Happy Birthday Daddy!

Another year, another birthday. January and February are quite the busy months for us. There was my birthday, Chinese New Year, then Jean-Louis' birthday and Valentines is coming up. Each one of these involve celebrating and me cooking and baking lots.

It's not that usual for Jean-Louis' birthday to be on a day off but when I saw that it was going to be on a Saturday, I just had to invite some people over and have a bigger than usual dinner. And by people, I mean inviting over my sister and her family:) Jean-Louis really didn't want a "party."

This morning I made us some Star War pancakes. I thought it was fitting since Jean-Louis is such a big Star Wars fan! I meant to make kefir pancakes but when I saw that my kefir did not set yet, I opted for a vegan recipe. Why not and it was Jean-Louis' birthday after all. For those who haven't followed, Jean-Louis has this desire to become vegan but we can't seem to agree on what we can and cannot eat since I don't want to go vegan. We had to compromise and part of it was that I would be willing to cook and eat more vegetarian and vegan food. We are basically cutting down on meat across the board, especially red meat like beef and pork. If we do eat meat, it will mainly be chicken or seafood.

Jicama, watercress, avocado salad

According to Jean-Louis, all the food served for dinner was a hit. Hooray! For appetizers, I made tzatziki and spinach and artichoke dip. This was served with assorted veggies, multigrain tortilla chips and multigrain pita. My sister brought a specialty goat cheese and some baked pita chips. The appetizers alone were filling!

For the main course, I finally got around to making pasta with vodka sauce. I decided to add some chicken breasts to it. It was very simple but quite tasty. I also made a new vegan salad. Omg. The preparation took longer than I expected. I used a grater and pretty much everything had to be grated or sliced thinly with a knife. The watercress was wet after washing and had to be spun. The peanuts came from whole nuts. Jean-Louis and Tristan helped crack and crush them. The orange and lemon juice for the dressing had to be squeezed from fresh fruit etc. so you get the picture. It was a pretty loaded salad! Luckily, the hard work paid off:)

Dessert was a lemon meringue cake. I've been meaning to make this one for awhile too and I know that Jean-Louis loves lemony desserts. It was basically a chiffon cake with three layers of lemon syrup, caramel, and lemon cream topped with meringue. If you don't like lemon, you probably won't like this sort of cake! We liked it.

We ended the day by renting Rise of the Planet of the Apes on iTunes. It was pretty good but it didn't really seem to have an ending. I guess we will have to wait for a Part II. We normally don't make a big deal out of birthdays, except when it is for Tristan, but today actually felt like a birthday celebration. I even gave Jean-Louis a small gift and Tristan made him a card. We had birthday candle on the cake and we all sang happy birthday. What else is missing? That's probably as good as it gets for the older folks:)