Kath's Birthday Celebration!

This weekend we celebrated Kath's 20th birthday, and we ofen do a family dinner with a cake in celebration. This year I spent a big part of the day cooking up a feast for my darling sister. She is a lot like me and gets very excited about food and loves to try new things. I knew I wanted to do Italian, but no pasta.

I chose to do a sidecar martini drink, a fig and goat cheese crostini, roasted beet and goat cheese salad, tomato vegetable casserole, pork with sweet onion marmellata, and a chocolate hazelnut cake. So I probably did spend too much time cooking in one day… but everything turned out delicious and Kath loved it so it was all worth it! Of course, Kath is a great photographer, so that is how I got all these beautiful pictures.

I did have a favorite; mine was the Tomato Vegetable Casserole. I have a mandoline slicer, which made making this a cinch. If you don’t have one, you can get one for about 10 (or more, mine was on sale) bucks at a Bed, Bath, & Beyond. With a mandoline you can make perfect extremely THIN slices of onions, potatoes (ideal for gratins), sweet potatoes (those are a bitch to cut by hand). So if you do not have not have one let me know, that might be a fabulous Christmas gift idea. This tomato casserole is so beautiful and honestly so tasty! You can for sure make this without the mandoline; it might just take a bit longer for the prep time.

We all had different favorites, so the next blog will be my mama's favorite, which of course was the chocolate hazelnut cake. Hope everyone is having a wonderful Easter!