Birthday Treats

Saturday, Husband and I headed up to his little brother’s house.  He’s renting a house right on a pond in the middle of the woods.  It’s beautiful (and totally an outdoorsy college kid’s haven).

My camera is uploading again, so here’s some pictures of birthday foodz:

The night before, pizza:

We haven’t purchased a pizza in over four years!  We buy Trader Joe’s pizza crust for about $1.  There are 8 servings of crust and each serving is about 120 calories.  I always get the whole wheat crust, but Husband tends to pick up the white crust with herbs.  We used to make the whole pizza, but it was always just a smidge too much — that last piece of pizza would be too much food, but who wants to wrap up a single measly piece of pizza?  So I weigh out the dough on my handy food scale and split it in 1/2.  I cook 1/2 of the dough and the rest goes back in the fridge or the the freezer.  These doughs freeze great.

The fantastic thing is, you can control your own pizza destiny!  If you see above, Husband’s side has cheese, mine doesn’t.  How many times have I read on a fitness blog that they ordered a pizza from such and such a place and they put cheese on the whole thing instead of on half?  And how much does pizza cost these days?  The one above has tons of spinach, sugar-free tomato sauce, some caponata from a jar and cheese.  It probably cost less than $6 for all the ingredients, and I can use the ingredients to make more pizza.  Can’t recommend baking your own pizza enough.

The next morning, I asked Husband if he wanted a special French Toast breakfast in honor of his birthday.  He was game:

Husband’s french toast is on the stripe-y plate, mine is on the orange plate.  I have three pieces because I was very noble and took the skinny little butt pieces of bread.  Usually I’d try and pawn them off on Husband, but since it was his birthday, I threw myself on the grenade.  Those pieces have 100% pure Canadian Maple Syrup and some Trader Joe’s Superfruit preserve.  I like to put preserves on my French Toast and Pancakes and use just a little bit of maple.

That is sprouted whole grain bread (from TJ’s, of course).  I added a little dash from this Bottle of Awesome to Husband’s toast batter instead of vanilla:

He liked.

I used this recipe to make a vegan version of French Toast for myself.  It was really, really good.  I will totally use this recipe again. A lot of the recipes I find for vegan treats involve a lot of processed or mystery foods, so I like that this recipe uses bananas instead of egg replacer.  Honestly, I can’t figure out what is in the Ener-G egg replacer.  When I look online, all I can find is that it contains “absolutely no eggs!”  Well thanks, but that doesn’t really narrow it down much for me.

While I was taking pics of french toast and booze, the Pup really wanted to get involved.  He HATES having his picture taken, but he hates being left out even more.  So here he is trying to climb into my lap.  Like the beard?

Doggel-y Dog says hi.

Later, Husband made Cherries Jubilee.  Vanilla ice cream with fresh cherries (not from a can, no way!) cooked into a sauce with Kirsch and flamed.  It was awesome.  And not vegan.

I made the decision yesterday to enjoy the efforts of my Husband and his bros at the grill and in the kitchen.  All the younger brothers really got into the spirit of having a gourmet barbeque.  The littlest one made figs stuffed with goat cheese and drizzled with honey.  The older one helped make stuffed portabella mushrooms with eggplant and blue cheese.  And of course, Husband made his cherries and cooked a delicious hot Italian sausage.  I definitely got my B-Vitamins for the year and had a fantastic time.

Sorry no pictures of the animal flresh, it was kind of wild and crazy in the house.

Little brothers love exposed beams in houses.

Demon Dog with Kid

I snapped this picture of the fig-stuffing kid cradling his dog like a baby (you can see one of the dog’s paws sticking out on the left).  So cute!  Our dog is really the kid’s dog, but while he’s in school we’re taking care of the mongrel beast.

We canooed and fished (I tangled up Husband’s new fishing pole — d’oh!) and had a great time.  And a lot of mojitos.

Hope everyone else had an awesome weekend/holiday as well!

Peace!

E.