Thursday, October 24, 2013

Birthday Dinner 2.0

Saturday morning Josh and I slept in pretty late, then headed out to Einstein Bros. Bagels for breakfast/lunch - not really extensive enough to warrant "brunch".  Thanks to the Internet, I quickly found out that the bagels are all vegan unless they have some obvious ingredient to the contrary - the asiago cheese bagel = not vegan.  And I got my bagel topped with peanut butter, rather than cream cheese.  It was actually a really yummy topping, and I think a lot better than fake cream cheese would have been. 
 
A little while later we decided to head to Whole Foods to try to find the ingredients to make a recipe in my new vegan cookbook, Great Chefs Cook Vegan.  Unfortunately, we couldn't find any of the tricky ingredients so we had to scrap that plan for now.  In it's place, we decided to raid the bakery for vegan goodies and came out with yummy cowvin cookies and carrot cake cupcakes. 
 
They were both good, but the cookies are probably the real winner of the two.  The cupcake frosting was allegedly "cream cheese", but it really just tasted like vanilla frosting.  Creamy, perhaps, but not "cream-cheesy".  I'm starting to think it's really just impossible to recreate that tangy flavor of cheese.  Maybe I'm destined to live a life without it. 
 
When we got home we snacked on our treats while drinking wine and playing Karaoke Revolution on the Xbox - one of Josh's birthday presents to me.  Super fun, though it gives you a hard dose of reality as to your singing ability!  Josh only wanted one cupcake because they weren't the "real deal", so I ended up eating cupcakes for the next few days to finish them off.  Not exactly a bad problem. 
 
Later Saturday night ... once we were pretty far gone from our wine ... we headed out to dinner at Pacci's Neapolitan Pizzeria.  We had spotted this place a couple blocks from our new apartment and had been meaning to try it for a while - and I'm so glad we finally did!  We both love Neapolitan pizza, and though this place isn't guild certified, it seems like the genuine article.  I ordered the marinara pizza, which normally comes sans cheese - so no awkward ordering!  It was simple but delicious, topped with marzano tomato sauce, garlic, oregano, and basil.  Plus it wasn't even that expensive.  Delicious, gourmet pizza, walking distance from our apartment, for not a lot of money?  Yes, that makes for a very happy birthday!

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