Happy Birthday to Us!

This past weekend we celebrated my and Dave's 27th birthdays with an elaborate and incredibly scrumptious Moroccan meal with birthday cakes for dessert. My mom even spoiled us with a few gifts.

Every time my dad comes up for a visit we like to make a dish or two out of a middle eastern cook book he bought for me called Artichoke to Za'atar from the UC Press. We keep a running list of each dish we've made on what date and give each a grade. This time we made seven vegetable couscous with basil tzadziki, onion jam, and green harissa broth as accompaniments--it an A+++ overall. It was soooooooooooo good. I'm trying very hard not to jump up and reheat some of it right this minute.
Dave's birthday cake was homemade chocolate with canned chocolate frosting, just like he wanted. Mine was boxed vanilla rainbow cake and canned pink vanilla frosting. They were both super yummy (I couldn't eat any of the chocolate cake but they all said it was better than my commercial cake) and so festive looking. Dave didn't want sprinkles on his cake so I decorated it in my usual nerdy way--with our age in a mathematical fashion. =)

It was a nice little celebration for us. Especially considering how crappy my birthday was last year (Dave had to work so late that all of the restaurants I wanted to eat at were closed, no cake, etc.). On my actual birthday this year he was able to come home from Gualala in time to take me out to our favorite all-you-can-eat sushi buffet, which is free for the birthday person--a value of $16! (don't worry, I ate only cooked meat and vegetable sushi). That was, of course, the night before the midwife told me not to eat sushi, even if it is made with cooked meat because of the threat of listeria. Oh well, I can wait for another 5 months for sushi.