What I Ate Wednesday #74: Our Valentine’s Feast

One of the reasons I love Valentine’s Day is because everyone loves showing off their “best meal ever.” Certainly I’m no different and I can guarantee you our dinner and dessert.. and drinks.. were all fabulous! We always make an effort to come up with a menu together, Nathan takes over the protein, we work together on the sides, and I’m in charge of dessert. It’s my favorite. And when everything comes out perfectly, it’s that much better!

I got dressed up.. right down to the shoes 😉

Nice angle, yes? Haha

Appetizer

We cheers-ed to our 10th Valentine’s Day together with Lagranja sparkles.

Don’t be fooled by the small pour. We smashed that bottle!

I love their red wines and figured I couldn’t go wrong trying this. We also demolished an awesomely tasty plate.

Truffle gouda, grapes, balsamic jam from Italy, smoked almonds, & nut thins.

The chunks of truffle in the cheese took us right back to Italy. That cheese is really something special!

Entree

To make the crust, we threw pistachios, rosemary, and garlic into the food processor. I think we both could have polished off a plate of the crust by itself. That’s always a good sign!

We hit the pan.

The flip. Check out that crust!

The final product! Pistachio-crusted lamb with cherry port sauce, Moroccan wheat berry salad, and roasted carrots & butternut squash.

The flavors of each pieces blended so well. I love the bite that the wheat berries have, the carrots and squash were roasted just right, and the lamb. Ooooh the lamb. Nathan couldn’t have cooked it more perfectly. It was medium rare and the crust had such a nice crunch. The cherry port sauce was flavorful and not sweet at all. I could have eaten more!

Dessert

More to drink? Beer goes well with dessert, right?

One of our faves.

What wouldn’t go with bourbon banana cheesecake?

Bourbon banana cheesecake with bourbon coconut cream, cinnamon,
and dark chocolate shavings.

I thought that amount of chocolate looked nice for my picture but I immediately added more before I actually sat down to eat it. It was so creamy and I’m happy to report that it’s actually not so bad for you either! I’ll be sharing the recipe this week 😉

My valentine.

After just a few drinks [ha!] and with full bellies, we cozied up on the couch to watch the first episode of House of Cards [holy moly!] I hope you had as great of a day as we did. Perfect way to kick off the weekend!

Food for Thought

What were your plans for Valentine’s Day?
Do you stay in or go out to celebrate?

Cable Free

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DAD!!

In a week from yesterday, my parents will be out here visiting and I cannot wait! I haven’t seen them since the day after Thanksgiving and we have a whole crazy week planned for them. We told them to come hungry and hydrated 😉

When we lived in Baltimore, we brought up the idea of cancelling our cable. It seemed like such a crazy idea to me at first, but when I really thought about it, I really only watched Food Network on the weekends when I woke up before Nathan. We would have the TV on at night after dinner when we just wanted to zone out.

When we moved, we decided to get over-the-air HD, a Netflix subscription, and mooch HBO Go off of Nathan’s family 😉 I bet you can guess how much I miss cable! During football season, we were able to get most of the games we wanted to watch on the main channels but we’ve really been enjoying all of the different series on Netflix and HBO lately. I’m always asking around for more shows so I thought I’d share some of our favorites with you.

Netflix

Orange is the New Black

I heard so many people raving about this show and once we started, we couldn’t stop! I think we managed to finish the first season in about a week and a half. And that’s with other shows in between. Can’t wait for season 2!

House of Cards

Nathan actually started watching this without me so I think I missed the first episode but he caught me up on all of the back story during the second episode. There’s just something that is so uncomfortably intriguing about this show that keeps me coming back. I think a little season 2 premiere might be part of our Valentines date tomorrow.

HBO Go

The Wire

We figured when we moved that we should really watch the show that so many people associate with Baltimore. It started out a little slow but when it got good, it really got good! Watching The Wire, in a really strange way, makes me miss Baltimore. It really is filmed there and even though much of it is filmed on the west side [where you really don’t want to be!], the familiarity of it all is nice. I can say, however, don’t get the wrong impression of the city if you do watch it! Also note that some of the accents are really, really bad!

True Detective

Another show that started a kind of slow but the writing is really good. The acting draws you in and makes you want the next episode. Unfortunately this is like every other show on cable and we have to wait until Sunday for the next new episode. This last episode was nuts [kind of reminded me of The Wire!] and I immediately wanted to watch another.

Clearly we have a theme going with detectives, crime, and scandal. We’ve tried a couple of other shows but nothing else has seemed to stick.. give me some recommendations!

Food for Thought

Would you cancel your cable?
Do you have HBO or Netflix? What are your favorite shows?