The Restaurant Came Here

Today is my wife P. birthday.  This being one of those special birthday’s I wanted to take her to a nice restaurant.  Only my Spinalcerebellar Ataxia Disease has progressed to the point where I no longer have the strength and/or stamina to go out to a restaurant.  After discussing the idea, I decided to bring the restaurant to us at home.

Next I contacted all of the children asking them to help me make this a wonderful birthday meal for their mother.  Our second son J. agreed that he and his fiancée J. would order the food from the restaurant and pick it up and bring here to the house.  I asked our youngest, our daughter K. to be in charge of things here at the house which she agreed to do for me.  She also went birthday card shopping and bought a wonderful card I could give P my wife.

However, her husband’s great grandmother passed away and the funeral was to be in the early afternoon the Saturday of the birthday meal.  There were some questions that she and her husband would be able to be here in time to do all that needed to be done around here, so I asked out oldest son C. if he would be in charge of the things here at the house.  Now with that part of the meal taken care of all that remained was the menu.

I suggested that our son J. to talk to his mother asking her what food she would like on her birthday meal.  So J. and P. worked on menu suggestions and then I came up with the meal of P.’s choice.  At least I thought that was what I was doing.  My original menu looked like this;

Salad:
1 - Large Maggiano's Salad:  
We need to decide if a small (feeds 8) salad would be enough or if we need a large (feeds 16) salad.

Main meal: (All Small feeds 8):
Chicken & Spinach Manicotti:  
Our Famous Rigatoni "D":         
Chicken Saltimbocca:                 
Two sides:                                    

Dessert:

Tres Leches Cake: Jonathan would make.                

Apple Crostada: From the restaurant

However, when J. saw my menu, he told me that what the restaurant considered serving size and what our family considered a serving size were very different.  He said I was ordering way too much food.  So after talking to him the final menu was:

Salad:
Salad:  J. and his fiancée would make a salad.

Main meal: (All Small feeds 8):
Our Famous Rigatoni "D":         
Chicken Saltimbocca:                 
Asparagus: C. would buy locally and grill on our grill.                                    

Dessert:

Tres Leches Cake: J. would make this.                

Apple Crostada: From the restaurant.

With this smaller menu, the portion sizes were more to the size we would be able to enjoy and not feel like we would have to eat and eat until we all would be uncomfortable.  However, we still have a refrigerator full of left over’s from the restaurant.  So this birthday meal will continue for a couple more days.

The one sad note was that earlier in the week our youngest son told us that both he and his wife were fighting the flu and weren’t certain that they would be able to come for the birthday celebration.  Then on Saturday April 13 our youngest son told us that they both were still fighting the flu and would not be able to come and celebrate with us.  We were sorry they couldn’t come, but understand that they wouldn’t want to infect us with the flu.