My Birthday Dinner

Yesterday was my birthday, and I thought I'd celebrate by cooking up a whole mess of things I hadn't tried before. I spent most of the day cooking up three different salads. I was particularly excited about Octopus Salad.

Copping up the octopi was strangely fun, but I was sadly disappointed when they came out of the boiling water 45 minutes later at about half their original volume. It was fairly tasty when done, but much, much smaller than I'd hoped for.
My mother was supposed to make this tomato and mozzarella salad, but she had strep throat, so she couldn't cook. I think I probably had the strep the weekend before we left Ireland, and chances were she caught it from me. Anyway, I wound up making this, too, with some last-minute help from my cousin Jethro.
We had a huge load of green beans from the local CSA, which went into this salad:

The recipe called for hazelnut oil, but I couldn't find it at any of our local shops, so I just used olive oil. It was still good.

Dinner began with an assortment of hors d'ouevres, including pate, clam dip, cheddar cheese, crackers, and assorted vegetables for dipping (there was a box of them in the fridge from a few days ago). There was wine, too. Soon enough, we moved on to the table, where we ate up the salads along with very good steak which my father grilled and a last-minute and somewhat under-risen and burned baguette.

We finished it off with Spanische Windtorte, which got a post all of its own.

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