Birthday fun – part 2

I may have arrived on my Grandma’s birthday, but I was due on my Mum’s birthday and, as I was a week early, her birthday is tomorrow.  Mum and Dad are off on holiday in the caravan with Sasha, Adi and Hugo tomorrow, so we set aside today for her to celebrate with me, Rich, Joe and Sophie.

Hurricane Bertha scuppered the original plan of a classic Beacon Hill picnic, so we agreed upon a Sunday roast at the Evanses.  Now, of the two Evanses in residence here, it is well known that I am not the cook.  I am the sous-chef.  So when Rich had one of his worst ever migraines last night and was up sick for many hours, I was left with a dilemma.  Cancel? Ask Mum to lead the cooking?  Neither of these options scream, “we’re treating you to celebrate your birthday Mum”.  So, I made the decision that I should buck up my ideas and just cook the roast dinner on my own.

Bear in mind that I had never cooked any of the elements of the planned roast dinner individually, let alone all at once.  This was definitely going to be a challenge.

With instructions from Rich (and I frequently checked those instructions) and a few tips and prompts from Mum along the way, I managed to pull together a full roast dinner.  There are various things I will improve the next time around, but I’m not going to be too modest about this achievement because I’m actually pretty darn proud of myself.  Just to be clear though, I’m not saying this is likely to be a regular occurrence.

My first roast dinner: chicken, roast potatoes, honey-roast carrots and parsnips, onion and mushroom gravy, sage stuffing balls, green beans, sweet potato mash and Yorkshire puddings.

My marshmallows went down a treat for desert, although I’ve not perfected any flavour other than vanilla.  Today it pretty much tasted like vanilla, even though I didn’t add vanilla flavouring and I was aiming for mango.  I’ll continue experimenting and report back once I find a method that gives a sufficiently intense fruity flavour.

After dinner, once cards and gifts were sorted, I revealed the entertainment for the evening – pinata time!  Mum had contributed the pinata to my birthday BBQ and then not been able to enjoy it with me, so I dug out my Winnie-the-Pooh pinata from the loft.  This sizeable pinata was kindly lugged back by Ailsa from Costa Rica years ago and, in honour of the effort she put in transporting it halfway across the world, I have been saving it all these years for a worthy opportunity to use it.  Today was the day.

I had quite a lot of fun filling the pinata: fruity chews, mini-Twixes, mini-highlighters, toffees, snack packs of Malteasers and plastic cookie cutters!  And, despite her reluctance to give Winnie-the-Pooh a wallop on the nose, I think Mum enjoyed discovering them!