happen.

Saturday morning swim class. The boys go for swim class every Saturday morning in an outdoor pool – don’t worry it’s heated. And it was such a beautiful day outdoors, especially compared to last week where it was drizzling and suddenly in the middle of class a heavy downpour began.

Saturday lunch at Jang Su Jang. My mom loves Korean food so that was her request for lunch. We had our favourites like seafood pancake, dumpling soup, bulgogi, acorn noodles, and clam soon tofu. Then a wander around the Paris Baguette, a bakery-cafe chain from Korea.

The husband and I went out for dinner without the kids! It was an early celebration of our tenth anniversary (which is later this month, when my mum’s leaving for Singapore). And he wanted to take me out to omakase, which I hadn’t had before. It was a tiny restaurant in Menlo Park called Kyosho. Very popular, very crowded, and the tables were a little bit small but the food was delicious, the service was nice and it was a great time out. Also I got to wear a new dress I had bought in Singapore!

Don’t laugh but after dinner we went to Target. I had forgotten about the 20% off coupon I had and it was expiring that night! So we bought some toiletries, some hand towels I wanted to replace our old ones, some Beyblades for the boys’ Christmas presents. I’m just glad Target closes late – all the stores in the Menlo Park downtown area were shut by 7! As someone from Asia, where shopping happens until late, that always surprises me.

Sunday

Drove down to San Jose where the Mitsuwa supermarket is, it’s a big Japanese supermarket with a food court and a Kinokuniya (a bookstore chain from Japan). We ate at the Santouka ramen there, browsed at Kino, then bought some groceries from the supermarket. We were there specifically to buy the sliced beef for hotpot. The quality of the beef at the Japanese supermarket is quite a lot better than those at our local Chinese/Asian supermarkets and definitely worth the drive. Also decided to pick up a bottle of yuzu sake. I love yuzu so I wanted to try that.

The 7yo has been taking piano lessons for 2 years now and every so often the piano school holds a mini concert (plus a formal recital once a year), so this time it was the winter mini concert. And he did great!

However, in the evening, he started getting a sore throat, poor thing. Good thing that dinner was hot pot so it was nice and soupy and he managed to eat some.

And yes, hot pot! A simple easy way to have dinner, really. Just need to chop some vegetables (we used Napa cabbage), mushrooms, and make some stock. We have a two-side hotpot, so I made one vegetable stock with carrots, ginger and celery, and the other was a simple dashi commercially made, then a bit of miso for extra taste. And there was the sliced beef, fish balls and fish tofu from the Chinese supermarket, crabsticks, vegetables and mushrooms. And we ate it with rice.

How was your weekend?