Greece is the Word

Pamela: from the Greek, meaning "honey" or "all sweetness". 

In celebration of Pam's 48th birthday, we decided to try preparing some Greek dishes, (and some others that were, perhaps, a bit less ethnic).

We started the day with sausage and egg sandwiches on English muffins, with a side of pre-fab hash browns.  The meal put us in mind breakfast at a certain fast-food restaurant, a place we have, in fact, not visited in several years now. Both the turkey sausage and the eggs were organic, the latter from our friend Lori. Well, from her chickens. (Pam points out that Turkey is near Greece, by the way.)

As we realized only the next day, we actually had Greek yogurt with our McMuffins.
See a review of this yogurt from blogger Eve Was Right.

Home-brew Oak Barrel

Even while our first batch of wine (a Barolo) still ferments in our basement, we have jumped into our premier attempt at white wine, a Chardonnay. Here the birthday girl stirs the oak chips into the barrel. We look forward to trying some of this late in the summer.

Chefs Pam and James pose in our cozy kitchen with our matching anniversary aprons. These anniversary gifts from James' parents are both kitchy and kitcheny, they are also linguistic -- with "chicken" translated in many of the languages used in our house.

A beautiful Memorial Day weekend. We enjoyed eating alfresco.

For our main course, we once again tried our hand with phyllo dough, this time with a delicious Spanakapita - a mixture of spinach, onion garlic, egg, ricotta, and feta cheese layered between sheets of phyllo. We did learn that left-over phyllo dough is probably not worth keeping, though we did manage to use some as a bottom layer.)

Birthday Baklava was made with phyllo, pecans, and a lot of honey - definitely "all sweetness."

Vexillology challenge: what is the state flag in the middle of Pam's candles? Answer here.

Our dinner, and dessert were both (remarkably) well paired with Mead, a wine made from honey. We had to go to three liquor stores in order to find one that even knew what we were talking about. Pioppi's in Plymouth, Massachusetts (the very first liquor store to open after prohibition) is  the place to go. Rather than go to this trouble in the future, we are just going to start making it ourselves.

At the end of the day, there was nothing for it but to watch Pam's favorite movie of all time.

Is it our imagination, or are all three pictures above of the same couple?