Birthday Weekend Part 1!

 

My birthday was last Friday, so my sister and her fiancée drove to Pittsburgh for the weekend to celebrate! We had an awesome time and ate lots of delicious food. We ate and drank quite a variety of things, and of course I forgot to document it all (including the ridiculous amounts of cheese we bought and ate). So here are a few highlights of our Friday night.

I don’t remember the last time I made a cake, and I definitely haven’t cooked any sort of baked good since college. I saw this recipe for a lemon basil cake and thought it would be amazing and decided to give it a shot. The two stores I went to didn’t have fresh basil, so it ended up being a lemon no-basil cake. There really wasn’t anything crazy about this cake other than the lemon zest. I mean, I used a box mix. I did end up using apple sauce instead of oil though, which made it super moist (and healthier I guess).

 

While the cake baked and I cleaned my apartment in anticipation of my guests, I had a birthday drink of Courvoisier with an ice cube! This was a $1.99 impulse buy at the state store. I love the tiny bottles!

 

I had every intention of at least making my own icing since it was a box mix, but at the last minute I got a can of vanilla icing and dyed it purple. I’ve never made my own icing, so it probably would have tasted bad anyway! Plus, this store-bought icing was delicious.

 

Everyone finally arrived Friday evening, and we stuffed ourselves with Trader Joe’s Spanakopita, cheese, dips, crackers, wine, and beer. Emily and I then made this amazing Bruchetta with Ricotta, Honey, and Lemon Zest. This is the ruler of all appetizers. It’s also ridiculously easy. First, we broiled sliced a sliced baguette with olive oil until they were nicely toasted. Then, Emily rubbed the tops with a halved garlic clove. This gave the bread a surprising amount of garlic flavor!

 

The toasted pieces then got topped with a nice layer of ricotta cheese and a drizzle of honey.

 

The last step is to sprinkle on lemon zest. See? Easy!! These were incredibly tasty, and I wish this wasn’t the first time I had this flavor combination. I fell in love, and I’m pretty sure everyone else loved them too. They were also dangerously perfect with dry red wine.

 

Our night naturally progressed to the House of 1000 Beers. My first beer (which was on the house!) was a Dark Horse Blueberry Stout. This is a seriously delicious beer. Not sweet at all, but very strong blueberry flavors! This beer could definitely do some damage – I loved it!!

 

I’d say by the look of this table that we had a pretty great night! Okay, so the three guys of our group did most of this damage, but I still got to try a couple new beers! Definitely a successful birthday…and a great birthday overall!!

Round two tomorrow! :)

Seitan Wings with Pineapple Habanero Sauce

 This is all I could think about for days. Andy and I were so excited to make this meal! We would text each other things like, “I can’t stop thinking about the sauce!!” …and this was before we even bought the ingredients. We scoured the internet for good wing sauce recipes, but most of them were something along the lines of “Add a stick of butter to a bottle of Frank’s.” Well that’s not exciting! We wanted something super spicy, and it had to be extra delicious because we were going to make it to celebrate two years of being together!

We wondered around the produce section and ended up with these ingredients: 10 habaneros, 2 serranos, 1 poblano, 1 bell pepper, 1 banana, and a container of pineapple. We bought tomatoes but ended up not using them.

 

I got to work on making the sauce long before Andy came over to make sure it sat for a while before we used it. It smelled SO good at this point! Well, it was almost kind of dangerous to smell because it was so potent. Oh, and I didn’t wuss out and take the seeds out of the peppers…it’s totally not worth it without the seeds!

 

I also added 6 cloves of garlic and about 1/8 cup apple cider vinegar.

 

When we were ready to make the wings, I cooked the sauce on the stove with some butter. It simmered on low for about 30 minutes. As it cooked, the flavors got pretty intense, and it started to taste less like salsa.

 

We’ve only had seitan at restaurants and have never bought it in a grocery store. Not really knowing what we were doing, we got this chicken-style seitan. There were quite a few options, but this looked like our best bet.

We were definitely expecting a block of seitan. I don’t know why. They’re actually slightly funky-looking pieces of different shapes and sizes. I guess this is to make them look more natural…?

We were pleasantly surprised when they turned a lovely golden-brown in the skillet! Andy cooked them in butter and olive oil until they were nice and crispy (a good while after this picture was taken). We couldn’t figure out who should have the honor of actually cooking the seitan. Andy is a meat-cooking master, and I’m a tofu-cooking master, so who cooks the fake stuff that looks like chicken? Andy took the honors since I slaved away at the sauce earlier.

    

On the side, I made potato wedges for Andy and sweet potato wedges for me. They were so tasty! I also cut up a TON of celery and carrots. Totally necessary!

After the “wings” were done cooking, they had a nice bath in the sauce. They tasted SO GOOD!! So it definitely won’t fool someone into thinking it’s actually chicken, but that’s not what we were going for. In fact, I was expecting the store-bought seitan to have more of a tempeh-like texture. I think this is because my two favorite places to order seitan wings must use homemade seitan. It’s like they mush a bunch of grains together. Anyway, maybe next time we’ll be more adventurous and make our own!

 

I can’t believe I forgot to take a picture of the blue cheese sauce! It was incredible and SO simple. I just mixed together a small container of 2% plain Greek yogurt (thinned out slightly with some almond milk) with a small wedge of Maytag blue and some black pepper. This also sat in the fridge for a few hours and ended up being so amazing. I think I’m going to make it all the time and dip everything in it!