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Happy 244th Birthday, USA! I invited some friends over for dinner and stopped by the grocery store earlier to buy some filet mignon and some chicken. I wanted to cook something Portuguese, but could not decide. Then I thought that it would be silly to have Portuguese food on America's birthday, so I ended up bastardizing dinner: I cooked the filet mignon Portuguese style (I really like a recipe from the book "Tesouro da Cozinha Regional Portuguesa") and served it with a baked potato and roasted asparagus, which is as American as you can get. For dessert, peach cobbler with vanilla ice cream, which is as american as you can get, but I did add a bit of lemon juice and zest to the peaches before adding them to the baking pan, which is super-Portuguese. The food was good.

After dinner, we chatted and then went upstairs to the balcony and watched, well, mostly listened, the fireworks around Memphis. It's illegal to have fireworks within the city limits, but people still do it anyway. Plus, this year, those that have jobs have been so limited in terms of how they can spend their money (no travel, no parties, no restaurants, no shopping for weeks on end), that there were lots of savings accumulated to spend on fireworks. And they must have been spent...

I have been a bit out of touch with Portugal, so I don't even know if there were fireworks in Coimbra, as this was the year to celebrate Rainha Santa Isabel. I always thought it was neat that my new country and the city where I came from were linked by the 4th of July. Anyway, it's another birthday. Hopefully, next year, we will have even more reason to celebrate.