A Beach BBQ Party

Not long ago I headed out to a town named Chigasaki, located about 40 minutes by train from my place. My friends Lisa and Mabo live out there and, throughout the summer, very often have BBQ parties in their garden. They are blessed to live about a 5 minute walk from the beach. If you get down there for sunset, you can watch the sun set right behind Mt. Fuji! It’s really quite amazing:) I’m not sure why it turned-out this way, but I only ended-up taking a few photos of Hiro on the beach in the dark.

Anyway, I will definitely continue to add photos (in the daylight!) as the BBQ parties continue throughout the summer. They always bring together a great bunch of people and only once has their cat, Rocky, been put off enough to hide up in a tree:)

Bread Baking Day!

YAY! This has become one of my favourite ways to relax on those rare occasions when I have two spare hours in a row. I have started to study the age old art of baking bread. Ok, ok, so I’m not exactly using a stone oven like we did in the fur trade days, but I DO knead it myself:)

In this picture, The bakers. are surrounding one of their successes! The three of them came out to my flat for the day to have a lesson in bread baking. I was being very Pa Ingles that day, and tries to pass on what I had learned through trial and error. They are standing in my kitchen and holding a loaf of basil-rosemary-cheese bread that Jordanna whipped up.

As the day wore on, more people pooped in to see what we had done but none of the bread lasted more than 5 minutes out of the oven. The five avocadoes I had bought that morning had a bit longer life!  Anyway, they didn’t get any bread, but we kept them happy with a glass of wine and a couple of episodes of America’s Next Top Model:)

International Food Day!

This is a day that I seriously love. St. Moores, an international school located in Yokohama, holds an international food fair every year to raise money for things like computers for the school. Because it is an international school, there are kids with parents from everywhere imaginable and that means we get to sample hot plates from all those countries we’ve always wanted to visit but haven’t had the chance. This year I had some yummy lamb chops barbied-up by my mate Jennifer.  International mates.Another friend of mine, Ray, also had his hands on the chops, and they garnered rave reviews all around. Jennifer is from New Zealand and Ray is from Australia.

After the food fair, we headed to an outdoor beer garden which has a beautiful view of the sunset over Yokohama. Sadly, it didn’t stay open long after we arrived, but it was great while it lasted!