On Monday, Mark took us girls (me and our exchange student) out for dinner for valentine’s day. It was the first Monday our local & organic Italian place was open – after years of being closed on Monday nights. It was my first day back at work with my broken toe. I gimped to the free 80 bus, which drops me off right by my office, but a couple of blocks from home – and kinda on the way to the restaurant. I stayed at work a little late, and it was snowing. Our reservation wasn’t till 7:00, but I decided that if, when I got to the underpass on the way home, it was at least 6:15, I’d turn right and head to the restaurant, instead of turning left for home. It was 6:21 at the underpass, so I went to the restaurant and got a seat in the bar. Had a glass of wine, read one the books I have in my phone (The Marriage Plot) and watched the cooking channel on the screen behind the bar. I think it was Giada de Laurentiis making a cake, that looked like it had hazelnuts & coffee beans ground together in the food processor, then butter, chocolate & eggs added. She put whipped cream on top, and fed it to some kids in a tent – I can’t seem to find the recipe, but the episode listing for this season includes kids & camping.
When we got seated, we all opted for salads & pasta – Mark & Joelle had Caesar; I had the house with fennel dressing & greens (and nicely thinly sliced red onion, that even though I picked out I could still taste next day). Mark had pasta Bolognese, I had seafood with vodka-tomato – I liked the mussels, but not the shrimp – and Joelle had the wild boar lasagna. We sat near my hairdresser & her husband, and chatted across tables.
Last night, actual Valentines, I was going to make steak frites – We had gotten a really nice steak from Fountain Prairie at the Saturday market – but everyone seemed to be going too many directions. Al was home, so I made a tray of nachos with leftover taco meat for the kids, and I ate bread & cheese. Then I made 6 little chocolate cakes from a Splendid Table recipe that I got from their email news letter. Almost flourless, melted bittersweet & unsweetened chocolate, chocolate chips or chopped chocolate – the only unusual ingredient was a whole teaspoon of cinnamon. We ate them topped with whipped cream, in front of our respective TVs. I watched the last season 1 episode of Game of Thrones. All indoor, bad light pictures – as the Breakaway Cook complained recently, it’s so hard to get food photographed indoors at night to look good – why I’m so jealous of Heidi & Deb, who, as cookbook authors, can stay home and photograph their food in the day time.
So that’s the double – the steak frites is looking to come in third, probably Thursday.
I did finally cook the steak Thursday, and we ate it with creamed spinach and oven steak fries. Yum. There was a good sized hunk of steak left and we talked about how this pound & a half piece of meat that we had just fed 3 people on was small for the US, but would be considered enough for four in the Netherlands.
