In yesterday’s post, I described the football decorations my husband, Clif, and I made for our son-in-law Mike’s birthday. And also the sugar cookies shaped like footballs. Now it’s time to move on to the meal itself. As I mentioned yesterday, in our house it is the tradition for the birthday boy or girl to pick the meal, and Mike chose tempura, with a special request for lots of chicken.

So tempura it was. Clif and I especially enjoy serving tempura. With the big red wok on a side table beside the dining room table, the process of dipping bits of meat and vegetables into a batter, and serving the food hot and fresh, the meal becomes a true feast. We also sometimes have tempura for special get-togethers.

Along with chunks of chicken breast, we had sweet potato, white potato, red pepper, and button mushrooms. (Almost any chopped vegetable would do.) All of these were arrayed in bowls on the dining room table so that Clif could pick and choose which delicacy he wanted to dip into the batter, which he whipped up just before the meal.

I made a sweet and sour dipping sauce from a very old and falling apart Wok Cookbook. This is one of our favorite sauces. I also bought a bottle of barbecue sauce for dipping. While I have a good recipe for barbecue sauce to use on chicken or with black beans, I don’t have a good one for dipping. I’ll be looking for one.

I cooked rice, put it in a bowl, and set it, along with a bowl of pineapple chunks—left over from the sweet and sour sauce—on the table. Then we had our feast, which stretched out for an hour or two, and that is also one of the delights of tempura. It is a very deliberate meal, and it takes the concept of “slow food” to a whole, new realm.

At the end of the meal, Clif decided to make some tempura pineapple. Utterly delicious but by that time we were all so full that we could each only eat one piece.

A happy birthday! As a final bonus, there were leftovers, and they in themselves are worthy of another post.