Food Friday-Birthday Edition

 

This beautiful child is now an adult and we are celebrating her birthday as a family during Shabbat dinner. She will be celebrating with her friends on her actual birthday. 

The main dish for tonight is:

Chicken cooked with

which is the fabulous hot spice mixture that one encounters in Ethiopian restaurants. I cooked the chicken at a low-ish temp to give the spices more time to seep into the chicken. The berbere was a gift from one of my sisters.

There is a bland rice warming in the oven and I am making a big salad. One birthday treat is this...

crispy and salty smoked meat. No, I will not be indulging.

We are having three different desserts each one was about making cooking compromises as I went along. Not pictured is a cranberry sorbet.

I had planned for this citrus-flavored cake, here shown in one skinny layer, intended 

to be filled with an orange custard made with a base of Israeli instant vanilla pudding. I had assumed that orange juice could stand-in for the milk in the directions on the box. I was wrong and while what I made was delicious it didn't have enough body to serve as the filling. So I pivoted and made a mocha-flavored filling. Yes, the cake recipe was faked.

Here it is stacked...

I then topped the stacked cake with the orange custard and added some chocolate shavings to decorate.

I will not regale my guests with the wrong turns in the life of this cake.

An essential addition for any birthday for my daughter is pumpkin pie. I had one large Costco can of pumpkin puree. I thought I would make one pie to serve tonight and one to give to my daughter to take home. Both of my round pie tins have gone AWOL. 

I figured I would make one large rectangular pie. I made a batch of pie crust that I thought would be enough to cover one of my large sheet pans. I made too little crust to cover the bottom of the sheet pan. Instead, I dumped the crust into a 9x13 baking pan and pressed the crust into place.

So we are having pumpkin pie bars.

My daughter can take the rest home with her.

And on a completely different topic...I learned a new category of looking good. This week on two different days two different homeless men complimented me on my clothing and then didn't ask me for money.

Now, all I need to learn is how to keep the credit card and car insurance people from calling me multiple times a day. Earlier this week I spent much too much time explaining that the fact that I don't have either a driver's license or a car probably makes me ineligible for car insurance to an annoying man from India.

Shabbat Shalom!