Return to Ali Baba Family Restaurant - D's Birthday Lunch

It's been a super hot and sweaty August, hasn't it?  The Educator GF's and I celebrated D's birthday three weeks later. As usual, they let me do the planning because I'm a control freak they trust my judgement.

I was debating whether or not we should even drive to the East County where it would be ten degrees hotter than our hometown of Chula Vista.  It was Labor Day weekend and I sorely wanted to avoid the beach areas, tourist hot spots, and places where we'd been before...

Another criteria was that the place had to have air conditioning (that took Asia Cafe off the list). When D gave me carte blanche to pick, I narrowed our choices down to this place...

iWok

Formerly a Chinese restaurant with the word "Panda" in the title (Not Panda Express), which I can't even remember the real name...

it changed to the creatively (cough, cough) monikered iWok this spring. Seriously, iWok?

Recently, I had lunch there with La Ley out of curiosity...

Birthday dinner @ Gunco Ramen

Dinner was TC's choice. It was either Vietnamese or Japanese.

She chose Japanese. One of the few decent Japanese places in Chula Vista is on the west side...

on the corner of Third and Palomar...right across from a certain donut shop, heh heh...

Look for this sign on the southwest corner...

where you will find two differently named Japanese restaurants that are actually joined...

Return to Love Cupcake Cafe

[Update- Closed as of March 2016]

As I headed east on Birch, I could see a big thundercloud looming ahead in the distance...

This was the same day that several thunderhead clouds merged to become one giant supercloud that ended up soaking East County...

The Big One Three for TC

The day has arrived...

TC has passed from Tweendom to being an official Teenager...

Pre-13 Bday party for the tween cousins...

Finally, for the first time ever, my brother and I held a joint bday party for our kids. His son is one day older than TC. I've always wanted to do it because it seemed redundant to have two family dinners either one day after the other or one weekend apart.

Even though it was just my side of the family plus Bert's mom and my BIL, there was still tons of food to go around.

Vietnamese Pork Chops

This next recipe I'm making for the pre-Teens' birthday party is one that I've made quite a few times in the past but never blogged it...

I first saw the recipe seven years ago from a Hawaiian based blog that was on Kirk's sidebar (you can even see the comment I made back in '06). It's pretty easy to make and is usually a crowd pleaser...

Apple Slaw

The other recipe that I saw at the doctor's office involved Bert's favorite fruit, the Granny Smith apple...

The long list of ingredients was a bit daunting and the prep work a bit tedious, but I had most of the ingredients and thought I'd give it a go...

Corn Pudding

When I was at the doctor's office last week, I was passing the time looking at a magazine when a couple of recipes caught my attention. This was one of them...

I took a photo of the page, then handwrote it later at home so I could tape it to my cabinet near the stove. Yeah, very high tech, I know...

This would be one of the "new" recipes I'm trying for today's family gathering...

Go West!

Watching the Little League World Series!

Local kids from the Eastlake Little League are representing the United States versus Japan...

Cold Stone Creamery, Terra Nova location

Earlier this aftenoon, I was doing errands to prepare for TC and her 1-day older cousin's pre-birthday party. I say "pre" because the party will be this Sunday but their real birthdays are on Monday and Tuesday, with the boy being one day older...

I was asked to take care of the cake...