Happy Birthday Meal: No. 147

It started last year, when I got to thinking about how I wanted to celebrate my birthday. And since I like whipping up meals and having people over, that's the plan I got in my head and decided to repeat this year. Since I'm such a fan of red meat, the only decision was which kind of beef would be the featured entree.

I decided to go with a boneless ribeye roast.



For the appetizer, I liked the idea of making small crabcakes again, but I tried out a new recipe that had some Asian inspiration to it. I still went with the amazing garlic-chile-lime aioli that was shared with me by good friends in New Jersey.



The salad is the closest imitation I can make of a much-loved salad offered at the Ryan's Restaurant on Coliseum Drive here in town, a finer dining establishment that was always a good place to go on special occasions. The recipe for this salad and its sweet-and-sour vinaigrette was tracked down by my college roommate Jimmy Randolph; he pulled it from Southern Living. It is a spiced pecan and blue cheese salad where all the flavors just seem to blend wonderfully.



I did not like the final result with the roast; I feel like I've had much better beef than this. The shiitake mushroom cream sauce was also a little on the bland side. But if you look closely at the plate below, you might notice something funny about the Brussels sprouts: they are deep-fried. This is a Michael Symon recipe as found on the Food Network's website, and I wanted to try it because I had these at two of his restaurants last month (one in Cleveland, and one in Detroit). They were pretty darned good.