For our tenth (10!!!) wedding anniversary, my wife and I had to cancel our trip
thanks to shelter in place/travel restrictions. That left me in a bind to do
something special for her in the current covid craziness. I decided i would host
a special dinner for Megan. My first thought was I could cook a fancy dinner, but with
kids that usually means it is actually more work for her if she has to watch the chidlren while I am in the kitchen. So what is a guy to do? Luckily, I had my partner in spreadsheet crime, Steffi, to help brainstorm ideas.
Three or four google docs later, we had a plan to host a multi course meal with each course corresponding to one of our past trips or experiences. To make things simpler, I would use door dash for a few courses while having a main course I could bake for a while to give us time to eat without feeling rushed. There are a lot of elements to pull together but the general concept was to have 5 courses, each a different location that we had visited. For each course, we would have a dish from that location, a themed drink and then a slideshow of our trip there. We would start late (around 8:30) so that we could get the kids into bed.
In order to prepare, I realized I needed to do the following:
- Decide the themes
- Build a menu
- Find drink pairings
- Build a slideshow per location
- Build a soundtrack of songs per location
- Decide on the decor
For locations, I balanced places that were meaningful but also had delicious food. I ended up choosing Hawaii, France, Italy, America and then our wedding.
Food
I built this menu to simulate a fancy restaurant with pairings for each course. Courses 1 and 3 were ordered from door dash so all I had to do was plate them.
The cheese plate I ordered from fromages.com so I did need to assemble it. I added sliced apples, grapes, olives a bunch of crackers and mixed nuts. I went a little overboard and we are still eating cheese 3 days later.
I had a great cut of cowboy ribeye from Snake River Farms. I normally cook ribeye on the grill with a reverse sear. I used our roasting pan to elevate the meat to increase air flow. About 90 minutes later in the oven at 275 it was ready. I use the meater block to track temperature to make sure it is fully cooked. After it hit temp, I pulled it from the oven and let it sit for 20 minutes and then seared over the grill on each side. It came out to a perfect medium rare.
For dessert, I had commissioned BethAnn from StudioCake to make a cake based on our top layer of our wedding cake. I made a slight upgrade to use her peanut butter ganache that I knew Megan would love. BethAnn was so great. She made it really easy to collaborate and delivered the cake day of to us. I normally don't love fondant but hers was really good. I can't recommend her enough.
It was a lot of fun. I went overboard in terms of dishes and wines and we had tons of dirty plates after the meal but it was worth it. I think we might do this in the future but with 2 or 3 courses.
Since my starter was poke, I wanted a tropical cocktail to pair and opted for a Hawaiian moscow mule. I took fresh pineapple, cored it and blended, then strained it. Add 1 oz pineapple juice and 1.5 oz vodka (I used Pau Ocean Vodka to keep with the Hawaiian theme) to a cocktail shaker. Add a squeeze of lime and then pour over ice into a copper mug. Top with ginger beer (I used fever tree). I added a pineapple wedge on the side of our copper mugs.
For everything else, I went with wine pairings. I ordered most from https://www.klwines.com/ and tried to pick a wine from the appropriate region. Ten years ago, I had purchased a wine for us to open on our 1st, 5th and 10th anniversaries so we decanted the 10 year wine to pair with dinner.
I used Google photos and could search by location. Then I added good ones to an album. To play them back, I used our roku on our tv with the PhotoView channel. All I had to do was pick the appropriate albums to let them play.
Music
I went through Google Play and added songs to these albums. I figured it would be 20-40 minutes per course but I put an hour+ just in case we took longer
- Hawaii
- France
- Italy
- America
- For our wedding, we had gotten an hour long video from our videographer and I uploaded that to youtube and played it back. 6 minute short version here
Decor
I bought a white tablecloth to cover a card table that I put in our office area. I wanted it to feel a little more intimate compared to our normal dining table. Ten years ago, we asked everyone at our wedding to put stones in a vase which I used as the centerpiece along with an electric candle. I printed the menu to add a nice touch to the place setting.
