Thank you!

Wow, thanks for all the birthday wishes yesterday!  Every time I heard my blackberry ding with another comment, it made me smile. 😀

Hannah had school yesterday, but she got up early and made me breakfast.  She said she went to four different stores the day before to try to find me a jalapeno cheese bagel, but couldn’t find one.  She settled on making me an asiago cheese egg sammie – it was delicious!

Hannah got me the Complete America’s Test Kitchen Cookbook – it has every recipe from 2001 through 2012!  Can’t wait to look through that – thanks Hanners!

My bosses were supposed to take me out to lunch, but there was a conflict, so they are taking me out today.  So I had a Roast Beef subway sandwich, with buffalo sauce – Melissa I am so glad you told me about Subway having buffalo sauce!

While it was off and on rainy during the day, by the time I got home, it was gorgeous grilling weather.

I manned the grill while Tony made his famous fried rice.  I had cooked the rice the day before and chopped the veggies I wanted to be put in.  He thought there were too many. 😀  He ended up cooking the eggs separately then adding them in later – so fluffy and good – and every fourth bite you get a bit of crunchy rice when he lets it cook in the cast iron skillet – its so fricken good!

I ended up doing a marinated skirt steak.  I love flank steak, but it is so expensive!  But I rationalized it by thinking, we could never have this type of meal in a restaurant for $18!

Asian Marinated Flank Steak

• 3 tablespoons hoisin sauce
• 2 tablepsoons rice whine vinegar
• 1 tablespoon soy sauce
• 2 teaspoons fresh chopped ginger
• 1 teaspoon sesame oil
• 1/8 teaspoon crushed red pepper (would have added more if it was just for me) 😀
• 2 cloves of minced garlic

Mix everything together and add the steak in a large ziploc bag.  Marinate up to 24 hours.

It was pretty thick, so I grilled it about 8 minutes per side for medium/medium rare.  My friend at work calls me Beef (instead of Beth).  In my office birthday card she wrote “Beef, it’s what’s for dinner!”  I think this picture sums that up!

I cooked Hannah skinny chicken with Greek seasoning.

Here’s Tony with his mad stir frying skills.

My delicious plate:

Some of the other birthday loot I got:  Trader Joe’s gift card, a bottle of Layer Cake Shiraz, my Mom, Hannah and Tony all gave me a variety of new cheese to try (how did they know I like cheese!) hot sauces, salt and pepper sweet potato chips (um, yes please!), spicy peanuts, fresh oranges, grapefruit and avocados from Florida from my PIL with two bottles of hot sauces and hot peppers, and cinnamon bun coffee.  Score!

I’ll leave you with the card that Hannah wrote me.  Love.

And thanks Tony for your cooking skills – I know you weren’t feeling that great and the fact that you went grocery shopping and cooked the fried rice shows me just how much you love me.  I couldn’t love you more. 😀