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Sunday, September 20, 2015

Farewell to Summer Dinner & Happy Birthday to My Son!

This weekend was a busy one. Yesterday I worked a good bit of the day on a recipe project. Today I worked all day long preparing for my oldest son's birthday dinner celebration. I started my prep at 8:00 in the morning and just finished shortly before they arrived at 5:00. While a good bit of the day was spent on dinner prep, there is the housecleaning and all the other stuff that goes with preparing for a "special occasion".

We had a great time. I prepared Shish Kebab. I made both beef and chicken. I cut up 4 pounds of prime beef loin into chunks and 3 pounds of boneless chicken breast into chunks and marinated them for about 6 to 7 hours in a mixture of fresh lemon juice, olive oil, Greek Seasoning (from Penzey's), minced garlic and fresh rosemary. I also cut up 6 large red, yellow and orange bell peppers as well as a huge Vidalia onion and marinated them as well. I like to use gallon sized Ziploc bags to marinate in. I did the meats separately, the peppers separately and the onions separately. Just threading all of that on skewers is a big job. I served jasmine rice with the meal (I skipped the rice).

For my son's birthday cake, I made my Chocolate Zucchini Walnut Cake. Everybody loved it and they couldn't tell it from the original version I used to make them years ago. They had vanilla ice cream with their cake. I snapped a few photos of our meal below. I sent all the leftover kebabs home with the guys (but I did manage to save some cake for me...LOL). It was a beautiful "last Sunday" of summer to grill out and enjoy a zucchini cake while we celebrated my son's birthday dinner with the family. Enjoy!







        
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2 comments:

  1. CyberSis9/21/15, 2:34 PM

    Hi GGC,

    Sounds like a *wonderful* day! Hope you got a chance to rest up a little. The cake is one of our absolute favorites ... good job saving a piece for yourself! :-)

    We've been having some really beautiful "fall-like" days lately and I'm starting to get my autumn stuff out. At least I managed to wait till mid-Sept. instead of jumping the gun in August like I usually do. :-)

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  2. Gourmet Girl Cooks9/21/15, 10:11 PM

    Hi CyberSis,

    Yes, we did have a nice day. While we did have some gorgeous cooler weather most of last week, the weekend was a bit warm and humid again as was today. I actually put a "fall-themed" tablecloth on our dinner table last night. It was quite a busy day between cooking and cleaning all day yesterday, I paid for it today. LOL I tweaked my back (lifting heavy stuff), strained my hamstring (I have NO idea how I did that) and just stiff and sore today. I guess it has been a while since I spent more than 8 hours cooking and cleaning...but it will get me warmed up for the holidays I suppose!

    Lucky you with the fall-like days already. :-)

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