EXTRA butter and tri-tip

 Most of our family, including my sister, Kristin arrived on Friday afternoon.  The timing was perfect since it was her birthday!  The decorations were hung and she had already chosen her menu a few days before.  She wanted a Mexican dinner and so we had chips, salsa, (Tyler's specialty) guacamole, and yummy salsa verde pork burritos with Pina Colodas. 

Then she opted for a family favorite of ours, from scratch (you know the recipe with four cubes of butter and eight eggs) German Chocolate Cake.  Well let's just say this one was SUPER yummy and SUPER fattening.  Because I was putting it all together as they were arriving and in all my hugs and chatting those first few minutes I almost doubled the butter!  Boy was it a delicious cake!

My sister is one of my very favorite people on earth.  She is a wonderful friend, example, and support.  It was so fantastic to have her here for her birthday to "love on"!  

Can you tell she loved the platter I gave her?!

And although not related to this birthday celebration at all, the next day we had a big family dinner.  My Dad is an award winning (think small town, Idaho fair) tri-tip barbecuer.  So we asked him to come prepared (he's got all kinds of tricks) to cook up the THREE tri-tips Tyler had gotten for dinner Saturday night.  He dug right in doing some SERIOUS tenderizing.  Like I think I went to WinCo and Target, came home and he was still tenderizing!  

Boy were they good.  Even the non-red meat lover (me) thought it was pretty tasty.