Birthday Dinner

Blake's actual birthday is on Friday, but he's leaving tonight to go to Vegas with his friends for EW's bachelor party (God help us) so we celebrated last night. For my birthday, I usually insist on going out to dinner, but Blake hates going out to dinner because it's unhealthy and expensive, so he prefers that I cook something nice for him instead. I usually throw together some of his favorites and add dessert. Last year I made lemon chicken thighs, for example. But I wanted to try something different this year.

I broke out my new Everyday Italian cookbook and found this recipe for chicken piccata. Blake likes chicken piccata because it's lemony and because he likes capers. But I had never made it before. The recipe was easy to follow though, and it came out pretty good. My only suggestion if you are making this recipe is that you use only like half of the capers it suggests. I was already cutting the recipe in half because it was only for the two of us, and there were just way too many capers. I like them, but they're strong and salty, so I wound up throwing a lot of them away. For side dishes, I kept it simple with plain, Parmesan risotto and roasted asparagus (throw asparagus in a jelly roll pan with salt, pepper, garlic, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar; roast at 425 for 10 minutes).

For dessert, I made some chocolate mousse. Nothing fancy though. Blake's mom had sent us a box of chocolate mousse mix a while back because it's his favorite, so I just whipped (ha) that up. What was exciting about it is that I finally got to use the wire whip attachment on my stand mixer to make it. Apparently, chocolate mousse is basically slightly stiffer, chocolate flavored whipped cream. I threw some strawberries on top for show. I was so excited to break in my whip attachment. I have now successfully used all three of my mixer attachments. Yay.

I got Blake a Flyers jersey he's been talking about for months as a gift. He of course wanted the official jersey that the players wear, customized with his favorite player's info and a "C" on the front for captain. He was really excited about it. He figured I was getting him something Flyers-related, but he didn't think I'd be able to pull this jersey thing off correctly. He was borderline shocked that I knew which player to get and to get the "C" on the front and to get the new jersey (apparently they still sell last year's even though the team doesn't wear them anymore. I didn't even see those). It was pretty easy actually. I just found the most expensive customizable jersey on NHL.com and figured that was the right one. It was pricey, but he wore it around the house for about an hour and really liked it, so it was worth it. All in all, it was a pretty good birthday night.