Yes! We are aged! It is birthday week and we have therefore spent every night from the 3rd to the 6th making and eating exciting things for dinner.

For my birthday Saturday we first had lunch at Catherine's Caffe, which is a Czech restaurant/cafe with very good coffee and a nice little back garden full of picnic tables. John ate fruit salad and a big exciting hummus and avocado wrap; I ate a huge bowl of carrot ginger soup, a huge plate of chicken schnitzel with lemon twist, and a similarly huge whack of hot, mustardy, caper-filled potato salad. It was massive and awesome, and I still have half of the salad and chicken waiting for me in the refrigerator. In conclusion, there may be a massive, awesome potato pancake later.

Or I may just eat the leftovers after making the schnitzel all crispy in the glorious toaster oven. Yeah!

After lunch we went to the Greene Grape Provisions for dinner meat, to the farmer's market for bread, mustard greens, apple cider, and fresh garlic, and to Gnarly Vines for wine and golden rum. It's definitely birthday week; we would never, ever be buying rum otherwise. It poured rain on us for the entire expedition, and we got very soaked and happy and went home and drank cold apple cider with rum. Yes birthday!

For birthday dinner John was all excited about making me Jacques Pépin's pork tenderloin, and I was pretty excited about drinking red wine, watching him cook it, and eventually eating it.

Obviously, we did not make an entire loin of pork just for me. One chop of loin was totally sufficient, and got totally cooked and perfect just through the initial pan browning. Other than that, since we had remarkably little luck finding either gruyere or spinach (I don't even know what cheddar is doing in that recipe; I'm pretty sure it was gruyere in the episode), we switched the cheese to gouda and the greens to baby mustard greens.

John also threw some of said red wine in to deglaze the tomatoes at the end. We had a pint of awesome end-of-season gold cherry tomatoes from the CSA box and everything.

Outcome: success! We cut the individual roulade into six pieces, and I ate them all, two at a time, until everything was gone.

Then there was more rum and apple cider and being extremely happy and birthdaylike until far too early in the morning.