My husband’s 30th birthday was this past Friday. To celebrate, I invited family over for dinner on Saturday night. My husband is a vegetarian, but we are the only herbivorous types in our families. Regardless, everything I made for dinner was vegan and I’m not sure anyone was the wiser.

Here was the menu for the evening:

Salad – Romaine and baby greens with cucumbers and blue berries with Creamy Basil Dressing (from ED&BV)
Entree – Red and white lasagna (from Veganomicon)
Side – Beanballs (from Veganomicon)
Dessert – Vanilla/cinnamon cake filled with cashew cream and strawberry preserves with vanilla buttercream frosting

I thought everything turned out very well and the lasagna could easily fool a meat eater (nuts are amazing cheese replacers!). The beanballs had great taste, but there’s no way they could pass as fake meat – which is fine, because I don’t think that was their goal. It was great to have them as a side and not feel as though something was missing alongside the lasagna. The Creamy Basil Dressing was delicious and it will for sure become part of the regular salad dressing rotation (I typically use Bragg’s Organic Vinaigrette, which is terrific for a store-bought dressing).

I pride myself on my desserts, but the cake I made this past weekend will not go down in history as one of my favorites. It got great reviews from my husband and my family and my toddler LOVED it (the greatest compliment of all), but I made so many mistakes along the way (I ruined a whole batch of coconut whip cream during the whipping process and had to make an emergency batch of buttercream to use as the frosting instead), that my enthusiasm for the cake waned and transferred to my feelings about the taste of the cake.

I have never before cooked for so many people. If nothing else, I learned this weekend that cooking for 9 people in an itty-bitty kitchen with a small refrigerator and no dishwasher while holding an under-the-weather 15-month old is biting off a bit more than I can chew. We’ve had a lot of family get-togethers in the last few months, but this was the final one and I’m excited to get back to cooking for myself and my family again.