Once again, my husband's chronological age has caught up with my own. And so, we put our heads together so to speak, to decide what could be put together as a celebratory dinner for the special occasion of his birthday. He enjoys looking through our library of cookbooks and he set about doing just that. Earlier on Thursday he had gone out shopping and brought back among other food items, a pound of fresh mussels. What to do with mussels? Well, how about paella, a dish I haven't made in ages. He had also bought small-cut pieces of chicken breast, just perfect.

He went through an assortment of paella recipes and of all things came up with one that didn't seem as traditional to me as the one I'd imagined putting together based on a tomato sauce. This recipe he chose had no tomatoes in it, much less any vegetables other than onion, garlic and frozen peas, but it's the one he wanted. The teaspoon of water-soaked saffron gave it some of the missing colour, added to the chicken soup liquid base. I was happy because I would be using long-grain rice, since Irving usually prefers oriental short-grain rice and that's what we regularly eat, but with this dish parboiled long rice is a staple. I wasn't thrilled with steaming the mussels, since they're alive before steaming, but considered it a sacrifice to produce the dish wanted for our special meal. In any event, I shucked the mussels out of their shells afterward since they'd take up too much room in the casserole in which the finished product was baked.

And that casserole dish was one of a number that our younger son who does pottery, gave us as a gift years ago. Never before used, because I hesitate to use such beautiful things meant, I feel more for show than as utilitarian objects, the casserole dish was just perfect for the finishing bake of the paella. Because of the richness of the paella that followed a very small fresh salad and was capped off with fresh blueberries, we had decided it would make more sense to bake his birthday cake the following day.

So on Friday he went again on a hunt for a recipe that appealed to him and came up with one out of the 2015 Milk Calendar, each edition of which we tend to save for their often-intriguing recipes. The cake recipe he chose was called "Mayan Chocolate Bundt Cake". Aside from cinnamon, nutmeg and a whole lot of cocoa powder (3/4 cup) it also, unusually called for 1/4 tsp. cayenne pepper. I decided to use slightly less cocoa powder, to reduce the amount of cayenne pepper and to substitute the all-purpose flour called for with cake and pastry flour, requiring that the flour amount be slightly increased.

Before the choice of cake I'd meant to bake a light chocolate layer cake and layer the parts with whipped cream. For this cake, however, I thought it better to just present the whipped cream separately to be ladled over the cake slices as desired, and that's what we did. I prepared a chocolate icing just to be spread over the top of the cake.

And the chicken breasts I baked for dinner were glazed with a mixture of honey, soya sauce, cider vinegar and olive oil, after using garlic powder on the breasts themselves. A combination of chopped onion and sliced mushrooms rested on the bottom of the baking pan in which the chicken was baked and the resulting combination was fragrant and piquant, the chicken breasts moist and tender. Cauliflower florets were baked separately. Of course Irving ate too much of his birthday cake at one sitting so the following morning he wasn't too enthusiastic about his usual robust Saturday morning breakfast.

We splurged on dinner so to speak, and went short by necessity on breakfast, as a result.