Our First Wedding Anniversary & Dakota's Steakhouse

       For our first wedding anniversary, John and I decided to do something simple. Our anniversary is January 29th, which fell on a Sunday this year. Saturday we spent the morning coaching our basketball team and refereeing a couple of games so it wasn't an option to make this an all weekend getaway.

     I don't know about you but with me, it doesn't matter what's going on, holiday, birthday, celebration etc - when I come home I find work that needs to be done. These chores either distract me and frustrate me that I'm not doing them or I go clean/do laundry/dishes etc rather than spending uninterrupted dedicated time with John.  So we booked a hotel in the Dallas area and made reservations to eat some place nice that neither of us has been to before! Dakota's Steakhouse in Dallas was the consensus.
    
      For us, going out to Dakota's Steakhouse was a big deal! I have honestly never been to such a nice restaurant before! I can honestly say that I have never seen a menu quite like theirs, just comes with the territory I guess. We both kind had bug-eyes when I opened the wine menu and not too far down the list was a wine so expensive that we could have purchased a house, a very nice house for! For dinner we started with soup. I had never had a chowder soup, and I'm not exactly the most adventurous with my food, so John had the Seafood Chowder and I had the Soup de Jour, which was a creamy chicken enchilada. I of course ate some of his (I've been eating off his plate since our first date!!), and they were both amazingly delicious!! For our main course, we both had the 14 ounce Rib eye steak. Their sides are served family style; John ordered the loaded baked potato, which was pretty much exactly as it sounds. I ordered the onion rings - won't lie, I wasn't all that impressed with the rings or the horse radish sauce it was served with. We agreed that the fact that the steak was so good made up for the sub par onion rings. ; )

      Oh, and to make the night all the more perfect... there was, of course, a nice gentleman playing the piano throughout the evening. Intertwined throughout several of the melodies he was playing was Hey Jude!! As random as it may seem this is "our song" of sorts!

      Last year, after our honeymoon, I prepped the top layer of cake to freeze, but it didn't make it more than a month in the freezer. The wonderful ladies who helped us with the cake and cleaning after the wedding & reception made sure that we had a piece of both of our cakes in all the flavors (mine had two flavors) to take on our Honeymoon.  Beyond that, and the bite we shared when we cut the cake - that was all the wedding cake we had.  We were far too tempted by seeing such a scrumptious cake in our tiny freezer, so we ate it! And it was delicious!!

     So, we had no cake to eat on our one year anniversary so I ordered a cake last minute from a bakery in town. It wasn't the same thing but this cake was delicious too!  If I had it to do all over again, I would have saved a big piece of cake from the top tier for us to share on the anniversary and we still would have eaten the rest!

     The actual day of our anniversary, we came home; I was one of the hostesses for a friends wedding shower, did that. Then, I went back to the house, ran a load of dishes, a couple of loads of laundry and cooked dinner. We ate dinner in bed watching an old movie (Kramer vs. Kramer... we started it the other night and rationalized that it is silly to be superstitious about watching a movie about divorce on our anniversary!) I honestly loved that at least a little bit of it all was our normal routine of sorts. The newness of cooking and cleaning and running a household is still there for us. I still find it a novelty to come home and put dinner on the table for my husband. I hope I can say this next year, and the year after that..