Birthday Party

Well it is that time of year again. The time of year that is almost a month after my birthday. So I figure I should write a bit about what we did to celebrate the start of a new decade.

On my birthday we went out for a special celebratory dinner at Bishop's restaurant (I blogged about it a few years back when I went with Roz and Reuben just before leaving Canada). Once again it was a mighty fine meal. I especially loved the chantarelle mushroom soup that I had as a starter. It was super tasty, even T liked it, and she doesn't normally like mushrooms. I won't dwell any longer on that dining experience in this post, as there was another birthday celebration the following weekend that I happen to have a few photos of, and my dear wife is dying for me to blog about it.

Being the big 30 this year I decided to go all out and have a big party, so we invited Daniel and Leanne over for dinner.

First up we had a brie wheel baked in filo pastry with red pepper jelly and caramelised onions. It was a recipe I spotted in a Yaletown newspaper and looked pretty good in the article. The finished product also tasted rather good too. So a good start to the evening there.

Next up was a watermelon gazpacho. I had made this in New Zealand for a family gathering dinner sort of thing. I had very fond memories of this soup, but it seems the watermelon we bought may have been a little less flavourful than the the NZ version was. The soup still tasted OK though (well I thought it did, I can't speak for the others present), it just wasn't as good as last time.

Next up was a simple shrimp cocktail. I love shrimp, so I really enjoyed this course. The Jamie Oliver recipe I followed had toasted breadcrumbs to sprinkle on top. I had never seen that addition, but tried it anyway. It added a lovely crunch to the otherwise not so crunchy salad. Good job Jamie for adding that to the recipe, it is a winner of an idea.

Next up was a favourite recipe of T's from an Indian cookbook we bought a few months back. The cookbook is from the owner of Vij's, a very highly regarded Indian restaurant here in Vancouver. T and I went there for dinner a month or so after we were married, and it remains one of our favourite dining experiences. The dish we made was the one that I had at the restaurant, Lamb Popsicles with a Fenugreek cream curry sauce. The lamb cutlets are marinated in white wine, mustard salt and pepper and then pan fried. The sauce is not particularly good for you but oh so tasty. It is largely cream and oil, with salt, paprika, cayenne pepper, tumeric, garlic, lemon juice and fenugreek leaves adding the yummy flavour. We served this with a potato galette, that we made a bit healthier than the recipe by cutting back on the cream and butter.

The next course was a baked ham, with green beans. The ham was called a spiral cut ham, something I had never seen until Christmas in Arkansas last year. It is a half leg of ham that is partially cut already, so carving it is really easy. Also because it is semi-sliced the glaze is able to get inside the ham a bit more. To my shame I went for the easy option and just used the packet of glaze that came with the ham. On reading the list of ingredients later I have decided never to do that again. It had about 10 different forms of sugar and not much else, and didn't really taste all that great either.

For the final course, dessert we of course had to have a birthday cake. Well kind of. It was actually a traditional French wedding cake, called a croquembouche, or a pyramid of filled profiteroles as I knew it. In the lead up to my birthday T was asking what kind of cake I wanted, saying she would make whatever I wanted. I have vague memories of Mum making one of these pyramid shaped towers years ago, and I seem to recall that it took ages to make all the little cream puffs. I also recall really liking the toffee that holds the tower together. So it was a combination of wanting to give T a bit of a challenge and wanting that toffee that led me to choose a croquembouche cake. T did a wonderful job. I even gave her an easy way out option and said she could buy the cream puffs if she wanted, but she would have nothing of it. And the filling could have just been whipped cream, but she went the extra mile and made a custard creme filling. The toffee was interesting. We are blaming our stove. The first time we tried making it, somehow we must have heated it too long or something because it went from being a liquid to being flaky sugar again. So we had to try all over again, this time using a different element and a slightly higher heat. It worked much better, but was still a very clear colour, not at all how I had pictured it. Once the pyramid was assembled we were supposed to make the leftover toffee in to spun sugar, using two forks. Perhaps the instructions were not all that clear, or perhaps I just did it all wrong, but either way the spun sugar didn't really work out. The end result still was very tasty though. Sorry, but I didn't get a photo of it before we all tucked in and devoured T's handy work.