Things I made this week.

Surprisingly, the crystallized candied ginger was not my main aim. I ventured into the local Asian market for the first time back in the fall, about a month after we moved here. While there, sudden inspiration prompted me to search for boba that we could make at home, a recurring theme in this too-short blog. I came across some frozen rice balls in the freezer case, and I decided they looked enough like boba to be what I was looking for. Some quick internet research, of course, reminded me that I was looking for tapioca balls, not rice balls. So the pink and white rice rejects sat in our freezer.

Until this week. After googling what turned out to be Vietnamese on the rice ball package, I surmised the little treats were meant to be boiled and served as dessert, often in a ginger syrup. So I dutifully picked up some ginger and made a syrup. The rice balls ended up being close to gag-worthy in my Western mouth (soft, sweet, glutinous blobs, etc.), but the syrup was divine, as all things ginger tend to be. I saved the boiled ginger pieces, rolled them in sugar, and consumed them within 24 hours (with Daniel’s help, of course).

All that ginger triggered a taste memory that brought me back to the Barr’s ginger beer we picked up on a whim when we were in Scotland last summer, which led me to google Barr’s ginger beer, which led me to amazon.com, which led me to purchase a 24-pack of ginger beer, ecstatic in my newfound realization of the profound reaches of globalization and with an Amazon gift card burning a hole in my work inbox. But that’s another, less interesting story.

Like a year ago, I promised Daniel that if he stopped wearing his worn-out t-shirts, I would make a quilt out of them. I had never made a quilt before, but that wasn’t going to stop me. And it didn’t. Because Rachel had gotten my sewing machine up and running, I felt empowered enough to make this thing happen. I cut a raft of 12-inch squares, pinned and sewed them in columns, and then sewed the columns together. I attached a blue flannel backing, and that was that. It’s terribly, horribly uneven in some spots and definitely needs some spot mending, but I did it.

It was my dad’s birthday, so I sketched a wintry scene for his card that looks quite similar to our neighborhood, minus the apartments and campus buildings (too complicated for me). We have a veritable deer infestation, but they’re beautiful nonetheless.