Tofu and Applesauce

Yesterday, I got to go to the agricultural market again. I got myself quite a bit of produce for not very much money!!!
The other day, I made some homemade spaghetti sauce and realized that now is the time to get tomatoes here in Korea. First of all, I surprised myself by making the sauce. I used to make my own sauce quite often, but I guess it's been awhile, and even though I have the right ingredients here, I seem to forget about making some things because of the price of the produce. What ever, good, healthy food is worth the money...So anyway, I made sauce and decided that I need to make some more and freeze it. When I went to the market, I found tomatoes and green peppers and good mushrooms and so on. We are in business for making sauce.

I also found some more millet and rice. But this time, I found something very precious and exciting for us...pinto beans!!! At least I think they are pinto beans. I brought them home and cooked up a batch. They taste like pinto beans. I am so excited about this! I got a nice little bag of them from home, but I haven't cooked them yet. They were too valuable. I was hoarding them for something special. Now I can cook beans! I know, it probably doesn't seem like a big deal, but we have found some tortilla shells and chips at the Costco here, and we would love to be able to have burritos, enchiladas and haystacks. We had found some canned kidney beans, but it just wasn't quite the same and they were a little on the spendy side as well. So, I had burritos for lunch today!

As for the following photo. I had to show this tofu! This is half of the tofu I bought yesterday. I put it next to the packaged tofu to show the comparison in the size. Those two packages are regular sized packages that we buy in the store. As you can see, one of those pieces is the same size as two packages. One piece is about $1.00, or 1,000 won in Korean money. It is perfect for sauteing or baking. It's very firm and good textured. The last thing that I really wanted to find at the market was a good price for apples. I found an ok price, but I was just happy to get a better deal than the grocery stores. Shane has beenmissing applesauce-especially on Sundays when we eat pancakes. So I really wanted to get enough apples to be able to make a decent batch of applesauce. I was able to make what you see here in the following photo. It's about three quarts. I am going to freeze this also. That's the only way of storing things for me at this point. There are no canning supplies around. I have seen nothing like that. But our freezer is decent-sized and I will just stuff it. I plan to go back and buy more apples. I made this during my free time this afternoon. I missed having the apple peeler/corer, but felt a real feeling of satisfaction when I had a big pot of apples simmering on the stove. It felt like fall should feel. It was even a dark and drizzly day-perfect for cooking!

Church Picnic and Activity Day

This is a shot of one of the walls on the walk down to the river trail where our picnic was held. I wanted to get a little bit of the autumn color. The colors are starting to come out here, and there are some places where there are more trees and it looks pretty. This is me in a pile of us. It was like a three-legged race, but they had us tie four people together and run it that way. We got going a little too fast and crashed. I was laughing so hard, I couldn't get up.
Here is Peyton's group in the same race. They also crashed, but I didn't get a photo of that.
A group of kids from the church. These are some of the friends Peyton and Grace have Sabbath school classes with.

This is actually part of the warm up and stretching exercises that they had us doing. But Brianna thought it would be good to have a photo to show how strong she is. She's a little thing-and I'm not!
Not much to comment on this one. Just Grace being Grace.
Peyton thought the idea behind this game was to use the long balloon as a sword, but the goal was actually to steal or pop the other person's balloon. We didn't find this out until the game had started and Peyton swung his balloon. The little girl grabbed it and eventually popped it. We were all a bit surprised. Oh well, it was all in fun! And Peyton still had fun!
He just handed it right to her-she had to be wondering what he was thinking!
We all had a fun day and it was nice to hang out with some of the church members outside of church. We enjoyed the good fall weather and getting out for the day.

Airshow at Osan Air Base

A few Sundays ago, on the 11th, we went to an airshow at the American Air Base. We have some friends who went and invited us to go with them. We first rode a bus for about an hour and a half to a city we hadn't been to yet. Of course, I don't remember the name, because they all sound alike to me still. But I think the name was Suwon. We took a short taxi ride from the bus terminal to the base. This is the kids on the city bus in our city, Daejeon. We took this bus to the Express bus terminal here in the city. They each got a donut because our friends brought them for us. Gracie is still enjoying hers at this point. Peyton's was long gone. At this point we are about halfway through the line to get into the base. You can see the entrance way up there. It was a very long line. We had to have our passports and ID with us in order to get in.
One of the many aircraft that was out for viewing. Peyton was really excited about all of this.
We had a front row spot for watching the show. It was really pretty impressive. I think I enjoyed it as much as the kids did.
Peyton got to go up and talk to a pilot in this jet. He thought it was pretty cool!
It was a good day, but a really long one. We got back and found ourselves locked out of the building. We didn't get through the doors until 9:30 or so. Of course we had to clean up and get everything ready for the next day. That was a really difficult Monday, but it was worth it. We got to see some beautiful countryside and experience something that we haven't seen before.
One thing I found pretty exciting was knowing that I could walk up to anyone of those military guys or girls and speak to them, and they would understand every word I said. I was tempted to stop someone just for that reason, but I didn't. I didn't realize how much I would appreciate that until it was gone!

Birthdays and Bread

Last Sunday we celebrated Peyton and Shane's birthdays. Actually, Shane's birthday was on Monday and Peyton's was on Tuesday. But we knew that during the week it would be hard to get all of us together and have the time to celebrate. So, I bought the only cake mix I could find that had directions I could read and made them a small cake. Since only four of us would be eating it, that was a good thing. Peyton got to blow out the candles. The cake wasn't big enough to hold all of the candles we would need to put on it for Shane. :) So here is a photo of the cake....Here is Peyton getting ready to blow out the candles. (Gracie is still working on finishing her salad so that she can have a piece of the cake.)
Here is the younger birthday boy. He just couldn't wait to get to those gifts!
He's getting into all the new pieces of his construction set.
Gracie was lucky enough to get some little gifts too(thanks to friends and family at home!) She was very thankful for this. :)
Later in the week, I decided to finally try to make some bread. We have been looking for a bread-maker, but haven't been sucessful in finding one. So, between classes one day, I just decided to "go for it". I got it all going and went back to class, leaving the dough to rise. I got to my class and said something about having dough stuck to my hands. I was telling my class about making the bread and looking for a bread machine. One of my little younger girl students asked me, "How do you make bread?" I told her about putting the ingredients in and as I was listing them, I realized that even though I knew I needed to put salt in, I had forgotten to do so. Ooops!
So when I got back, I ended up having to put salt in and knead it again. This caused me to have to let it rise again, and it made the texture a little different. I also had to leave it too long, because I didn't get a chance to come back for some time. Anyway, on top of that, I discovered that I didn't have a bread pan. So...I ended up putting them in the form of rolls and baked them. They turned out really good. Our oven is very small, and I have one small baking sheet 'pan'. So, after the rolls were done, I put what was left in this "french bread" shape. I decided to take a photo. It's not very pretty. The rolls looked better, but they all got eaten up before I could take a photo. It turned out very tasty. I decided that I want to keep making it. It would be easier with a bread maker, but it didn't take that long. Now I can't find a bread pan anywhere. I guess we will just be eating it in the form of rolls and french bread. So here's my funny looking loaf...

Life and laundry as we know it.

I thought I would post a photo of what our building looks like from the outside.
We live on the top floor, but we live in the back of the building, so all of our window look out the back and the sides.
This is how we dry our laundry. Most Korean apartments have 'verandas' or porches off of their apartments where they hang their laundry to dry. But we don't have that luxury. So ours hangs in our living room on a drying rack. We can't seem to get all of it on there at once though, especially if we wash two loads in a row, so we did what you see in the next photo.
We hung a clothes line from the pipes that run along the top of the walls. Once we get everything hung, we blow the fans on it and that helps speed the process. It's an eyesore, but it works. It also keeps the apartment very humid. We don't need any help with that during the summer or warmer seasons, but as it starts to cool off, I think the humidy might be a nice benefit of drying our laundry in our living room. :)

Teacher's Retreat at the English Village

Last weekend we went on a teacher's retreat. It was at a place called the English Village. The town is called Yongpeong. It was about two hours on a bus from our place. What a beautiful place. From what I understand, this place was built and funded by the Korean Government, but they have the SDA Institute running it for three years. Other than that, I don't know much. It was made to look like New England in the colonial era. It is out in a much more rural setting, and it is really clean and nice. This is the building you first see when you come in. The lettering doesn't really go with the rest of the motif, but it does get your attention. Here is a vew of some of the dorm housing and some nice green common areas. The telephone booths are an interesting thing. They look like something from England in the 50's or 60's, not colonial New England-but, what ever. :)
This was the dorm house we were staying in. It was so spacious and clean! We enjoyed it. Even the bunkbeds were acceptable when the place was that nice.
Here is Peyton in one of the phone booths with all of his friends he made while he was there.
There are many farms along this same area. This was a farmer on his tractor taking city people out for a ride. They come to the farms on the weekends so that they can see what the rural life is like. I took this photo because I thought the tractor was really unique and interesting.
We were trying to work out some of the extra energy by taking Peyton down to the soccer field and getting him to run for awhile. It worked. He was having a really good time. He had more fun when some of the 'big kids' came down and played too.

Gracie wasn't feeling very good. She had a mystery sickness while we were there. She had a fever for three days with no other real symptoms. But it really wiped her out, so we didn't try to run the energy out of her.
Here we are. She was playing with the camera and taking lots of photos, so I helped her take one of us together. Her arms aren't long enough to do this kind of shot. :)
Looking up at 'the village' from the soccer field. It's nearly sunset.
Looking in the opposite direction. There were hills and mountains all around us. The air was crisp and clean. And, when the sun went down-it was cold.
I went out for a hike with a group of people on Sabbath afternoon. Shane and the kids napped, but I was up for an outing. This statue is at the beginning of the trail. I thought I would be funny and try to do the pose too. I hope it doesn't mean anything wierd! :)

When we got to the top of the trail, there were all of these little stone piles. Then, a little further and we got to see a real, live Buddhist "monastery". It was really interesting. And the scenery was so beautiful!
Here is the entrance. The big building right there is the actual temple. I wasn't supposed to take photos of the inside, but didn't know until I had already taken them...oops!
I thought this building was really neat. If you've been reading these blogs, it's pretty obvious, that I really appreciate the traditional designs of these old places.
This one was a bit further up the hill. Right behind it is a hillside with lot's of flowers and trees. It was really beautiful. There was amazing woodwork on this building-carvings of flowers and birds in the doors and all over the walls. It was very cool!

A Visit to Expo Park

A few Sundays ago, we decided to walk to Expo Park here in Daejeon. It is a nice walk, not too long, but definitely a walk. On our way there we saw this really strange thing. This is on the top of a restaurant. I just thought it would be interesting to share. We have no idea what the meaning is, or even how it goes along with the restaurant, but it's there. Here is a view from the other side. You can see the restaurant building in this shot.
Here is Peyton at Expo park. A nice man came up to him in this section of the park where there are a bunch of different small animals to look at and put this parakeet on his hand. He did it to Grace first, and she kind of freaked out. She got so scared that she squeezed the poor little bird's toes. The bird then got a little scared and was trying to bite her in order to get her to let go. That only made her squeeze harder and squeal at the same time. Eventually I pried her fingers open so the bird could get out. This was a very good-natured little bird, because it was perfectly happy to go to Peyton after that traumatic time with Grace.

We went into this dinosaur exhibit. They had these big models of dinosaurs all the way through. They moved and made sounds. The first one we went past that started to move was almost too much for Peyton. You could see the color drain out of his face, and I thought that Shane might have to pick him up off the ground. We kept trying to talk him through it, but he really had a tough time. In one part of the exhibit we went into this dark building and it was made to look like a rainforest. There were smaller moving dinosaurs and they also made noise. The kids both had to be carried into this part. Eventually we got them to relax a little, but not fully. Shane and I both were pretty entertained by this. They were pretty funny. It took alot of coaxing to get Peyton to stand in front of these dinos, even with Shane standing behind him. These one's moved and he was afraid that it would eat them.
There was no coaxing Grace for this photo, I had to just pick her up and take her over there for this shot. She was not happy with me at all!
This is shortly after Peyton saw the very first moving dinosaur in the exhibit. He looks awfully pale. :) But he did put on a smile for the photo.
This is at the entrance to the park. Most of the exhibits were closed down, but it was interesting to walk around and look at things. One nice thing was that there weren't alot of people to have to get around. It was pretty dead.