Monday, May 03, 2010

Happy Birthday Michael


Sunday was Michaels birthday & for a change I had him all to myself for the day.  Unfortunately The Mighty Pies were playing in the afternoon & the family wanted to go to the game so we had the family celebrations on Saturday, I was actually pleased we got to have a nice family day alone for something different. 

To start with we walked down nice & early to Hellenic Republic for breakfast, it's nice & quiet at opening (9am) with most people in the area preferring to sleep in & have a later start to the day, for us, 9am is a late breakfast.  Chloe & Josh were well behaved & shared some toast between them, Chloe also stole some of my eggs & Michaels amazing thick cut bacon.  It was a nice breakfast though I'm sure they have shortened the menu & my spanakopita & poached eggs wasn't as good as the first time I had it back closer to the date they opened.  Still it was great to be out & I love going for a nice early morning walk.  Now that Josh is getting a bit easier to be out with, ie we can feed him off a menu instead of having to drag along baby food, we will have to start heading out a lot more like in the good old days.

After a relaxing day for Michael, I decided to have a bit of a pizza party, boys love pizza & Michael is no exception.  I find them really simple to make at home & actually prefer it to the home delivered variety no matter what the brand/shop it is coming from. 


I used the base recipe from Jamie Oliver's Italy & made 3 different pizza toppings, margaritas with fresh basil from the garden, and a couple of his suggested toppings, potatoes, mozzarella, rosemary & tomatoes and for the last, egg, prosciutto, artichokes, olives, mozzarella, tomato sauce & basil.  I cut my potatoes a bit thick as I didnt allow enough time for them to cool & I think I overcooked them a bit, so they didnt crisp up at all though the flavours were still fantastic.  The margarita was really very good, it's usually my favourite , though this time the prosciutto won out, a fantastic marriage of flavours.  Luckily I made heaps so guess whats on for dinner tonight & lunch too, no doubt I will be sick of pizza very soon!


To finish off the night I made some apples stuffed with dates, sultanas, pine nuts, honey, cream, vanilla, cinnamon & lemon zest, they were then baked with some apple juice & served with the juice boiled down to a syrup.  I wanted to keep things relatively simple after all the pizza & we really didnt need any more cake after Saturdays celebrations (I made an orange torte with chocolate ganache).  Nice though really, really sweet so lots of yoghurt on the side was needed to cut trough the richness. 

My birthday is later this week, more celebrations & of course more food, look out for some sensational chocolate that I will make for this weeks challenge as well as for me!

1 comment:

Ali-K said...

Love homemade pizzas!