A Very Merry Un-Birthday

My birthday is next week but since I am going to be spending the actual day of my birth traveling for work, we decided to do the “official” celebrating yesterday (although Jason has promised to make me French toast for breakfast on my actual bday…and even bought challah bread for it!).

Birthday French Toast Challah!

Birthdays have always been a big deal in my family which is why my parents drove down from PA to help me celebrate.  This year my “pretend birthday” (as Jason and I chose to call it all day) consisted of:

1) Glee-themed decorations (in honor of one of my fave TV shows). Backstory:  My mom loves holidays of any sort and she tends to go all out. To this day, she still likes to come up with a birthday “theme” every year and goes to great lengths to ensure that there are decorations to match.

2) Dinner at a restaurant of my choosing. As you might imagine, planning where to go for my birthday dinner is something I take very seriously these days (although for most of my childhood my restaurant of choice was always one of those Japanese steakhouses where they cook at your table …you can see I’ve been obsessed with food and cooking from an early age).  So it might surprise you to learn that I did not select a restaurant from my wish list. Instead we went to a place I have been many times before—The Liberty Tavern. Liberty happens to be my favorite all-around restaurant. It is the type of place where you could go for a nice meal out or for a pizza and a beer. The menu changes seasonally and the food is quite good. This year, my birthday dinner consisted of mussels in smoked tomato broth (so good I think I’d be happy to eat them every day) and scallops with a brown-butter sauce, fregola, and black trumpet mushrooms.

3) An ice cream cake (or frozen custard cake if you want to be precise about it) from The Dairy Godmother. This is another favorite of ours. They come up with the most interesting and delicious (and often seasonal) flavors of custard (which change every other day) and sorbets. Some of my favorite flavors include sweet potato pecan, cranberry crunch, salted caramel, and apple cider sorbet. This year, Jason got me a German chocolate custard cake and it was pretty darn good!

4) A number of food/cooking themed gifts. Although I have issued a "no kitchen items allowed" edict for gifts while we continue to live in our current apartment (where we are busting at the seams kitchen-wise...more on that at a later date), it does not currently apply to cookbooks (although perhaps not for much longer given that my cookbook shelf is about full now). Yesterday I received The Pioneer Woman Cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking (both very blog-y choices), as well as the Top Chef Quickfire cookbook. Lots of new recipes to try!


All in all I’d say I had a very merry un-birthday indeed!