By Chef Vicky
Food, family, celebration – what’s not to love?
So tradition in our family is you get to choose your
birthday dinner menu– whatever your heart desires - we aim to please!
Sometimes it’s fresh made fettuccini with Alfredo sauce, or it may be duck, or thick burgers on the grill or with an ice cream sundae bar for dessert.
It’s collaborative – and this is where the fun really resides, cooking with others. It takes the heat off of one person, brings new ideas for how to prepare a dish, and let’s face it, we all wind up in the kitchen anyway so why not put everyone to work!
This week, my daughter Angela prepared a dish she had done for my birthday a few years ago. Asian food is one of our family’s favorites and she was making a Thai dish for her husband, Daniel’s birthday. It was beautiful with all the crisp veggies and nutty curry sauce. We plated each dinner using the bottoms of the bok choy for garnish since they looked like flowers when you cut off the good stuff. We get excited about stuff like that…
Every pot in the house was used and piled by the sink as we made our way onto the patio for dinner under the stars. Food, family, and a tradition of celebrating life together – yeah, I can do this.
We engaged our good friends years ago with this tradition and the result is a packed out kitchen, layers of food, laughing, and more memories of what food made together for someone else does to you. More than nourishing the belly – it nourishes one’s very soul. This is a Vietnamese dish called Hot Pot.
Our dear friends Thuy and Thao and young Julia prepping my birthday meal recently
Julia has a passion for food and is on the path to being a chef herself. In high school it thrilled her to get things like a stand up mixer, kitchen gadgets and Julia Child’s cookbook.
Yeah, she’s the real deal, and you can catch her at Lafarm doing her thing and loving it.
