bIRTHDAY bLOG

We have been celebrating my thirteenth birthday for the past three days, so I will give you a quick description of each day.

We celebrated on the 17th because I wanted to celebrate in Belgium with our friends there and we were leaving that afternoon. We celebrated with chocolate cake (made by my friend Bethany with a little help from me and her sister Lisa) and a couple small gifts (a block of belgian chocolate and a book on drawing flowers with the instructions in Flemish).

There was some controversy over which day my birthday was because I was born at 6:18 p.m. on March 18th in Baltimore, which is 12:18 a.m. on March 19th in Rome. Unable to choose, we decided to celebrate on both days. On the 18th, we went out to lunch at a delicious restaurant nearby. Later that day, my mom made panekoeken (which are like Belgian crepes filled with sugar) as best she could without a recipe.

The final day of celebration, the 19th, was an ordinary day until dinnertime. For dinner we had pasta preceded by typical Roman fried zucchini flowers. They are fairly simple, but still quite a production to make. Here is how:

(1) Mix bread crumbs with one egg (the mixture is supposed to be crumbl rather than eggy, so you don't need much egg) and some salt and pepper.

(2) Gently fill the flowers with the bread crumb mixture and set them aside.

(3) Heat a lot of oil in a pan, but don't let it get so hot that it smokes.

(4) Fill a shallow bowl with flour and another one with a couple of well beaten eggs.

(5) Roll each flower first in the flour, then in the egg, making sure all of the outside of the flower is covered in both flour and egg.

(6) Put the flowers in the pan of oil and let them fry until they are lightly browned.

They have to be served fresh, so put them on a plate with several layers of paper towel and cover them until you are ready to eat them.

We finished the evening by staying up til midnight to watch The Matrix (which Denis and I had never seen before). Overall, my three birthdays were highly satisfactory.

Sophie