Today is my sweet husband’s birthday – the 60th time he’s celebrated it. I’ve been celebrating with him since 2005, and I hope to be celebrating at least 20 more. I’m really shooting for 30 more, or more. He’s not like anyone else in this world, and I’m just sorry it took so long for us to find each other.
He’s a big foodie. He’s just a wonderful and intuitive cook. He tastes, gazes upward, stirs again, tastes, and at the end he’s made us something delicious for dinner. He never makes the same thing twice, even when he’s trying. That’s fun, but sometimes I really want that orange shrimp he made me 5 years ago!
One thing he doesn’t do is bake, so luckily that’s what I love to do. For his birthday breakfast, he wanted sour cream pecan biscuits – a Dorie Greenspan recipe, from her book Baking: From My Home To Yours. It’s a fantastic book, and spawned the wonderful group project called Tuesdays With Dorie. I participated for several months, and it was loads of fun. So here is a picture of the biscuits, to tempt you. They have brown sugar and chopped pecans in them, so they’re slightly crunchy and slightly sweet, and quite luscious with honey drizzled inside:

cooling biscuits, just out of the oven
For his cake, he wants carrot cake, with orange cream cheese frosting. It’s hard to find a bad recipe for carrot cake, but this one is my very favorite. No pineapple – I never really understood the addition of pineapple – but it’s incredibly moist and rich, and the hint of orange in the frosting makes it special. Here’s one I made before:

carrot cake with orange cream cheese frosting
Apologies for the quality of the photo – I took it before I really knew what I was doing. So my day will involve a bit of fresh flower shopping, some Post-It Note posting….every year I put little Post-It notes everywhere around the apartment (on doors, in the fridge, in surprise places, in cabinets, hanging down from cabinets, each with a little note of some kind) and they stay up all year long. So today I’ll take down the old ones and put up new ones. I’ll make that carrot cake, and he also wants me to make a batch of oatmeal cookies to have around. We’ll have pork tonkatsu for dinner – he’ll make that – and tomorrow we’ll go to Queens for dinner with our youngest daughter, to celebrate over a wonderful Greek dinner.
Happy birthday and many, many, many more.














other friendly voices