In Which Connor Tries On Shoes And I Have More Cooking Adventures

I picked Connor early from school today so he could go in for his first fitting on his ankle-foot orthotics (AFO's).  The outer shells and inner foam of the AFOs has been made, but they don't have any straps yet and the final trimming still needs to be done.  The shells go quite a bit higher on his calves than his last pair, so he'll get some more stability with them while he's standing at the expense of some of his flexibility. 

The fitting went well, and they only need to make a few little tweaks to the AFO shells.  His next appointment will be for his final fitting, and then we should be able to pick them up.  I'll be sure to post a picture of his cool new shoes when he's got them!

After that we stopped by the house to discover a package on the door-- a care package I'd sent to Ellen this past summer.  Apparently it got all the way to Thailand before they decided the postage was wrong, and then it sat there for a while before it ended up being sent back here.  I'd sent almost all of her previous care packages via priority mail, so I think I'll be going back to that.  So I'm combining this package (or portions of it, anyway) with the current package I'm working on and she'll just get two letters in it instead of one, written several months apart.  It's suddenly become much more urgent to get this next package out; I'm worried she's going to think we've forgotten about her.  I'm going to try and get this latest letter out to the translator tomorrow so I can get the package back in the mail and on its way to her again.

Then we stopped by the adoption agency to drop off a bit of paperwork.  On the way home we hit the Asian grocery store to pick up ingredients for Yam Kun Chiang and discovered a new favorite food.  I'd never tried dried Chinese sausage (lap chong) before, and it's not something I would have taken home on a whim without a specific recipe in mind.  But after slicing it up and pan frying it for this recipe, I was tempted to skip the rest of the salad and just eat the stuff directly out of the pan.  It's really sweet, so when you sear it (or in my case, half-burn it) it tastes sort of like meat candy. 

Which doesn't actually sound very appetizing when I write it out, but trust me when I say that the stuff is delicious.  It reminds me a little bit of what I call Death By Bacon, which is where you take a big ol' mess of bacon, brush it with maple syrup and dip it in brown sugar before popping it in the oven.  Lap chong isn't quite that sweet and the flavor's a bit more complicated, but it has that same sort of overall effect, and while it's probably not great for you it's got to be a lot better for your arteries than Death By Bacon is. 

I did end up making the rest of the salad too, and that only made it better, but I think I'll be adding lap chong to my growing list of foods I'll be using in the rest of my non-Thai recipes.  My kitchen is becoming this weird food fusion place where I've started mixing Thai spices and ingredients in with my regular cooking, where I do things like use smoked red chili paste on my turkey sandwiches and put coconut cream in my hot cocoa. 

Yum.

~Jess