July

Man alive, this month has gone by fast.  Starting with our fun 4th of July trip to Colorado and then continuing the fun back here at home in California.  And before the month is over the girls and I are heading to Utah for one last quick summer get-away before Clara starts Kindergarten in mid-August.  Which I'm trying hard to ignore for the moment because I cannot believe she will be a KINDERGARTENER!

Anyhow, we made it back to the beach last week with friends from our old ward.  Or actually, practically the entire old ward, it felt like, since a huge group of them get campsites together and do a week of beach camping each July.  I keep wanting to go but always chickening out since Paul can never come.  But maybe next year I will be brave and go for it.  

We had a great time for just the day anyway except that the drive home took two hours and the girls fell asleep in the car around 6:15, just before getting home, which meant a miserable bedtime routine and night of sleep for very confused and very tired girls (including myself).  But it was worth it and the girls played their hearts out in the sand, digging and chasing waves and being buried by mom.  And I had so much fun catching up with friends who I do not get to see nearly enough.  I would LOVE to move back to San Jose if we could figure out a feasible commute situation for Paul, but alas, the commute from SJ to SF is brutal so it's not happening any time soon.

I have been keeping very busy with two new personal projects.  The first is probably not news to most people who might read this blog.  I started a separate food blog to post recipes and stories and serve as an outlet for my food photography (which I am loving since my subjects don't tend to run away from me like two speedy little girls).  In truth, I'm hoping to make something of my little food blog and eventually earn a little side income from it - nothing to brag about, but maybe enough to cover expenses and afford some fun travel.  Either way, I have been enjoying combining my favorite hobbies of food, photography and writing, and have been spending too much time over at House of Nash Eats (which, if you haven't checked it out, please do!  And feel free to go like the Facebook page for House of Nash Eats or the Instagram page or join the subscribe list or something so that you can get updates.)  Gosh, I even set up a Twitter account for it, which is so weird for me because I definitely do not do twitter.  Like I said, I would like to monetize it eventually and a good way to do that is through sponsored posts with brands that pay bloggers to mention them in a recipe post, but to land those you need a bit of traffic and a following.  I would do the blog regardless of making money off of it, but it wouldn't hurt my feelings if someone wanted to compensate my hobby, so...  We'll see where things go.

My other personal project is learning videography.  I'm currently taking a videography class that I was super excited to get into (there were limited spots and loads of people on a FB group I am a part of who were all trying to get one of those spots - we sat and refreshed our screens and all the seats were gone in about 3 minutes.  I was lucky enough to snag one).  It has been so much fun and a lot to learn, which is why I think I like it.  I just love learning new things!  It makes me feel more...me, I guess?  Maybe it's my BYU education with the whole "lifelong learning..." thing but it just lights a fire in me.  We are still early into the course and haven't covered more than basic editing and haven't touched on color grading, audio, music, or anything like that, but I had to put together a little technical assignment with a bunch of different shots that we are practicing and even my silly little technical assignment makes me feel inordinately proud.  You can see it below, although some of this footage may go into my final project, which will be a fully edited video with music and everything (and will definitely be posted when the class is over).

Amy Nash - Technical Assignment from Amy Nash on Vimeo.

We have been doing our typical summery stuff - having friends over for dessert on Sundays, working on house projects (oh man are we working on house projects - it is a full exterior overhaul with retaining walls, landscaping, painting the house, etc. and it is going to take us months to finish, if we even get to all of it this year which seems unlikely), swimming and going to concerts in the park.  I sure love those little concerts and look forward to them every year.  It is such a fun scene.  One thing I need to start being better about is taking still photos because I have been so focused on food photography and videography that I am letting my regular photography slide a bit.

But that has been our July!  August is going to be a big month with a lot of change for us!

U-pick Fruitstands in Brentwood

This Saturday we tried something new as a family - picking nectarines, blackberries, apricots and pluots at some fruit orchards in Brentwood.  We have done apple picking every September at Gizdich Ranch in Watsonville for a few years now and love it, but didn't even know about all the fruit orchards in Brentwood until this summer, which is only a 35 minute drive away instead of the 1 1/2 hour trek to Watsonville.  And wow, are we ever glad we made this discovery!  

We went hoping for peaches but when we got there, we realized that there are many small family orchards all along a few roads, kind of clustered together, and each had signs out letting us know what was available there.  The orchards even have maps with 60 different orchards listed along with what produce they grow and sell, where you can pick it yourself, and months each variety is available for picking.  We had already found a place called "Mike's" online and went there first, only to learn we had missed their peaches but that their yellow nectarines were ripe. 

It was fun picking the nectarines, which were plentiful and low enough that the girls were able to easily reach them to pick and then add to our bucket.  In fact, it was almost a little TOO easy because in a few minutes we already had more nectarines that I'm afraid we are going to be able to eat!  There were ladders spaced through the orchard to help you reach the nectarines higher up in the trees, but we didn't need to use them because the orchard hadn't been picked over at all yet.

Clara was thrilled to find multiple ladybugs.  She doesn't have any problem with creepy crawlies and will hold ladybugs, roly polies, and worms without hesitating.  She is afraid of spiders though.

After picking nectarines, we weren't ready to go home just because we had reached our limit of how much we thought we might be able to consume.  5 minutes of fruit picking is not nearly long enough and that's basically all it took for us to get a bucketful of nectarines!  So we decided to drive around and see what other orchards had to offer.  We ended up spotting signs for blackberries, which sounded fun to pick, and stopped at Chan's fruitstand where they had strawberries and blackberries for picking.  The blackberries were AMAZING.  Easily the most delicious, sweetest, juiciest blackberries I have ever tasted in my life.  The girls and Paul and I ate as many as we pleased while taking our time filling our box with the plumpest, biggest blackberries we could find.  At $3/lb., they aren't cheap, but oh many it is worth it for such perfect, delicious fruit that you pick right off the bush and pop straight into your mouth.  And the blackberry bushes were absolutely loaded in ripe berries!  

Blackberry picking was more fun than nectarine picking from an experience standpoint because it took longer and they were also easier to eat right there.  And I already have ideas for how to use up the box full of blackberries we ended up with, starting with Blackberry Swirl Ice Cream that we are going to have for dessert today on top of a nectarine and blackberry crumble!

Rose ended up with purple juice stains all around her little mouth and fingers because she ate so many blackberries.  Clara was pleased as anything to find "the biggest, most perfect berries" for us to eat.  Paul, who doesn't normally even really care for blackberries, was raving about how delicious they were.  And I got twice the enjoyment because I got to practice photography and document the fun as well as eat the berries that the girls would bring to me.

You can tell by Rose's face especially how much she enjoyed this family activity!  What a goofball.

After blackberries, we really were planning to head home but as we were driving we mentioned wishing we could have found some apricots to pick just as we drove past a fruitstand that had a "U-pick apricots" sign.  So we pulled over at Annie's Happy Farm and spent another half an hour filling a bucket with apricots and (joy!) pluots!  Clara loves, loves, loves pluots and was super thrilled about picking them and eating them right there in the orchard after I cleaned them off.  They were super sweet, with green skin on the outside and bright red and orange flesh on the inside.  The juice got everywhere but it was totally worth it.  The apricots and pluots were a little higher up, so they weren't as easy for Rose to pick, but she was still able to snag some of the lower hanging fruit.  Clara was tall enough to not have much of a problem and was pretty good about looking for only the best apricots and pluots to collect in our bucket.

It had been overcast all morning, which was nice for fruit picking because the weather has been so warm here that if the sun had been up it would have gotten much hotter, much earlier.  I'm not quite sure how we are going to get through all this fruit as I'm afraid our eyes and grabby hands were bigger than our stomachs, but we are certainly going to try.  And we are planning to go back again later in July for yellow peaches!  This just might be a new summer tradition.

Chiang Mai, Thailand - Villa, Cooking School, Floating Lanterns

Our second full day in Chiang Mai was more laid back because we knew we would be out late that night for Loy Krathong and Yee Peng, two separate festivals that happen to coincide in northern Thailand each year because they are based around the full moon of the 12th month of the Thai lunar calendar (which in the West means it usually happens in November).  That meant that this year the festival fell on November 25th, but next year (2016) it will be on November 15th.  One of the big reasons we planned this trip when we did was so we could attend these festivals.  They don't often coincide with Thanksgiving, but since they overlapped in 2015 we were able to do a much longer trip with fewer days off of work for Paul.  

We stayed at the Khum Phaya Resort in Chiang Mai.  When I was researching places to stay in Chiang Mai, I narrowed in on hotels done in the Lanna Thai style, which is very traditional northern Thai using lots of exotic wood and ornate carving.  It is gorgeous and somehow (I seriously didn't plan this), I had booked a villa, which was huge and beautiful with its own little garden area, private massage tables, and enormous 4 poster canopy bed draped with white linens and mosquito netting.  It gave a feeling of being transported to a much older place and time.  I don't know why I never got a picture of the interior of the room!  I kept meaning to but just forgetting.  Here is a picture of the main entrance - the lobby is completely open to the elements other than the roof structure, which is neat.  Also, EVERYBODY was wearing these ridiculous pants all over Thailand and Cambodia.  So, you know, I got some too.  Its like wearing pajamas all day long and totally bizarre but completely accepted, at least among the tourist set.

The two biggest downsides to Khum Phaya were location and mosquitos.  It was about 15 minutes from the city center, which isn't super inconvenient and had the upside of being really quiet and removed, but it had the downside of tuk-tuk drivers getting lost and a $5-10 ride into town.  Granted, we only had to go in once a day the two days we were there and its not like that is a ton of money (and the resort had a free shuttle that ran 5 or 6 times a day - it just wasn't when we wanted to go in), but still...we have always preferred staying right where the action is and generally try to book places that are more central and are happier when we do.  And the mosquitos were pretty bad - I think largely because the resort is set right on a river and we arrived just a few weeks after the end of the rainy season.  In fact, everywhere we went - Siem Reap, Chiang Mai and Krabi - were fumigating to get rid of the mosquitos, so maybe the rest of the year they aren't such an issue?  Anyway, we had come prepared with bug spray and deet wipes and had taken the precaution of getting shots to prevent diseases beforehand so we weren't too affected other than a couple of bites that I got on my ankles.  But there was no way I was going to try a massage outdoors utilize the jacuzzi because I am just too much of a draw for mosquitos and would have been eaten alive baring that much skin back there, insect repellent or not.

The girls loved this place because the front desk kept a well-stocked basket of apples set out for visitors and every time we passed through the lobby Clara would walk up to the concierge and say "Sa-wat-dee-Kaahhhhhhhh, may I have an apple please?" and get herself a nice little treat.  Incidentally, Clara got pretty good at saying hello in Thai in Chiang Mai because of this and really drew out the polite "Kah" on the end.  When we got home our friend who is half Thai and served his mission in Thailand explained that the longer you hold out your "Kah" the more respectful it is, which explains why the employees at the resort seemed to overexaggerate the "kah's" to the point where we were wondering what was up with that word.  Clara also got good at thank you, which is "kop-kun-Kah" with the same polite ending being drawn out for more respect.  

This is a shot of our "backyard" to our villa.  It was really cute!  I wish we could have eaten breakfast out here or something.

And there was a little fence enclosing our garden but this is the view through a little gate in the fence.  Some huts that people live in, a murky river, and coconut and banana trees.

Way back last January when I went to the Masterchef Top 100 auditions in LA, I started thinking about doing a Thai cooking class in Chiang Mai because a few of the friends I made through the audition process had done it and said it was a great experience.  There are a lot of places you can go for this experience but the one that got recommended by one of my fellow masterchef hopefuls was called "A Lot of Thai" with a woman named Yui.  She has an outdoor instructional kitchen set up on the side of her house and provided us with a cookbook 30 or so recipes that she rotates through depending on the day of the week that the class is held.  Normally they pick people up from their hotels in their vintage VW baby blue bug but since my hotel was outside the main city area, I took a taxi in and then just rode around with them to collect the other students for the day from their hotels.

We made 3 dishes - noodles, soup, and a curry.  Easily and by far, the noodle dish was my favorite.  It was so, so, so good and I absolutely want to make it again and add it to my repetoire of things I make at home.  It was called Pad-See-lew and was made with wide rice noodles and pork and chinese broccoli in a wok with some sort of crushed red pepper flakes sprinkled on top depending on how spicy you like it.

We used a number of ingredients that I have never seen before like keffir lime leaf and this root called galangal, which is sort of like ginger but with a different flavor and not interchangeable.  It went into the Tom-Ka-Gai (Chicken in Hot & Sour Soup with Coconut Milk) that we made.  I had this a few times on our trip and actually made it again in another cooking class I ended up taking in Krabi at our resort and each time it was a little bit different.  But it is another one I want to make here at home a few times to see how well I can recreate it in an american kitchen.  Thankfully I live in an area where I have a pretty good idea about how to find these more exotic ingredients.

And for our last dish, we got to choose to do either a red or green curry.  My favorite part about this dish was the two very different types of eggplant we used in it, neither of which were anything like the eggplant I was familiar with here (the big purple variety that I have only used grilled or in eggplant lasagna and wasn't a big fan of either time).  Yui said that there are many types of eggplant used in Thai cooking but the ones I liked best were about golf ball size and a pale green.  I accidentally made my curry a little too spicy (for my tastes) and will have to change this when I make it again.  Strangely, I never saw yellow curry anywhere in Thailand, which is what I always order in Thai restaurants here as it is my favorite.  Not sure why and I should have asked Yui about it.

After cooking (and eating) all three dishes, we took a field trip to Yui's local market where she buys much of her meat and produce.  It was really interesting having a guided tour through a local market by a local chef.  She explained all the strange things to us and one thing that I learned that was really fascinating is that all the "weird" foods we see that seem so gross and crazy to us (fermented months old eggs buried in the ground in alkali powder until they turn black, dehydrated tiny shrimps, etc.) were developed centuries ago as a way to preserve food when it was available because they obviously didn't have refrigeration and they also dealt with food shortages and scarcity and preserved whatever they could however they could so they would at least have something to eat when they ran out, even if it was freaky looking black jellified eggs that look freaky to us today.  It gave me an appreciation for the "delicacies" that make me gag when I see people shoving them down their gullets in food eating competitions on shows like survivor.

When I got back to our hotel, the girls had taken 3-hour long naps, which was perfect.  (And incidentally, Paul said he didn't mind sticking around for a slower morning with the girls while I did a cooking class since he got to do a couple of thai and cambodian massages on other days of the trip while I stayed back with the girls - to each his own and for me it's food.)

We headed into town before it got dark and just spent a few hours wandering and exploring, looking at souvenirs, getting another fish pedicure for Clara and Paul, and people watching.  We took a little break at some picnic tables and chairs set up in front of a stage and watched local girls dressed in formal Thai costumes perform traditional dances (or at least that is what it looked like to us) which was cool.  Our original plan had been to go to the lantern lighting ceremony at Mae Jo University, which is about 45 minutes north of town.  There are absolutely incredible images of thousands of lanterns going up in one big release there if you search it online.  But the traditional release there was cancelled this year because apparently it used to just be for locals who practice buddhism and has been increasingly overrun by tourists until finally this year they made it a tourist-only thing and started charging $150/ticket that you had to buy beforehand, which were mostly sold (so I was told) to chinese tour groups.  Since it has been free in the past and we didn't want to spend $300 on it (and we knew that lanterns would be released all over the city anyway) we opted for the town approach and I think we are glad we went that route.

We bought a krathong - it translates into "float" - which is a floating collection of flowers and banana leaves and candles that you light and set in the river to let it float away as a way of saying thank you to the river for the life it brings and apologizing for the harm done to it through the year by pour garbage and refuse into it.  No joke - more than one person explained it to me that way and I found a similar explain of the two reasons for Loy Krathong online.

Family photo op with our krathong before floating it.  We opted to float it before it got really dark, which a lot of people were doing.  There was what looked like a troop of boy scouts in khaki uniforms floating their krathongs together from a little platform over the water and we just joined them.

Eventually this man waded in and started setting krathongs in for people and pushing them out toward the middle of the river.

We eventually made our way to the Iron Bridge once it got really dark and started seeing lots of lanterns going up even though the official release wasn't supposed to happen until 9:00 p.m. and it was only about 7:30.  So we headed toward the bridge just north of the Iron Bridge (where we could tell most of the lantern releases were happening.  This first shot from farther away is from the Iron Bridge where a lot of people gathered to watch krathongs floating down the river and lanterns rising into the sky and the next shot was about halfway from the Iron Bridge to the other bridge (not sure what it's name was).

Once we made it to the other bridge, we decided to go ahead and light both of our lanterns too and send them up early.  It was amazing to watch them fill with hot air and then gently be pushed into the sky although more than one lantern was set aloft before it was really ready and would sink lower and lower toward the people packed on the bridge while people would screech warnings.  It only felt slightly dangerous though since everything was moving so slowly and there was plenty of time to move out of the way or give the lantern a little boost aloft again, so long as you were paying attention.  Yee Peng has a slightly different purpose from Loy Krathong.  It is about letting go of your worries and watching them drift away in the sky.  The girls were mesmerized and so were we.  And there was a collective energy in the crowd as we all craned our necks skyward, taking in the beauty and wonder of it all and feeling a shared sense of "we are all here, living this moment together" as cheesy as that sounds.  At least, that's how it felt to me.  Until the police showed up and started trying to get people to stop sending up lanterns early.  Not in a mean way or with any real effect.  I think they knew they were totally outnumbered and had no chance of really enforcing things, but they had to make a show of it.  Apparently the lanterns have disrupted air traffic in the past and that is why they instituted the 9:00 p.m. lighting time this year.

The girls did not want to help Paul push our lantern off once it was ready to go.  They were content with a little distance from the flaming ring of fire.

When we were planning this trip, we were thinking about Clara and how at 4 1/2 and with the background of having seen a floating lantern scene in Tangled and follow-up reinforcement of seeing pictures of our floating lantern experience, this might be one of her earliest memories.  I'm not sure about that now - I think that riding the elephants the day before will definitely be a memory for her since it is the part of our trip that she is still talking about and I keep overhearing her explaining the elephants to her preschool and gymnastics coaches - but I'm still so glad we planned the trip around this experience and got to be there for it.  It really was amazing to behold and be a part of.

We left around 8:30 or so when the girls were getting super tired and nabbed a tuk-tuk to take us back to our villa.  It was the perfect way to end our time in Chiang Mai but I think we were all looking forward to our next (and final) leg of the trip - the white beaches and cerulean water of Krabi in the island region of southern Thailand...