Birthday cakes and party time

This week has been all about my son’s first birthday here at RMDM and it has been a really fun week. My wife’s parents have been visiting with us since last Thursday and, unfortunately, they will be heading home back to upstate New York today. And while I will miss them, I will not miss camping out in my living room on an air mattress (damn you, smurf house!).

Still, we were happy they were able to be here for little man’s big day, including his first birthday party that we held for him last Saturday. It was a pretty low key affair, just some family and close friends in attendance. Since I haven’t done an RMDM Kitchen post in a while, I thought it might be fun to do a post on the one aspect of the party where I did go overboard – the food.

I enjoy entertaining friends and family at my home, but I don’t do it as often as I would like. When I do get around to doing it I usually end up getting way too ambitious for my own good in terms of the menu. This time was especially challenging because it was my first big event since finding out I am diabetic, so I wanted to come up with healthier fare for my guests. Not that what I used to cook was blatantly unhealthy, but it would also make it easier for me to not have to think to much about what I ate while I worked the kitchen and the grill.

As we’ve been overhauling our diet we’ve been gravitating towards Mediterranean dishes with lots of meats, vegetables, whole grains for the starch and things rich in essential fats like olive oil. So, I decided to run with that theme for the party menu with lots of kabobs (shrimp, chicken and kafta), a yogurt and cucumber salad and a build your own spinach salad bar sort of thing. As an accompaniment I made Muhammara, which is a roasted red pepper and walnut dip that goes great with the kafta kabobs (basically a hamburger on a stick).

Lastly, I made a variation on the Quinoa salad that I profiled here a few weeks back, only I turned it into a three grain salad using barley, millet and quinoa. At the suggestion of someone who commented on my Quinoa post I toasted it in a pan before cooking and it did add a very nice, subtle nutty flavor to the dish. I didn’t care for the millet and while the barley was a nice addition the next time I make it I will stick to brown basmati rice. The addition of tomatoes and feta made for a nice change in texture and flavor, so I will definitely reprise those changes.

To top it all off I grilled up some pita bread to serve with the feast and, as complicated as the menu may sound, it was cheaper and healthier than if I had ordered food. It did take five hours of prep work on Friday night and two and half hours of actual cooking before and during the party, but it was totally worth it.

And, since it was our little man’s birthday, we had a nice cake and some cupcakes for the kids that were there. My wife is the baker in the family, so she took the lead on the desserts even making our son his own little cake for him to destroy when it came time to sing to him. She wanted the cake to be as healthy as it could be, so she pulled out a few recipes from the Baking with Agave Nectar cookbook that I also profiled in a post that can be found right here.

She made the chocolate cake and the Hopsies’ cupcake recipe from the book and both were delicious. Before serving the cake we did let people know that the cakes were diabetic friendly, but we waited until after they had tried them to let them in on our dirty little secret about the secret ingredient – zucchini! That’s right; one of the main ingredients for both the chocolate cake and the cupcakes, which remind me of carrot cake, other than flour and eggs is zucchini. It made the cakes amazingly moist and since the zucchini is grated very fine you’d never know it was in there unless someone had told you.

We had a great time celebrating our little man’s first birthday and are very fortunate to have so many people in our lives that came out to share in his special day. I was pretty much asleep on the couch by eight o’clock that night, but, again, it was totally worth it.