Yeah! We finally finished our deck project. We love it! The whole idea of building the deck started from our purchase of the $40 BBQ grill. We wanted a place that we could enjoy our new BBQ obsession, so we built a deck. Then, we kept adding onto the deck project. Now, our cheap BBQ grill is the center piece of our new deck! Funny, isn’t it?

We connected the two decks that we built earlier last weekend. We liked how it turned out, but we were laughing when we saw the finished deck. We thought that we might have gone a little “deck-crazy"!

I’m staining the deck, and then we will start to landscape around the deck.

Here is a picture of the finished deck before we stain and seal it. It took us a weekend to finish the deck. We are very happy with the result.

After we decided that we needed to build a deck, I googled “how to build a wood deck". And, this website showed up: http://www.deckplans.com/. We browsed through the website, and were surprised that it was actually pretty easy to build a deck by ourselves. I downloaded one of their free plans and modified it to create the design I wanted. Then, we went to the local Home Depot to order the materials and had them delivered instead of carrying them home by ourselves (it saved us a lot of effort and the delivery charge was very reasonable.)

We spent most of the time on setting up the foundation of the deck. We had a water outlet outside the house and air vents for the crawl space, so we had to dig many holes to bury the concrete blocks to keep the deck lower than the water outlet. We also spent quite a lot of time on leveling the foundation. After the foundation was done, the rest was easier. We fastened the surface boards with deck screws. It was easier and less noisy than hammering nails. We left about 1/4″ of space between each surface board to provide drainage for rain and water.

Yesterday, I was frustrated with a plan that didn’t work out the way it was supposed to. Instead of sitting in front the computer and thinking about the failed plan, I redirected my energy and went out to build myself another deck. I felt much better after building the deck. At least it was not a total failure yesterday. My husband was very surprised when he came home last night to see the deck. Now, we are thinking about how to connect the two decks together to create the Japanese engawa style deck. Stay tuned!

We went to visit Hakone gardens, a Japanese garden in Saratoga California, to get some landscaping ideas for our backyard. Most parts of our backyard are still covered in dirt only. We like how Japanese style gardens use rocks, wood decks, and plants to create different vignettes in one garden. We have actually started a deck project already last weekend. It’s almost done (our bodies are aching so much right now after all the dirt-digging and moving heavy woods). I will show you the pictures later once the deck is done. We are very excited about the deck. It’s our first major DIY building project together!

Buck’s is a famous local restaurant located at Woodside, CA. We went to have lunch, and the restaurant was as interesting as we had heard of. The decoration of the store was very unique and fun. We ordered Hot Dungeness crab with melted cheddar, and seafood linguine. Both dishes were great. I especially liked the Hot Dungeness crab with melted cheddar. So good! We’ve already planned to go back to the restaurant again with our friends.

The Sugar refinery, which we visited during our trip in Taiwan, had a museum displaying old equipments collected from their old factories. Among all the vintage equipments, I found myself drawn to their collection of old telephones. Each telephone reminds me a part of my childhood (well, not the first black phone. It’s a bit too ancient for me). The first phone we had at home was something similar to the yellow phone in the second picture. At that time, my younger aunt still lived with us and she just started dating my uncle-in-law. I remember that she was on the phone all the time with him while my brother and I were fighting and screaming next to her. By the time I was in the second grade, we moved to the green phone in the last picture. You could actually hold a phone call by pushing one of the buttons on this telephone and the little red light would turn on, which at that time was considered as a very cool thing!

In our neighborhood, you can smell someone barbecuing every 3~4 days. After smelling the delicious BBQ from our neighbor’s backyard on Friday, we decided to do the same thing on Saturday evening. We did my favorite BBQ style – the Taiwanese style.

First, you need to marinate the meat (we used beef this time) ahead of time, at least 30 minutes before (overnight marinating is the best). I used about 1/2 cup of soy sauce, 1/4 cup of sake (rice wine), some garlic powders, some red chili peppers and a little of sugar. You can adjust the portion, so the meat is completely soaked in the marinate.

The key ingredient for Taiwanese style BBQ is the Bull Head BBQ Sauce. I mixed the Bull Head BBQ sauce with a little of soy sauce and brushed on the food as we barbecued.

We toasted breads on the grill, and sandwiched the grilled beef. In Taiwan, we don’t use hamburger buns. This is our version of hamburgers when we barbecued.

We wrapped a sweet potato in foil, and put it in the charcoals before we started grilling. By the end of the barbecue, we took it out and enjoyed the yummy baked sweet potato.

After eying on an ice cream maker for more than 6 months, we finally went ahead and purchased one. I was so excited and gave it a try right away. I made the red beans over ice cream, which is very popular in Taiwan. We purchased a can of prepared red beans to put on top of the homemade ice cream. The prepared red beans are very sweet, so I made the ice cream less sweet to balance the taste. Here is the formula I used:

3/4 cups whole milk
1/4 cups granulated suger
1 1/2 cups heavy cream
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1/4 cups of water

I like very light ice cream, so I added 1/4 cups of water. The picture of the red bean ice cream didn’t turn out good, but it tasted great!