valentine’s day meal
I’m not a big fan of Valentine’s day, since in my opinion, it’s just a made up bunch of hooey to sell gift cards, flowers, chocolate, and diamonds. However, one doesn’t always get to choose which holidays in which they participate. That, combined with the fact that I liked to cook, lead me to create the following menu last night:
A few notes…
I stared at the strawberry avocado salad recipe for a while, thinking to myself, “man this is gonna be so nasty because the dressing is made of white sugar AND honey — way too sweet!” I was pleasantly surprised, as it worked quite well. The tartness of the strawberries helped knock down some of the dressing sweetness. I didn’t have cider vinegar on hand, so I used rice vinegar. I think you could use any common vinegar (other than maybe balsamic), since it really only serves to further knock the sweetness down. I used a base of baby spinach rather than mixed greens, since I hate iceberg, and it was lovely.
The wine sauce chicken was good, although I didn’t have mayonnaise on hand for the sauce. No matter, as I didn’t really taste any difference. I used sherry for the wine, which was nice because it’s a bit dryer than, chardonnay (too sweet) for instance. This recipe was really simple, and tasted great over a bed of roasted garlic wild rice.
Death by chocolate… what can I say? It was ridiculously good, and deceptively filling. Eating what I thought was a small portion pretty much rendered me incapacitated for the next few hours. I used a walnut-fudge brownie mix as well as regular instant pudding. Heath bars are a good source of “chocolate covered English toffee”.
Regarding the prep time… I think it took me about 3 hours total to prepare it all, so it’s definitely something that can be done semi-last minute, especially in a non-pro kitchen where you only have one oven. You’ll want to make the dessert first, and have it chill in the fridge while you prepare the other things. In other words, baking the brownie mix first frees up the oven for the chicken which comes next. You need to allot for both cooking the chicken and sauteeing the mushrooms in addition to the one hour of bake time. The salad is easy and is pretty much a no-brainer.
Because the chicken requires baking, if you’re clever, you can actually play cook and diner at a multi-course meal with equal aplomb, compared to the normal situation where the cooking requires constant attention. In those situations, you’re getting up every five minutes to check on the food and interrupting your meal. Not so great for Valentine’s day.
With this menu, if you have everything prepped beforehand, and have your date arrive about half an hour before the chicken is done baking, you’re golden. Kick off the rice (as it probably takes about 30 minutes for the Uncle Ben’s stuff) just as your date arrives. You can start on the salad (and wine! (we had Toasted Head, which at $15, is a pretty reasonable priced bottle of Merlot, Paul Giamatti’s whiny bitchrant in Sideways notwithstanding)), and relax for a bit. In half an hour, the chicken and rice will be done, and nice and hot, and you can take as long as you like to polish those off. The longer you take, the more time your dessert will have to chill — you win all around.
All in all, highly recommended.
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