Birthday dinner

Today we finally got around to having the postponed birthday dinner.

I cooked it all, which is fine, because cooking is more fun that sitting around by yourself waiting. We started with the Dom Perignon, of course, which was lovely, as usual.

Entree was a stuffed mushroom. I can't get brown field mushrooms here, so I used a large shiitake mushroom. Topped with a fat slice of tomato, some slices of avocado, topped with grated cheese, black pepper and parsely, and served on a round piece of garlic toast. This was SO yummy, you really must try it, and so easy too.

Main was stuffed chicken breast, with potatoes and salad.

The chicken was stuffed with camembert and apricot. I didn't do very well here, the chicken would have been best lightly cooked on the inside first, as it was raw and we had to microwave it. It was also lacking somewhat in flavor, if anyone has any good ideas as to how to flavor this dish, I'm all ear. All I did was butterfly the chicken breasts, put half a canned apricot inside half a round of camembert, then put that in the chicken breast. At the very least it needed salt and pepper.

The salad was mixed leaf with carrot dressing, and just perfect. The potatoes were golden paprika baked. Here's a good tip - boil the potatoes first, then scour them all over with a fork. Then brush with melted butter, and sprinkle with paprika. Bake for twenty minutes, then brush with butter again. They were just superb!

Dessert was brandy snaps brought from NZ in January, which were a disappointingly soft, despite having a best before date of December 2005. I won't complain about over-zealous Japanese expiry dates again.