Rachael's birthday was last Wednesday (she's 24!), and her sweetie Tommy's birthday was the week before, so we had a joint party on Friday. Poor Annie had a prior engagement and couldn't come, so it ended up being just the three of us. I forgot to take any pictures of the birthday children during the party--I documented the food in advance so as not to irk Rachael with photographic delays--so the above illustration is from a couple of weeks previous.
We had
cauliflower salad from Ottolenghi and Tamimi's new cookbook,
Jerusalem. It turned out really well, and Tommy said he'd never had such tasty cauliflower.
We also had the above
roasted carrot salad, a Jamie Oliver recipe. My oven was going all day--almost everything I fixed was roasted or baked, and they all required different temperatures! This salad was good too, though a little more work than the cauliflower.
We had some nice
challah,
and the main dish was vegan lasagna from
Veganomicon with extra spinach and red sauce.
For the birthday cake we had
Clementine cake, and some of
David Lebovitz's chocolate sorbet to go with it. Rachael's not a sorbet or chocolate lover, so I tried to interest her in this dish by pointing out that it was a molecular gastronomy thing, a variant of Hervé This'
famous chocolate mousse, and she just said 'Ew, chocolate mouse? Rosemary's Baby? Ew!' But she thought the cake was super, so that was good.
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