Ilya closed out his 33rd birthday celebrations with some more home-cooked goodness today. For lunch, I made Peanut Chicken with Lo Mein, consisting of Vegetable Lo Mein mixed with a combination of sweet thai peanut sauce and chopped up rotisserie chicken breasts (recipe for the entire combined recipe is here). It varies for me whether I cheat and buy a rotisserie chicken to use (cuts down on time and rotisserie chickens are delicious) or use a few boneless, skinless chicken breasts that I have cut up and cooked on the stove in sesame oil. For a weekend with as much going on as this one, it was rotisserie chicken all the way. This recipe is superb, I must say. It ranks as Ilya’s all-time favorite dish of mine, so naturally it had to be included for the birthday goodies.
For dinner, I took another stab at creating the creamy shrimp from Wegmans (you know it’s true love when I will handle raw seafood twice in 2 weeks). This time, I used a recipe that incorporated coconut cream. It felt right that it would involve coconut as possibly being that certain taste that seemed lacking from the Honey Walnut Shrimp I made last weekend. There were some snags along the way in the one I tried tonight (read more about these snags in the post here) but in the end it came out great and I felt that not only was it much closer to the real thing but tasted better overall to me than the Honey Walnut Chicken. Ilya said it tasted closer but wasn’t better or worse in his mind. I think he just likes creamy shrimp, regardless of the recipe used to make them. We had the shrimp on top of some lo mein (I made another smaller round to go with the shrimp) and enjoyed some small slivers of leftover cheesecake for dessert and that marked the end of the birthday festivities.
He was pretty spoiled this year, but he absolutely deserves it for being such a fantastic husband. The bulk of our free time today consisted of him trying to work out a lot of the coding and whatnot for this blog (we are blog-coding newbies!), using all his time researching and figuring out how to do all the things I wanted to do but couldn’t figure out myself. He is always so supportive of my endeavors and man is that an attractive quality in a partner.
My mom also stopped by today, so she could try out some of the cheesecakes and to drop off a “rice therapy heat sack” she made for Gizmo. Gizmo, seen below, is our adorable, sweet and completely spoiled fur child. He doesn’t let it go to his head, though, as he’s the sweetest dog around (yes, I realize I’m biased, but other people tell us this all the time too!).
Giz recently had an episode of neck pain (possibly due to some compressed vertebrae) and according to the vet his neck muscles are very tense (no joke…his exact words). I laughingly asked the vet if that meant we would need to start giving Giz massages, and he replied in a serious manner that we could do that or try using a heating pad of some kind. Ha! It sounds hilarious, yet we would do anything to ease this little guy’s pain. Luckily it just so happens my mom is an expert crafter who makes rice therapy heating sacks (for people) for the craft shows she does and she was more than willing to alter the pattern and make her granddog a Gizmo-sized version. We had a nice visit and she left with a bunch of leftovers.
Now we are winding down, preparing to head into another work week. Overnight tonight I will be making some steel-cut oatmeal in the crock pot. We really like the steel-cut oats and there are quite a few different recipes I have found for cooking them in the crock pot. Our faves are this one I’m making tonight, a pumpkin pie version and an apple cinnamon something or other. I’m sure I will be making those again soon, so the recipes will be up here at some point. The one I am making tonight is great because it takes just a few minutes to throw together, is done when we get up and yields enough for us to each have breakfast every day for a week.