This weekend was great. Absolutely great. In the last blog that I wrote, I mentioned that on Friday night I was going home and making pumpkin soup. It was DELICIOUS! The only downside to pumpkin soup is that Ian doesn’t like pumpkin, so I won’t be able to make it often. 
This saddens me greatly. However, he wasn’t there, so I got to make whatever I wanted. Yessssssssss!! I was very excited with the way that it turned out. It was the perfect meal to have on a cold Friday evening. I snuggled up in bed with soup, tea, three layers of blankets and enjoyed my Friday night!
On Saturday I continued my cooking craze. I cleaned the house and skyped in the morning and cooked in the afternoon. I had two things that I wanted to experiment with: pumpkin seeds and a new rice cooker cake recipe. I’ve heard that you can cook the pumpkin seeds for a healthy snack, and I wanted to try that. I washed the leftover orange goop from my seeds and left them to dry for a bit. Then I brushed the seeds with a little olive oil, salt, and pepper and slid them into the oven to cook for a few minutes. I was very pleased with the results! I feel like I might have overcooked them slightly, but they were still excellent! Next up: chocolate ganache rice cooker cake. I’ve written about rice cooker cakes before. They’re a great substitution to box mix cake over here. It seems like most Japanese cakes are light and fluffy—tasting more like angel food cake instead of delicious dense pound cake. Rice cooker cakes provide a welcomed relief from this. However, they are never really a true delicious cake like what we have in the States. That is where my chocolate ganache cake comes in. I made it in the rice cooker like normal, but this one was super moist and ridiculously good. I don’t want to toot my own horn on this one but……… It will definitely be the cake of my choice for rice cookers from now on! It might have taken a little bit more work to bake, but it was totally worth it!!
Saturday night we all went over to Margo’s for an informal welcome-to-the-gun party for Devin, Rachel’s replacement. Since Ian was in the city and had the car and Devin doesn’t have a car yet, I rode my bike to Devin’s, and we took the train from Taragi. I wanted to take my cake to Margo’s, so I had to pack my cake and balance it in one hand while steering my bike with the other. Multi-tasking at its finest. 
(However, once we finally got to Margo’s and looked at the cake, it kind of looked like a pile of poop. It had slid around and fell to the side. ) Devin has a new apartment, and I knew the general area where she lived but wasn’t sure of the exact location. It was getting dark, and I got lost on some back streets but finally figured it out. We both hopped on our bikes and pedaled to the train station, arriving in plenty of time to take the train to Asagiri where Melissa picked us up.
The rest of the night was ridiculously fun. We made dinner and played games until the wee hours of the morning. Shara is quite the character and likes to do improv. She taught us a game called “word salad” in which everyone writes down five famous people on a slip of paper and drops it into a bowl. One by one, we went around in a circle and had a minute to describe as many people on the slips of paper as possible while our team mates try to guess who it was. That’s the first round. In the second round you can only use TWO words to describe the person. In the third round you can only use gestures. It was FUN!! Then we decided to play Rock Band….except we didn’t have a play station, PS game, controllers, or anything. Did that stop us? HECK NO! Instead, we made up our own version. Melissa and Brian were chosen to be the “band leaders,” and each person hand to audition to be in their band. 
I’m not joking. Once the band members were decided, we practiced one made up song together and preformed it. We were a bunch of idiots, but we laughed so hard at our stupidity. Shara then suggested doing improv. I’ve never done improv before and this scared the crap out of me, but it ended up being lots of laughs! Two people’s names were drawn from a bowl. They had to sit on the couch and completely make up a scene. It was really interesting to see where some of them went! We played a couple of rounds of this before moving onto another game in which three of us sat down on a couch and were the “expert.” The “audience” had to ask us questions. However, we had to make up an answer speaking only one word at a time. The first person would say one word, second person another word, third person another word, and back to the first person until the answer was complete. This game was also a riot! We finally left Margo’s around 1AM, but I really didn’t want to go. Usually I’m the one who wants to get home and go to bed, but all of us were having such a great game night! However, we were taking Devin home, and I could tell that she was tired. Plus, it was 1AM, and it was time to get going….
That night was the BEST time I’ve had hanging out with the group in a while. It’s amazing how something as simple as dinner and a few games really makes for such a great time!
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