The Puppies

One of the parents on my team is an excellent photographer and offered her photography for our team picture. It's awesome!

Soccer 9-19-09

Sara on the ball!

Connor and Keani on defense

The girls had another excellent day today, with 4 of my 6 girls scoring goals throughout the game. One girl scored 2 points! The other team was much more aggressive than last week's team so it was a stronger challenge, but we still played well. Though I wasn't keeping score, I'm pretty sure we won by about 3 points. But winning's not the priority in AYSO, and it was nice to see teams playing on our field before us allow the losing team to score some goals without too much defense.

And Sara played her first game ever!!! She got to go to the movies and Fun Factory in celebration!

Ryan's big kick

Our boys struggled a bit more, but still played well. We had previously scrimmaged the team that we played, and they beat us then too. They have a really strong offense. Still, we could not get any scores in. But it was a good learning experience and gave me a lot to work on with the kids at practice. Oh, and speaking of "firsts", this game was Evan's first as goal keeper too!

AWESOME soccer day

What an incredible day it was today. We started out taking pictures for our girls U6 team. Then we had a 9:00 game. Though AYSO is supposed to distribute the teams evenly, it seems like we have a lot of really good players on our team. And in fact, my girls were scoring too much today. I had to ask one of them to start passing off and playing with her less dominant foot, because AYSO discourages running up the score.

Here are a few of the girls enjoying some downtime:



And here's a video of one of the many breakaway scoring drives of the game:



It was a really nice victory for us, but in a lot of ways it was really sad. There was a girl on the other team that (according to my wife) just gave up every time she saw one of our girls breaking away with the ball. At the very end, there was a girl who just stood there, not facing anyone, and just cried. I felt so sad for them. And yet I can't ask my girls not to play their hardest. So finding ways of getting them to NOT score so much (like playing with your less dominant foot, etc.) is something I'm going to have to research more before we progress through the season, just in case this happens again. But I'm sure we'll have our share of crying due to getting outscored too this season!!

We had a little break before we headed over to our U10 boys game. We were missing two boys, one due to baseball, and another to a church event. So no one was able to take a break during the game. It was intense, but we won 5 to 2. I was particularly proud of my son, who went head to head with one of the best players I know from last season. And my son stole the ball from him several times.

This video is one of my son's steals, though the opponent in the video isn't the kid I was talking about.



And here's my son stealing from the kid I mentioned.

Thai Pandan-Wrapped Chicken (gai ob bai toey)

Our neighbor Sam, who is from Singapore, sometimes brings us herbs from her garden. A few days ago she brought us a bunch of leaves called Screwpine leaves.
Along with the bunch of leaves, she left us a note about the different ways you can use these in cooking: as a rice or dessert flavoring, as food coloring, or to wrap chicken in.

I decided to try wrapping chicken, so I looked up a few different recipes and made a sort of amalgamation of all of the different elements that I thought looked good: soy sauce, sugar, oyster sauce, fish sauce, garlic, sesame oil and a lot of coconut milk. I marinated the chicken for an hour, then went through the tedious process of wrapping about 30 bundles and securing them with toothpicks.

Next was the part that I HATED. I had only enough oil to do a medium deep fry. The wrapped pieces leave little pockets of liquid that explode when they hit the oil. Or they lie dormant, waiting for you to walk by to check the doneness, then BAM, they splash all over your arm.
But according to my wife, all of the work and oil splashes were worth it. She loved it!! The marinade for the chicken is similar to a chinese minute chicken, with the exception of the fish sauce and coconut milk flavoring which gives it the Thai taste. The Screwpine leaves added a really nice and unique fragrance, almost like a cross between ti leaves, green tea, and maybe lemongrass. Just a really unique flavor that really can't be replicated with any other leaves, though I guess I would try wrapping in ti leaves sometime.

To complete our meal, we had it with some rice, and a Thai red vegetarian curry with cabbage, bamboo and onions.
Kinda ambitious undertaking for a weeknight, but there was no soccer today, and I had the kids bathe and finish their homework early. Next time I'll wait for a weekend!!