Happy Birthday Ellen!

Saturday night we hosted a 75th birthday party for Ellen: her actual birthday is next week. She's having a serial celebration with several small parties and visits from her children and grandchildren and a cousin. For this one, I invited a total of 8 of us, a comfortable seating for my table. Unfortunately the photos of our guests weren't a success so I can only show the food here.

We started outdoors with a shrimp appetizer that Abby made, and drank a champagne toast. For the main course, we had a classic Salade Nicoise and two "rogue" salads that aren't part of the classic. One was a lentil salad with citrus, red onions, and dried cranberries. The other was cucumber salad with sour cream garnished with red peppers.

The photos show the main course ready to serve. Enough Salade Nicoise for eight people won't fit into a single bowl or on a single platter. Guests thus arranged their own on their plates.

I arranged the classic components as follows:


I put the main vegetable ingredients in a big bowl: lettuce, marinated green beans, black olives, and tomatoes with a few rogue yellow pepper slices. I didn't get a photo of this bowl.

I served the pommes a l'huile -- that is boiled potatoes in vinaigrette with a bit of parsley-- in two small bowls to make for ease of passing them around. This is my favorite part of the Salade Nicoise, usually, though this time I also loved the tuna.

In the middle-sized glass bowl is the tuna steak that I had marinated for around an hour and Lenny had grilled outdoors a couple of hours before the guests arrived. The tuna is garnished with the last classic item, hard-boiled egg wedges.

Finally, you get to see a photo of my effort at a layer cake. I just don't practice enough to make a really presentable layer cake. This one had a slight disaster when layer 3 from the bottom cracked and sort of protruded between layer 2 from the bottom and the top layer. I pasted it all back together with lemon icing. I loved the taste. The guests were all very understanding of my weakness. I topped each slice with two flavors of Whole Foods' in-house brand of sorbet: Red Raspberry and Meyer Lemon.

Note to self: make 9 x 13" sheet cakes!! Give up on layers!