surprise homecoming attack

My Dad complains about how I don’t come home, especially now that I’m married, so Twiggy and I launched a surprise homecoming attack on July 4th weekend.

It was only by coincidence that his new puppy, Shiro, arrived via airplane (from KANSAS) on the very Wednesday before our launch attack. Only coincidence.

However, us being well-fed with fantastic food, like this beautiful rack(s) of ribs that Dad’s been smoking for 4 hours? That, we had calculated out. Our parents always feeds us well, in fact, they stuff me with food up to my gills and then complain that I’m fat. Oh, parents.

On the evening of our arrival, I bitched and moaned about how horrible my experience at AnQi was – AnQi being a restaurant from the same family as the famed Thanh Long across the bay – so Dad took us out for some “proper” Vietnamese food. My Mom, she still dreams about the Garlic Noodles and Crabs she had at Thanh Long – but she’s also the one who hates to leave the neighborhood just for dinner, so we went to a Vietnamese place in Milipitas called Vung Tau II to cure our crab cravings. The salt and pepper crab (37, or market price) was so good and oily, we were licking our fingers long after the crab shells were emptied of its visceral mass.

The next day Mom made us some salmon chirashi sushi for lunch. Extra scallions for me, less rice for Twiggy. Yes, she spoils us.

I kinda felt bad about just bumming around and depleting my parents’ food supply, so I helped make the sides for the BBQ. Here are some grilled fig and pear salads with parmesan crisps…

Some wasabi potato salad…

And some cucumber crostini.

Everybody said that the sides were oishii (delicious), which, of course, means a lot coming from family.

Of course Dad 1-up’d me by booming “you don’t know what oishii is…”

“UNTIL YOU’VE HAD THESE!!!”

Smoked for 5 hours, dried overnight, then charcoal-grilled with some spicy BBQ sauce. HolyflyingBatman, that was good. I think I ate a whole baby piglet myself.

No ribs for Shiro. We learned from Kenta, our last dog, that a puppy with a taste for ribs is a very expensive puppy.

(A looong time ago Mom, my sisters and I went to Japan for three months and left Kenta with Dad. Dad started to feel bad for him because Kenta had to eat the same thing everyday, and swapper his food instead with a healthy diet of ribs and steaks. We came home to a really fat dog who would climb onto the kitchen counter to nab some BBQ.)

The next day Mom packed us some chirashi sushi for the ride home. Yes, I know, she spoils us rotten.

Here, Momo is taste-testing the tamago for Mom.

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And then we came home. Dang, I miss my family already.