valentine's day en double

impressed with my french skills, no?

anyways.

bryan and i aren't generally huge on the whole valentine's day thing. i get flowers, we eat a fab dinner at home, and that's about it.

this year, we both had great ideas for dinners, so we decided to do them both.

saturday, we had my pick: steak frites (using the hangar steak from our cow) with sauce gascon (essentially a pan sauce with white wine, demi glace, and mustard), homemade garlic aioli for the frites, and roasted beets with creamy horseradish vinaigrette over winter micro greens. and red wine. for dessert, we had heart cookies oliver made at day care, so of course they tasted perfect and full of love. delicious and filling. i heart homemade frites.


sunday, we had braised pork belly with sunchoke puree and grilled radicchio with balsamic vinegar. oh yea, YUM. i had to banish myself from the kitchen once the belly came out of the braising liquid lest i EAT IT ALL. it was very good, though not a whole lot different tasting than a pork roast, albeit a very, very nice one. still, no complaining. we washed it all down with some fat squirrel ale from new glarus brewing company. for dessert i made chocolate cake, with strawberry filling. i wasn't very happy with the cake. it was no where near as chocolatey as i as expecting, and the frosting didn't come out. i had never attempted that kind before and doubt i ever will again. for the strawberry filling, i used some frozen berries we had from last summer's u-pick. in the end, while it didn't look very pretty and wasn't as chocolatey as i was looking for, it certainly didn't suck. oliver in particular wasn't upset, as it's hard to cut a small piece of 3 layer cake, so he got a relatively good helping.





we ended the day by watching couples retreat, which was funnier than i expected. for once, vince vaughn didn't annoy the crap out of me; he talked non stop, but his character's view on marriage was endearing.

all in all, a very lovely valentine's day, happily spent with my two favorites boys.