Valentines Day

We don’t go out for Valentines Day. It’s crowded. It’s expensive. You have to wear shoes. And really, I’m a pretty good cook so the added value to going out as opposed to eating in is pretty minimal. Plus, if we stay home we can usually drink a bottle of wine for less than the price of two glasses. And I do like wine. This year’s V-Day menu courtesy of Bon Appetit Magazine:

Scallops with wild mushrooms and polenta

Arugula salad with caramelized onions, candied walnuts and goat cheese

Strawberries with zabaglione (yeah, I didn’t know what that was either)

The verdict? Scallops were amazing. Definitely adding those to the “things to make when we have dinner guests who eat both seafood and mushrooms” list. The arugula salad is one of my favorites. The strawberries were good, but I would have preferred whipped cream. The zabaglione was nothing special. It took awhile to put everything together, but it was a lot of simple steps. There was nothing complicated about this meal. And many of the steps can be done a day in advance.

We then proceeded to snuggle with Wylie on the couch, finish off a bottle of wine and watch the Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Next. Swedish dramas are always very romantic.

Vegetarian Enchiladas

Last night we had vegetarian enchiladas, via Pinterest. They were ok. I’m sure if you were a vegetarian these would be worth the effort, but the portobello mushrooms were kind of lost among the enchilada sauce, so seemed to be there more for texture than taste. And I really have to wonder if the effort involved in roasting the pasilla pepper really added that much. Couldn’t I just throw in some peppers from a can?

It was good, just not great. And it took way too much time to make (although, you can make a lot of it ahead of time if you plan accordingly, which I did not).

It will not be entering the regular rotation. I’ll save it for when I have to make dinner for a large group of vegetarians.

We also had Spanish rice, which was quite good. I’ve been looking for a recipe that was close to what we get in Mexican restaurants. This was close, so I think this will be my go-to rice for Mexican food.

In the beginning…

I cook almost every night. I love cooking. Sometimes it is a great success, sometimes it is a glorious failure. Most of the time it is good, but nothing I get really excited to make again. The problem is, when I do find something I want to make again, I often forget about it and thus it never makes it into our regular rotation.

I have a hard enough time keeping up with our “Adventures” blog, so I’m not sure this experiment will be successful. But I’m going to try to keep it simple and easy to find what I’m looking for. I’d also like to figure out how to take decent pictures of food, but that will be more of a long term goal.

For now, this will be a  place where I keep track of what we’ve been eating and whether it is worth eating again. We will see where it goes from there. Enjoy.