7th Wedding Anniversary Weekend, Part 1: Home

Monday was our 7th wedding anniversary. Since I was on overnight call in the MICU (of course) on our actual anniversary, we celebrated early and decided to make it a two day event. In general, Adam and I have stopped giving each other gifts for holidays- we both value experiences over stuff so prefer to spend money on dinners or travel or items that we both can enjoy like Zak our kayak or Jack our near life-size bison photograph. Let me tell you, this makes anniversaries and birthdays more fun and less stressful! (We had a no-gift Christmas this year with my extended family and it was great! Highly recommend focusing on spending time with family rather than in stores!)


Despite this "no gift" policy, however, when I got home from work Saturday
afternoon, I found that Adam couldn't resist a gift in some form. He had completely cleaned and organized my room, closets and dressers included, and hung all my photos, including my 30th birthday present: 30 photos to remind me of 30 great moments in my life. (And he added 2 to make 32, since I seem to just keep getting older no matter what I do!) If you are interested in seeing all 32 photos, click here.


Since we had a very special bottle of wine we wanted to drink this year we decided to have dinner at home Saturday. Since Adam is such a great cook, dinners at home are often better than anything we could get at a restaurant, and this night was no exception. To the right is a picture of the cute chef with our first course: heirloom tomato, fresh mozzarella, and basil. Our first bottle of wine was from Bowers Harbor Vineyard, Blanc de Noir sparkling wine.

The first course: Heirloom tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, and basil

Next, it was time to open our special bottle of wine for the main course. We purchased this wine 7 years ago on our honeymoon to California. We went to two wineries in Sonoma on that trip: Bonny Doon (we had their Cardinal Zin during the wine ceremony part of our wedding) and Ravenswood, where we purchased the Ravenswood 1999 Cooke Zinfandel. Since the wine is over 10 years old now we thought we better drink it. It's a nice bottle of wine, but probably not the kind that lasts 20-30 years (I guess we'll never find out!). The wine was absolutely delicious. Complex, with deep flavors, very drinkable. And it went great with our main course: bison filet w/ Roquefort Societte raw sheep blue cheese and Velveeta Shells and Cheese. One of the many great things about eating at home is you can have fun combinations like great cuts of meat, wonderful red wine with an old standby like mac and cheese!

Ravenswood 1999 Cooke Zinfandel, Sonoma Valley

Bison filet w/ blue cheese

For dessert, we had chocolate layer cake from Whole Foods. It was pretty impressive. I had a slice of it today (4 days later) and it is still moist and delicious. Whole Foods gives a whole new meaning to "store bought cake". For dessert drinks we had Taylor Fladgate 20 year old Tawny port.

Chocolate cake w/ buttercreme frosting

We had a great night, good food, good wine, great company. And still a whole additional day of anniversary weekend to look forward to!