Then, we started with oysters. Which I almost missed out on, being the blushing, buzzy bride flitting about the room chatting. Last night, we started with sweetbreads, suckled veal sweetbreads from Bobolink, ordered a few months back and tucked away in the freezer for a special occasion. Like our anniversary, the fourth, and wow, has it been four years already?

So yes, the sweetbreads. Not oysters, but surprisingly delicious with a perky piccata-like sauce. We had them with a split of prosecco.

And then there were the oxtails. The oxtails started it, really, my wish to have our anniversary dinner mirror in some ways our wedding night dinner, oxtails in January, rich and rustic (and this time around, with more seasonally appropriate weather). So we snapped them up when we saw them at the market recently, Aquidneck Farms oxtails, their braise started on the Monday holiday and finished up Wednesday evening, and they were truly luscious.

And my beloved husband, because he is awesome in so many ways, handled dessert. Our “wedding cake”, recreated. And it was fabulous.

We said when we moved away from Brooklyn that we would try to return to Marlow and Sons each year for our anniversary dinner, and we haven’t actually been able to make that work out, but what a delight to be able to evoke the memory and the flavors at home – the only thing missing was our friends.