Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Birthday Dinner No. 1

Yay for birthdays!  And for awesome boyfriends who plan not just one birthday surprise, but tons of fun to make it a birthday-filled-weekend! 
 
Since my actual birthday was Friday, Josh took me out to dinner to celebrate.  We went to Great Sage, which is an entirely vegan, semi-swanky restaurant in Clarksville (a little far away, but worth it for a special occasion).  It's not exactly the best food, but it's pretty good, and the fact that I could order absolutely anything on the menu was a huge perk.  Naturally, I started with a cocktail - a ginger snap made with snap organic spirit, van gogh vanilla vodka, frangelico, cinnamon, and soy milk with a spiced sugar rim.  Yummo!
 
We decided to go all out with our ordering - split an appetizer, split two entrees, and then a dessert for each of us (with lots of shared bites).  We started with the artichoke dip.  Josh wasn't crazy about the fact that it was covered with Daiya (both because it tastes horrible and because he thought a restaurant should really make their own fake cheese), but I scraped it to my side and everything was mostly okay.
 
Our two entrees were pumpkin gnocchi - in sage cream with red peppers, peas, arugula, butternut squash and toasted pumpkin seeds - and Thai peanut curry - sweet potato, cabbage, peppers, tomatoes and carrots roasted and tossed with rice noodles and spicy peanut coconut cream. 
 
They were both so-so - good enough that you don't want to stop eating, but not like you'd want to seek it out again.  In particular, I thought the sweet potato in the Thai curry was all wrong.  And I really like sweet potato ...
 
Fortunately all was made up for by dessert.  I ordered the white chocolate creme brulee - a French classic with a touch of white chocolate and vanilla bean. served with a sable cookie and soy whip.  It really tasted nothing like creme brulee (half of why I ordered it is because I wanted to know what they were going to do there), but it did taste like delicious melted ice cream, which wasn't a bad thing. 
 
Josh ordered the almond chocolate chip skillet cookie - a baked-to-order almond flour cookie chocked full of chocolate chips and served piping hot with a scoop of ice 'cream'.  He wasn't super thrilled with it (it's basically a super gooey chocolate chip cookie in a ramekin) but I thought it was really good, and the ice cream was a great touch. 
 
All in all, I really enjoyed our meal at Great Sage.  The food itself may have only been okay, but the company was definitely out of this world :)  Birthday day 1 - complete success!

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