Fruit and Flowers and Beer

Friday was our fourth wedding anniversary. We had kind of made a pact not to get anything for each other. We did this last year except that we got each other a two week trip to Switzerland and France. This year we broke our promise again on an extremely small scale.



Jen got me three fruit-themed beers as the fourth anniversary is supposedly the "Fruit and Flowers" anniversary. I got Jen flowers and also some apricots and peaches to round out the theme. It's probably our lowest key anniversary to date. This would be a tremendous savings if it weren't for the enormous expense of rapidly approaching twins' birth.

We had a guest in town this weekend, Jen's friend Amanda. For our anniversary we ate dinner at a local pub. This was every bit as romantic as our anniversary dinner last year and about ten times better an experience. Last year we waited 45 minutes to get our drink order taken at a restaurant we had previously been eager to visit. While it was an awful experience it has given us plenty to complain about over the past year and that is something I am very grateful for.



Tonight I grilled up some corn and made a version of Mexican street corn with a sauce of Cotija, sour cream, mayonnaise, lime, chili powder, hot sauce, smoked paprika, salt, and cumin.



For the main course I made enchiladas. I haven't made enchiladas since one of our first blog entries in 2008 where I made potato kale enchiladas. Tonight's were notably less vegan as they were made with garlic, onion, cabbage, ground beef, chili powder, cumin, salt, and corn tortillas. I topped them with Cotija and fresh cilantro.



One of the fruit beers Jen got me for our anniversary was this Black & Blue from Dogfish Head. It's a Belgian-style beer brewed with blackberry and blueberry puree. I can't tell if she got this for me to fit the theme of our anniversary or simply to annoy her father. Either way it satisfied both of those objectives nicely.

This was pretty standard for Dogfish Head in that it was not standard at all. It was very tasty though I don't think a very good pairing for Mexican food. That being said I enjoyed a glass thoroughly. This beer packed an incredible punch. After one glass I was feeling it two hours later. It was 10% ABV that drank like 4% ABV.

That's six whole percent of sneaking up on your ass!



After dinner we walked to Longford's for dessert. With no hockey on tonight we were left to recline in our apartment and pause briefly before returning to the tremendous amount of work left to be done to get ready for the babies.

Tomorrow I get back to work on finishing up the apartment and the long-awaited return of the farm share.

For a few weeks anyway we'll try to use the farm share vegetables creatively before the babies come and the vegetables wilt and rot in the fridge while we sleep on the couch.

It's gonna be great!