Anniversary

Lest you think that every single day follows the same routine around here, I give you...our wedding anniversary. This is the second year that D and I have celebrated our anniversary by going out to lunch rather than dinner. We do lunch for a variety of reasons, primarily because it saves on babysitting money and because frankly it seems a little more special to go out together smack in the middle of the day. As a general rule we RARELY eat out (for both financial and practical reasons) so it is an extra special treat for us to get to not only go out but eat something other than a burrito at a restaurant. This year we went to Sasa, a new Japanese Izakaya (small plates) restaurant downtown. We completely indulged and everything was absolutely delicious. We started with tempura prawn lettuce wraps, soy-braised short rib sliders and kombucha squash bisque and then moved on to a big green salad dressed with a creamy miso dressing, a soft shell crab and bacon club sandwich and an ahi tuna parfait.

The soy braised short rib sliders. I could have eaten 10 of these...they were incredibly rich and just melted in my mouth. Mmmmm.

The salad. it doesn't look like much but the lettuce was divine. It was soft, sweet butter lettuce and was tossed in just the right amount of miso dressing.

The ahi parfait. It was a nice stack of crisp mochi rice cake topped with ahi, avocado, creme fraiche and black tobiko. There was no discernible sauce on it, but the ahi was incredibly fresh and flavorful so it was nice to not have that obscured by a strong sauce.

After lunch we planned to walk down to our favorite dessert place...Gelateria Naia. We are HUGE fans of Naia's fresh, local, intensely flavored gelato, but today was just really not a gelato day. It was sheeting down rain and freezing cold. Luckily we happened by a new cupcake joint and decided to shift gears and get dessert from there instead. Its always important to be flexible, right? We ended up with 6 cupcakes, 5 of which made it into the photo below. Before I had a chance to snap them we ate the java, which was dark chocolate cake with a coffee buttercream frosting, complete with ground up espresso beans for a little bit of crunch. It was delicious. We also got a Chocolate Velvet, a Fleur de Sel (chocolate with caramel filling and sea salt topped chocolate ganache), Carrot Cake, Meyer Lemon and S'mores, which featured a graham cracker crust, chocolate cake and a toasted marshmallow frosting. We had the Fleur de Sel and Z had the S'Mores after dinner and we can safely say that they are all delicious.

After our really wonderful lunch we continued our romantic day by D going back to typing code and me cleaning up the mouse droppings in our pantry. (I honestly don't mind having mice in the house...I just wish they wouldn't do their business in it!) Romantic afternoon? Maybe not, but the joy of having been married for 9 years is that we were both immensely satisfied with our little anniversary celebration. This has been an extremely trying year (or 3) and we mostly wanted to just pause and celebrate the fact that our marriage has actually grown stronger and happier through this period. We consider ourselves very lucky for the position we are in.

After school let out Z and I headed for the store for supplies and then came home to make veggie burgers, bread and dinner. At the request of my bean-loving husband I tried a black bean burger recipe this time. The burgers turned out pretty well, but I can't say that they are as good as the edamame burgers were. I started with a recipe from the Washington Post and tweaked it a bit. The final recipe is as follows:

4 cups black beans (I cooked mine yesterday. If you use canned, you will need 2 and 1/2 cans...rinse and drain them first.)
1/2 to 1 cup panko breadcrumbs
2 large eggs
1 onion, minced
1/2 cup cilantro, minced
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 1/2-2 teaspoons ground cumin
1 teaspoon coarse salt
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper

Put half the beans in the cuisinart and puree. They will be pretty chunky. Place them in a bowl and add the remainder of the ingredients. Mix well! Shape the burgers into patties; you will make about 10 of them out of this size batch. Put the patties onto a large dish and refrigerate them for about 15 minutes. While you are chilling the burgers heat up a large, heavy skillet over medium heat. (I used a cast iron skillet.) Put a few chilled patties in the skillet and cook them for 7 to 10 minutes per side, until they are browned and a little crispy.

Since I had the cuisinart out I decided to make the "batter" for my garbanzo bean burgers as well. I will cook them tomorrow but I did all the assembly tonight. I just put the mix into a glass container and stored it in the fridge for the night. Tomorrow I will just quickly pan fry them and then I will have another batch ready for the freezer.

While the burgers were cooking I also made a loaf of bread. 2 years ago for my birthday D gave me a breadmaker and I can count on one hand the number of loaves of bread I have purchased since then. It is really just ridiculously easy and we LOVE having fresh homemade bread always t the ready. Of course, after doing the cleanse D now eats significantly less bread than he did before and I eat barely any at all, but Z still consumes it in copious quantities so it remains a worthwhile venture. Plus, it just makes the house smell great.

Since we had such a big, delicious lunch we didn't need much supper, so I threw together a green salad full of CSA box treats: romaine, cilantro, carrots, red pepper and avocado. We topped the salads with crumbled veggie burgers and some leftover salsa and were all set.

I know that sounds like a lot of cooking, but in fact I got it all done in one hour. I started pulling the ingredients out of the fridge at a few minutes after 5 p.m. and we were sitting down at the table by 6:15. All that and I had the expert "assistance" of a 5 year old along the way. (That never slows me down...)

Aside from the 3 remaining cupcakes, tomorrow we will be back to our regularly scheduled programming. And that is fine with me, because as good as those sliders were today, I missed my lunchtime salad and chai!