Valentine's Day Dinner

Okay. This is it. The big time. I was cooking a gourmet meal for my sweetie on Valentine's Day. Never mind the gumbo disaster or the burned patty melts, this was a new meal, a new dawn. Deep breaths...and here we go.

I started off with the pasta portion of the meal which included roasting grape tomatoes and garlic then mashing it in a bowl with a little of the starchy water from the pasta pot. Next, you dump in the pasta (I chose bowtie because it's my favorite!) and wilt in some basil and arugula. You can also dump in a handful of parmesanno-reggiano, but I only had regular parmesan. In theory, this sounded like a fantabulous pasta dish. However, something bad happened. The pasta is supposed to be just shy of al dente so when placed in the tomato/garlic liquid, it'll soak it all up leaving no liquid at all. This didn't happen. Either I spooned too much starchy water or the pasta was overcooked or the bowties held too many water droplets, but it turned out as soup. We had to use a slotted spoon to serve it, which made my left eye switch slightly.


The main dish was gorgonzola steaks with a sage, parsley, and scallion rub. You sear the meat to get it nice and caramelized then add the toppings before placing it in the oven to bake until everything gets nice and melty. I love cheese so this sounded phenomenal to me. I pull it out and looks all perfect and I serve it up next to our pasta soup. Giraffe takes a bite and said it was pretty good. I breathe a sigh of relief then cut my own piece. One teensy weensy problem: turns out, I don't like gorgonzola. It tastes too much like bleu cheese, which I don't like. My Giraffe reassured me that he liked it because he really likes bleu cheese.


It broke my heart and went against all my cheese-loving principles, but I scraped all the cheese off the steak and ate it with the few herbs that remained. That ended up being pretty good. Next time I'll try a different cheese that I know I like ahead of time.

Now it was time for dessert. I tried a new recipe, but I had no worries. Dessert is what I can do. I did a no-fried ice cream that tasted just as good as you can get at a Mexican restaurant. I rolled ice cream balls in cornflakes before I started cooking dinner then put them back in the freezer to harden. Once we had eaten, I pulled them out and melted some honey and cinnamon to drizzle over the cornflaked ice cream, which totally made up for the mediocre dinner. At least he liked it.

I need to get back to my roots and stick to country cooking. This was a Rachael Ray recipe and some of hers have worked nicely in the past, but next time I'm going to try a Pioneer Woman recipe. My food talks to each other likes hers does so it should be a snap!