Whether you’re celebrating Canada Day or July 4th, or just enjoying a lazy summer weekend, I hope it’s a good one. Enjoy.

I had no idea, as we planned our meals for this week, that last night’s dinner would turn into such a big fun celebration. We’ve spent most of our time planning for and looking forward to today, our fifth wedding anniversary, and the meal we’ll share tonight, as well as making plans to continue the celebration over the weekend. We’ll have other things to celebrate then, too – my parents‘ 40th (!) anniversary, and my niece‘s second birthday, so much joy packed into a few short days.

But boy did I get a surprise yesterday thanks to the folks at food52 – they chose my Hunters’-Style Chicken as a Wildcard winner, to appear in the second food52 cookbook alongside Amy‘s amazing Short Rib Ragu and countless other mouthwatering dishes. It’s always a rush to have a recipe chosen as a finalist or an Editor’s Pick in a competition, but to have my dish deemed worthy of inclusion in the book just on its own is really something special. I’m incredibly humbled, and so thankful, and it was such a fun coincidence that I had already planned to make this dish last night.

I’m sure we’ll be raising many a glass over the next few days, and you can be sure that as we toast to all of the things we’re grateful for in our lives, we’ll be thinking of all of you and this incredible community we’ve become a part of.

(As always, you can click the photos to view them with more detail in my Flickr stream.)

So here’s what we did with our Thanksgiving leftovers – what about you?

(As always, click the photos to view them with more detail in my Flickr stream.)

Thank you for sharing our food and drink, our laughter and tears, our sorrows and joys this year. We are so grateful for you all.

(As always, click the photos to view them with more detail in my Flickr stream.)

(You know the drill… click the photos to view them with more detail in my Flickr stream.)

Here, have some smoked trout deviled eggs.

Then, we started with oysters. Which I almost missed out on, being the blushing, buzzy bride flitting about the room chatting. Last night, we started with sweetbreads, suckled veal sweetbreads from Bobolink, ordered a few months back and tucked away in the freezer for a special occasion. Like our anniversary, the fourth, and wow, has it been four years already?

So yes, the sweetbreads. Not oysters, but surprisingly delicious with a perky piccata-like sauce. We had them with a split of prosecco.

And then there were the oxtails. The oxtails started it, really, my wish to have our anniversary dinner mirror in some ways our wedding night dinner, oxtails in January, rich and rustic (and this time around, with more seasonally appropriate weather). So we snapped them up when we saw them at the market recently, Aquidneck Farms oxtails, their braise started on the Monday holiday and finished up Wednesday evening, and they were truly luscious.

And my beloved husband, because he is awesome in so many ways, handled dessert. Our “wedding cake”, recreated. And it was fabulous.

We said when we moved away from Brooklyn that we would try to return to Marlow and Sons each year for our anniversary dinner, and we haven’t actually been able to make that work out, but what a delight to be able to evoke the memory and the flavors at home – the only thing missing was our friends.

(As always, you can click the photos to view them with more detail in my Flickr stream.)