Two ways I celebrated my birthday:


For years now I’ve been fixing the same little feast for valentine’s day: rock Cornish game hen, Uncle Phil’s long grain and wild rice, and flourless chocolate cake.
It’s inspired by the very first meal I cooked for Jackie, just a few days after we started dating.
This year I made numerous mistakes in timing and measuring—kinda weird, since I slept so well last night. Fortunately, a modest amount of scrambling and fixing managed to make everything come out delicious!

I was preparing a honey-mustard glaze to put on a ham. The recipe called for dijon mustard, honey, and dark brown sugar—that last, presumably, to make it caramelize nicely. The new jar of honey I opened had crystalized rather completely. So I skipped the brown sugar, and just put in twice as much honey.
It was delicious.
Now I’m trying to decide whether it’s worth updating the recipe, given that I can’t expect to have crystalized honey on-hand all the time.

A couple of days ago Jackie braised some wild-caught venison, and today there was just a bit left that she included in some fried rice that she served as a side dish along with the wild-caught sockeye salmon that I cooked (cumin and zaatar as seasonings).
No pics, but trust me: A lovely and very wild main meal of the day.
Have you ever seen a more lovely loaf of bread? 🍞

The sort of thing Jackie might say on any ordinary day (such as today):
“Consider using a shallot as your allium in today’s lunch.”

(To be fair, just yesterday I told her I wasn’t using the shallots, assuming that she’d gotten them with some particular dish in mind.)