Happy Bday

Birthdays come with traditions in our home.  It is usually a two-night affair.  We rarely have parties even for the kid’s birthdays.  We always have a home night and a go out night.  For the home night the birthday person gets to pick their meal and the go out night they get to pick their restaurant.  It sounds simple, but there is always a lot of lobbying that takes place.  For the home meal the negotiation not only includes the main meal, but also the cake.

Yesterday was Virginia’s birthday.  On Sunday we went out to our favorite Thai place in town.  Since she is a San Francisco transplant we are always on the look out for good Thai.  I never really liked Thai food until I had it in San Francisco.  It was always the same dishes that were very heavy and goopy tasting to me.  While we have good Chinese food and great Burmese food in DC, Thai food was always lacking until we discovered Thai-Xing, an amazing place that ranks up there with some of the best food I have ever had period.  Chef Taw has opened his small row house as an amazing home restaurant.  It is an incredible place to dine.  While he accommodates vegetarians anytime, Sunday night he offers a veggie or vegan tasting menu.  The place is tiny. It literally has five tables fit into a small garden apartment that also has a converted commercial kitchen.  The setting is intimate even though you are in very close proximity to everyone else who is eating. Taw only does tasting menus and they generally start with a soup, papaya salad and multiple courses.  The dishes are served family style on banana leaves and each one has a unique flavor and taste.  It is BYO so for father’s day I got a travel wine bag just to use when we go to Thai-Xing.  I filled it with a light Muscadet from the Loire and lovely Cremant Rose.  Both were a good balance to the spice and hot temps.

Monday night was Virginia’s real birthday and for months she had been asking for me to make “real” paella.   Since she has celiac and is gluten free, rice dishes are always ranked high.  She loves to eat and requires not only a protein but also some kind of a starch.  Don’t ever try and give her steamed veggies or a salad for a meal.  She gets cranky.  We try not use white rice.  Spanish rice for paella and Arborio rice for risotto are really the best, but the dishes feel better for us if we can substitute brown rice.  It does require a little more cooking, but I think it works well.

Some of our meals are really quick.  This wasn’t one of those.  You could cheat some of the steps, but I wanted to make this very special and since the produce is so amazing this time of year, I went all out.  I started with baby artichokes that needed to be peeled and trimmed.  Since I had bread in the oven for the kids lunches and Virginia was making her own birthday cake (more later on that), I put the cleaned and quartered chokes in a covered pan with a little bit of water, oil, salt and pepper.  It only took about 15 minutes to cook and they were going to be one of the major veggies of the dish.  On the grill I put the rice with corn stock made from corn cobs, paprika, lots of saffron, salt, pepper and fresh sage.  I wanted to get the rice going since the brown rice takes longer to cook and absorb flavors.  After the rice was nearly done I emptied the pan and prepped it for cooking the veggies.  I put in some olive oil and then added the longer cooking items.  Almost everything was from Twin Springs as usual.  Back on the grill, I put in scapes, spring onions, field onions, limas and cauliflower.  Heat index was 100 so I was happy not to have the stove going in the kitchen.  I might spend more on propane than I would on air-conditioning, but the house stays cooler.  After those veggies got a little brown, but still crisp, I added the string beans, yellow and red tomatoes and artichokes.  When they were all just about done I put the rice back in and gently mixed so as not to break down the veggies.  We topped each dish with incredible home grown ground peppers from Martin and Jen’s wonderful rooftop garden in Brooklyn.  I opened a crisp Spanish Albarino to go with the theme.

I must say that it was awesome.  During my insane cook fest, Virginia picked the boys up from soccer camp.  I delivered Noah to Piano lessons while she baked her cake and then she picked Noah up and drove both Noah and Sasha to swim team.  Timing is hard since I am never sure when they will get back home, but she called with an ETA and I was able to time the cooking and factor in showers so we would be ready to eat when they got home and cleaned up.

Virginia bakes deserts.  I cook the food and bake the bread.  If it is my birthday I cook my dinner, and if it is her birthday she makes her cake.  Could we do it all for each other?  Sure, but we love to do what we do and that is how it works for us.  She loves chocolate and has perfected many gluten free vegan cakes, pies, cookies, crumbles and mousses.  She wanted chocolate but Noah did not.  She ended up making a coconut milk cake that might just be the new standard after Noah wore her down.  As a kid we all chose my mom’s red velvet cake.  That tradition ended with the vegan gluten free diet, but this cake was equally awesome.  She topped it with amazing local Twin Springs peaches.  I will say that her baking has improved tremendously.  Vegan she got pretty quickly, but the gluten free stuff used to have a strange texture and graininess.  Not this time.  Thank goodness we have a month until the next birthday.  I am full.