My birthday was yesterday!

MM made the whole week special, giving me a small gift every day of the week leading up to my day.  In addition, we went to our jeweler to talk about taking a piece of jewelry that belonged to MM’s grandfather and turning it into something that I could wear (MM does not wear jewelry, with the exception of the wedding ring).  I’m super excited about the design that we went with, and can’t wait until it all comes to fruition.

When I get it, I’ll post a picture.

Saturday night was dinner with my parents at an Italian place.  The lobster ravioli was really good, as was the company.

Then, on Sunday, my birthday, I got a little crazy.  I’d had in my head a few things that I wanted to do, and when I say a few things, I really mean… five.  Five projects that I wanted to do during the day.

There was just one problem.  All but one of them involved the kitchen, and I was really, really into my book.

Doh!

The result?  I was in the kitchen for the majority of the day, making two types of cookies, slow cooker meatballs, finishing the work for homemade pizza dough (made on Saturday) so that we could have it for dinner, and trying (failing, really) to make bread.

The two cookies – one was a recipe that I’ve posted about already, but with almost all the chocolate chips removed.  MM requested that I make the Chewy Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies without the chocolate chips.  So I did, but I hid a single chocolate chip in 8 of them.

Not a bad ratio, really.

Salted Chocolate Chunk Cookies were the ones I took into work to share with my coworkers for my birthday.  I left a small amount at home so that I could have a few.  But the rest are almost gone!  Recipe well received!

The meatballs are for dinners this whole week, and I’m looking forward to them.

And finally, the bread.  Well, that didn’t go so well.  I failed to check to make sure that all the ingredients I needed were in my kitchen.  Don’t get me wrong, I had everything.  But the yeast was really old.  Three years, in fact.  I still tried to use it, but as of this morning when I left, they hadn’t risen past the two inch mark in the loaf pans.  No worries, I’ll just pick up yeast the next time I’m at the grocery store and try again later.

The fifth project never happened.  It could have, but I decided to take my day easily, finishing my book between recipe work.

And finally, for dinner, MM and I made those homemade pizzas and watched four episodes of a new (to us) series.

What a fantastic day!

(I’ve posted pages about the meatballs and salted chocolate chunk cookies on my Food Trials page.  Check them out!)