As I mentioned last week, my birthday was on this past weekend. To celebrate a big milestone, I decided to actually move forward with my Paella-Palooza party. The idea got planted as a direct result of Preston Food Crawl and nomnomnom, I have no regrets. I booked my party for 11 people, and promply at 5pm, the LaLola partywagon showed up and unloaded their rig and ingredients. And for an hour, Miguel and Vanessa humoured my family asking them eleventy thousand questions about what they were doing. And THEN, we got to eat this amazing seafood paella that they made just for us. So GOOD! AND THEN, we had Abuela’s gluten-free cheesecake for desert. So the first thanks on this (one day late) Grati-Tuesday goes to Miguel and Vanessa of La Lola.

I cannot overstate how much I enjoyed this whole thing. If you have to turn 50, friends, this is the way to do it. Truly.

What else is on the gratitude radar this week?

My gentleman associate, knowing how rabidly excited I was to have my paella party, left me all the leftover paella. He said he enjoyed it, but he let me have a 3 day paella honeymoon with the leftovers for lunch this week.

This coming weekend, it is my gentleman associate’s cousin’s wedding. They’ve opted for a very intimate family dinner, so another cousin, her husband, GA, and I are going out to dinner together instead. She contacted me today to help her pick a restaurant. It gave me the opportunity to review the menus of the suggested restaurants nearby, and pick one that is friendly for my gluten-free life. I don’t always have many choices on a menu – sometimes a salad is the only gluten-free thing. So it’s nice to be able to suggest a restaurant where I have some choices.

Semi-related: Thanks to all the restaurants and product lines who are starting to have more gluten-free options. We really appreciate that. I can’t tell you how happy I am that gross mushy “spaghetti” and dry crumbly “bread’ aren’t the only options anymore.

Also, shout out to Pinterest. Yeah, I know, it’s a giant rabbit hole of time-suck, but it gave me the idea for this Charcuterie-of-the-sea board to have as nibbles before Paella. And it totally worked well, so the Fish-on-Fridays game in my life just levelled-up. Christmas eve, Good Friday, I’m lookin’ at you! You literally leave the canned fish in the cans and build around it. Easypeasy!

If you can choose to be anything this week, friends, choose to be grateful.