There are two things I love about October:
- It’s the season when the pomegranates turn a bright ruby red and signal the start of fall.
- Also, it’s our wedding anniversary — and one of my favorite times of the year.
It’s hard to believe that it’s already been one year since our wedding!
The wedding planning phase took the longest, and at times felt like it was never going to end!
Now, suddenly, here we are one year later!
Josh and I got married on 10/10/21 during a beautiful Fall evening on our land surrounded by orange trees.
In many ways, it was our perfect wedding and we couldn’t have imagined a more beautiful day.
The last year and a half have been busy!
We bought a house, moved, planned a wedding, and enjoyed a month-long honeymoon. All of this kept our calendar quite full!
So we sat down and asked ourselves: how do we want to celebrate our first anniversary?
We decided it was fitting to spend the day enjoying our home and doing some of our favorite things together.
We also agreed that a weekend getaway trip before the end of the year could be nice.
We came up with a list of activities for the weekend:
- Review our honeymoon footage from Thailand (we shot an entire terabyte!)
- Make a pancake brunch and enjoy it in the half-moon [photo]
- Pop some of our favorite champagne
- Watch our wedding movie and revisit our photos
- Swim in the pool and enjoy the last few days of warm weather
- Bust our wedding cake out of the freezer
- Remake a favorite cocktail from the wedding
- Do a photoshoot in the orchard
- Pick and enjoy pomegranates
- Make dinner together
- Enjoy a nice dinner out
- Relax and spend time together with no expectations
- Refresh our house for fall and plant some succulents
Josh and I find every moment we can to celebrate because life is simply more fun that way.
We enjoyed our special day by leisurely choosing activities from our list with no expectations except to fully enjoy the day.
To add icing to the cake, my mom graciously offered to cook us an anniversary dinner the following weekend so we could all celebrate together. She even offered to make anything we wanted! My Mom is one of the most talented people I know in the kitchen.
We chose Persian food (…no surprise there!) since we had it at our wedding and it’s one of our favorite cuisines.
My family showed up at our door singing “Happy Anniversary” while bearing gifts and all the ingredients for our tasty anniversary dinner.
We popped some bubbly and started our stroll around our land which looked quite different from just one short year ago…
At our wedding, we took some of my favorite photos on a swing in our neighborhood shortly after Josh made us our own swing set in the orchard.
For our anniversary, he surprised me by upgrading our swing (redoing the bench to make it a bit wider) and refreshing the flowers.
I loved it! We recreated one of our swing wedding photos — and conveniently, now both of us can sit on it at once.
We started a tradition because creating new traditions with family and friends is one of the most special things you can do in life.
We did a photo shoot in the orchard and recreated the same poses as a couple of our favorite wedding photos.
We’ll continue to do this every year as a tradition and a really unique way to watch the orchard evolve over the years.
Where we said “I do”!
After that, we headed inside to enjoy some Persian appetizers. Aush Reshteh (Beans and Greens Soup) was paired with…Kaskeh Bottomjune (Garlic Eggplant Dip) plus “Roya & Josh” cookies and various homemade vegan cheeses.
My mom had a special stamp made and baked these delicious sugar cookies for us.
And to start another tradition (of course!), we dressed up in our wedding attire and plopped down in my cloud of a wedding dress to say a few words about this moment in time.
We recorded a series of questions and answers about our hopes, goals, and dreams for the future.
We’ll do this every year on our anniversary and not watch the videos until our 10-year wedding anniversary.
We made some pretty wild guesses and dreams for the future!
It will be so fun to see everything we have accomplished together by then!
Josh took me to see one of my favorite artists, Michael Buble, a few months prior as an early anniversary gift.
Since our plan was to enjoy a weekend getaway for our anniversary in the next month we agreed that we weren’t going to do gifts. Or so I thought!
The first anniversary is paper-themed so I went the more traditional route and surprised Josh with a few of our favorite wedding photos framed and a wedding book with our other favorite photos.
It was SO HARD to choose those prints. Mostly because we absolutely LOVED our wedding photos and there were SOO MANY good ones I had a really hard time choosing! Our Photographer Kristen Booth – The Fairytale Photographer did an outstanding job!
I also liked these suggestions from The Knot for first-anniversary gift ideas which included a custom star map, a date night subscription box, and cozy bathrobes.
It was really a gift for both of us and I enjoyed surprising Josh.
Then…
He surprised me with tickets to Ed Sheeran for next year!
I think my face says it all!
My family surprised us with something I’ve been wanting for a while…
Only I would get SO excited about a machine that lets you make nut milk from scratch.
One of our goals is to make as many of our daily staples from scratch as we can.
It’s part of our effort to reduce waste (i.e. buying cartons of almond or soy milk). Also, when you make something yourself you know exactly what’s in it.
I’m familiar with the machine since my mom has one and uses it regularly.
On to the dinner party…
We recreated the same tablescape from the wedding complete with eucalyptus, candles, Orange & Joon dried oranges and fairy lights.
Originally our plan was to enjoy different courses of our meal around the property (champagne in the orchard, cocktails on the wedding stage, etc.) but we were lucky enough to receive the first rain of the season — so we kept it indoors this time around.
Anniversary Dinner Menu
Dinner was a Persian feast featuring the wedding rice that we enjoyed at our wedding along with some of our favorite dishes.
Salad with Seitan Vegan Bacon, Avocado, Fresh Veggies, Persian Cucumber, and a Homemade Dressing
Persian White Basmati Rice with Saffron
Rice with Barberries or Zereshk Polo
Wedding Rice with Orange Peels, Pistachios, & Almonds
Shirin Polo
Vanilla Creme Brulee with Raspberries & Wedding Cake
Almond Champagne & Roya’s Margarita
Wedding cake + another dessert
All of these recipes will be in our upcoming cookbook: The Vegan Persian Kitchen
You can sign up to be notified when it’s ready here. We are so excited to share our book with everyone!
On to the Theater!
A dinner party isn’t complete without a film viewing in the theater.
We were lucky enough to receive two wedding videos – one short version and one long version.
We thought it was the perfect time to unveil the feature-length wedding movie.
If you’re on the fence about paying for a videographer – do it! It’s totally worth it. The day will come and go before you know it so why not capture it so you can relive it, and preserve it as part of your family history.
We all huddled and cuddled together in the theater and relived the wedding day together.
We saved the top of our wedding cake by wrapping it with cellophane and tin foil. It held up pretty well!
The next morning we had our wedding cake and champagne. We weren’t sure if the cake would hold up but it tasted just as good as it did on the wedding day!
Alternatively, if you weren’t able to save your cake topper our bakery suggested just ordering a small cake for your anniversary. I plan on doing this for a future anniversary.
Our first anniversary was so delightful and perfectly “extra.” It was wonderful to be able to share it with our family and Josh and I are indescribably excited to continue building our future years together.
Hi there, my name is Roya — that means dream in Farsi– I am a creator, marketer, adventurer, cookbook author, dreamer, curator of experiences, and plant-based lover of food on the search for the best plant-based restaurants in the world.
My husband Josh and I own several acres in San Diego and it is our mission to grow the majority of our own food. Follow along on our journey with us.
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