A Birthday Dinner

Sheila's birthday is tomorrow but we did most of the celebrating over the weekend. She opened most of her presents already and we had a meal of her choice last night.  Oh, and she chose a nice chocolate raspberry cake which we'd cut into on Saturday night.  

The dinner she chose for last night was delicious. 

I roasted a garlic herb roast beef. I inserted some garlic cloves into the meat spread out across the top of the roast. Then I rubbed on a mixture of spices and herbs. That was in the oven less than an hour and a half. I tented it under foil while finishing up the rest of this meal. That roast beef was tender and tasty!

The asparagus was wrapped with smoked bacon in small bundles. We placed the bundles in a baking dish and then drizzled it with a smooth mixture of butter, brown sugar and soy sauce. Then I added some garlic salt and freshly ground pepper before roasting it just long enough to crisp up the bacon.

The potatoes were cut into chunks and par-boiled first... the only time I don't par-boil first is when making baked potatoes. I added some of my own seasoning mixture after the potatoes were placed into a buttered baking dish. This dish only needed about 25 minutes in the oven at the same time as the asparagus bundles. Since they were already par-boiled, they only needed to be in the oven long enough to brown them up a bit. We hadn't made these roasted potatoes in quite some time so this was a nice change.  

As always when we make a meal we both like and desire, we ate far too much! 

I had to let Sheila open a couple of her birthday gifts before we went shopping on Saturday morning because she was talking about buying these two things while we were out. I knew she was going to do this so I was ready for it! I simply had her open a couple of the gifts before we went shopping. 

Then, yesterday afternoon, she was feeling well enough to do some yoga so I had her open another gift first. I had searched for and found four DVD's of yoga geared toward cancer patients and recovery. She was excited to try one of them out so she quickly opened one of the DVD's and popped it into our DVD player, laid out her yoga mat, and had a nice long yoga session. 

Sheila has only two small gifts left to open but she'll need to wait until her birthday.