Two V.I.P.s and How We Celebrate
Today is my mamma’s birthday!
She really is the best mother out there. She spent 40+ years selflessly raising four kids, a 5th foster child, a small handful of foreign exchange students, a plethora of pets, and a slew of said kid’s friends across two continents and several countries and states, all of whom are competent human beings, contribute positively to society in some way or another, and don’t publicly shame our good family name too much. So I think we all turned out pretty darn well…and we’re a handsome group of devils, which has to count for something. But this is all due to excellent parenting. Anyway, she’s also smart, loving, grounded, faithful, generous, funny, a good cook, a great friend, well-traveled, multi-talented, beautiful, and a lot of other important and wonderful things too. Her birthday is the day after mine (I obviously needed my own birthday and couldn’t wait another six hours), but now as an adult I kind of wish we shared a birthday so we could have one more special thing between us (not that I don’t love my own birthday, want to intrude on her own personal special day, or that birthdays one day apart isn’t special enough). And now that I don’t live in Texas anymore, I always hope that one day we’ll be in the same place at the end of August so we can celebrate together. But anyway, she’s the greatest and it’s her birthday! So I’m wishing her another year (plus many more besides) full of love, good health, blessings, prosperity, travels, adventures, great experiences, and togetherness with the family and friends who love her most. Happy birthday, Mom!
And Sunday the 25th was this dude’s birthday.
We pretty much own August in this family. Once I wised up to the fact that his birthday was the day before mine, I knew I had to marry him. I mean, what’s not to love? He’s a multi-talented lighting and theatre/entertainment production guru, he puts up with my curious adventuring shenanigans, he makes up really funny and genius song lyrics all the time, finds joy in “gizzard fest” and, with the exception of my love for new or unusual food/ever constant desire for traveling and wanderlust/need to take every animal I see home with us/affection for trying new things all the time, he basically appreciates all the same fun and weird things I do (so, in other words, we compliment each other’s strengths and weaknesses well). But, most importantly, he has that late August birthday.
And because we live in the same place, we do get to celebrate together! But rather than buy each other gifts for birthdays and holidays, we like to experience things and spend time together instead. So, on Saturday evening – since it was in the low 70s and simply gorgeous out – we had an inexpensive special joint birthday dinner by grilling steaks (which were seriously fantastic) and fresh, local purple potatoes and corn, paired with a delicious farmers market yellow watermelon and a special August-only local sweet white wine, in our backyard, and then at nightfall we used a birthday coupon for some free house-made ice cream and waffle cones at a local ice cream joint in Webster.
On Sunday we brunched on awesome breakfast sandwiches at the farmers market, and then in the afternoon I made Ted his favorite birthday cake – a really delicious pineapple upside down cake – and we ordered a pizza and rented Ted’s choice movie 42 about Jackie Robinson, which was a really, really great and enjoyable movie that we highly recommend. Of course, we lit candles, sang happy birthday, and opened cards too. :)
The pineapple upside down cake recipe can be found here, and with a thick coating of homemade caramel at the bottom (or top I suppose?), it is good. Like, really, really good. I did add Maraschino cherries (which the recipe did not call for) to the centers of the pinapple slices because Ted loves the cherries, and I baked it in a shortening-greased 9″ springform pan because I don’t have a cast iron skillet, which was actually pretty perfect because it made it insanely easy to remove the cake from the pan and turn it upside down. If you make this cake I would caution you that the cake probably only needs 38-40 minutes in the oven instead of 45 (depending on your oven), and also to place an oven-safe cookie pan with short edges under the springform pan because the caramel will leak out as it bakes and you really don’t want gooey caramel all over your oven. But this recipe is a winner.
Onto the pics!
Happy Birthday to all my favorite August folks!
