It was mum's 71st birthday and we had planned to get her a cake to celebrate. I wanted to take everyone out for dinner but Uncle Jim and Aunty Oi Lin had already bought so much food and the cake too so we ate in instead. We travelled from their San Jose home to their other home in Seaside, Monterey, but not before having lunch with one of their two sons, Kenn, and his family, wife Anne, four-year-old daughter, Kelly and 8-month old son, Eli, at a Chinese dim sum restaurant. It was mostly a quiet and relaxing day, being a US public holiday as well, Veterans Day, so the supermarkets and restaurants were pretty crowded, like Costco, a huge wholesale warehouse store that sells mainstream products at a low price. We went there early to get two slabs of succulent, tender, moist pork ribs at a great price of just usd19 per slab and had that over the next few days. They were delicious! I added to the meal with two packs of cooked dungeness crabs, also reasonably priced and sumptuous looking but they didn't taste as good as they looked. In the end, we had a simple cake cutting for mum in a cosy house, and in the company of family and old friends. Sweet.
You need to be a member to shop here at wholesale prices. Everything's huge... sizes, portions, physical spaces, but all reasonably priced (aka cheap) so it's a no brainer that it's very popular.
This neat workstation corner at Costco shows how they automate pizza making, requiring just one or two humans to produce a factory line of different flavoured pizzas. A huge one like this costs just 9.95!
The turntable-like contraption similar to a vinyl record player dispenses the ketchup from the rim inwards...it was very interesting to watch, I've never seen anything like it!
Veterans Day dim sum lunch in San Jose with the Lee family. From left at the table is Aunty Oi Lin, daughter-in-law Anne, four-year-old Kelly, son Kenn and at the back is Uncle Jim with their eight-month-old Eli.
It was a delightful lunch! We headed to Kenn and Anne's home after lunch so that the kids could play together for awhile, before we headed off to Monterey.
Our drive to Seaside, Monterey was a scenic one, a prelude to our much anticipated journey along the Pacific Coast Highway, otherwise known as Highway 1.
The view from Uncle Jim and Aunty Oi Lin's home. The beach is not far away.
The kids relaxing before dinner.
Mum and Aunty Oi Lin preparing a sumptuous feast for dinner. The long slab of ribs are in the foreground.
These crabs looked so good and were calling out to me to get them! But they didn't taste as good as the lobsters we'd had on Sunday evening...
Dissecting dungeness crab legs.
What a feast! I think you can guess what my least favourite dish was...
Time to tuck in!
Cake cutting time!
A rare family photo. Thanks to Uncle Jim and Aunty Oi Lin for putting this dinner together!
1 comment:
nice family photo!
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