Dating - Homemade style "After becoming parents we never go out anymore." Here is how you make a romantic date, with a three-course dinner - at home!
I’ve made a simple, but tasty three-course dinner for you to make with your love on this beautiful Valentine’s Day. Here are the instructions. Have a romantic evening – and keep the love burning! Preparation order
The preparations should be ordered like this, the tasks fairly evenly shared: - Turn on the oven at 200*Celsius (392*Fahrenheit) - Wash the potatoes and cut them in thin slices - The other start making the stew When the potatoes are in the oven and the stew cooking: - Start with preparing the dessert, one on the ice-cream - The other one on the chocolate plates When the ice cream is in the freezer and the plates cooked: - Make the appetizers and set the table  You might need an hour and a half for preparing all three courses, but remember: This should not be a stress-process! It might actually be as important as the meal itself! Have a good drink in your glasses and some music in the air, playfully dancing, cooking and flirting. Appetizers
An appetizer should challenge your nose and tongue in an exciting way, without making you all full. A light and fresh salad is a wonderful way of getting ready for the main course. Tonight we go for a variation of a Mediterranean salad, served with “bruchetta” and a tasty yoghurt dressing. Cut tomatoes and avocado in quite big pieces. The red onion should be cut in leaf-thin slices. Break the feta-cheese by hand and top the salad with walnuts. Cut a lemon in two, and squeeze the juice of one half over the salad, together with some drops of a good olive oil. Season with flaked sea-salt and grind pepper. Bruchetta is toasts, Italian style. You simply heat olive oil in a pan. Divide the loaf-slices from corner to corner, into triangles. Cut a clove of garlic in half and rub the loaf with the inside, on both sides of the bread. Fry until they are golden and crispy.  Mix the dressing in a bowl. The main course
Tonight the main course needs to be a meal that makes itself ready, while we are enjoying the appetizer. I’ve chosen a traditional beef-stew, with a twist, served with crème-baked potatoes.  Cut the beef in cubes of 3x3 centimetres (2 inches) and put in a small plastic bag with the flour and spices. Heat olive oil in a deep pan; iron-pans are preferable, but not necessary. Cut the vegetables in pieces about the same size as the meet, and fry the veggies for a couple of minutes. Add the meet and flour-mix, together with the rest of the ingredients. When it starts boiling put the lid on, and reduce power to minimum. It should just merely boil, and keep it like that on the stove for an hour or so. We choose crème baked potatoes because they should stay in the oven for a long time. So, while we eat the appetizer we don’t even have to offer the main course a thought. There are many types of crème-baked potatoes. We go for a simple version without cheese, because I feel that is more compatible with the stew. We choose almond-potatoes and keep the skin on for this dish. In that way we keep more of the nutrition, plus it looks cool! You may of course choose mashed potatoes or traditionally baked potatoes if you prefer.  Have a spoon of butter in the bottom and the sides of a nice baking-form. Mash a clove of garlic and spread in the same way. Scrub your potatoes and slice ‘em up, about 2 millimetres. Put them in layers, overlapping each other a bit. Between each layer have some garlic, salt, pepper, cream and thyme. Pour the rest of the cream on top, as well as with the rest of the butter. Cook in the oven for about an hour, in the bottom of the stove. Desserts
The dessert is a simple, but delicious homemade Milk Chocolate Ice-cream, served on a chocolate cake plate. It is most enjoyable when served with a quality cup of coffee, perhaps a macchiato, a cortado or a cappuccino?  Break the bar of milk chocolate into small pieces in a bowl over a hot water bath. Let it melt together with 5 tablespoons of the milk. The rest of the milk you start heating in a separate pan. Use low heat, for it should not boil, just simmer. While waiting for it to reach the right temperature you mix egg and sugar in a bowl that can deal with both warm and cold temperatures. Add the heated milk and whip it in the hot water bath until it thickens. If it doesn’t get thicker you might add another egg-yoke and keep mixing. When it feels like custard you add the chocolate, while still mixing. Cover up and put in a cold place. While it cools down you whip the double cream ‘til you see ribbons in the cream. Now you are ready to mix it all together carefully. Get it in the freezer. Before eating the main dish you take it out of the freezer, mixing it until totally smooth before you put it back into the freezer.  While one of you is making the ice cream, as instructed above, the other one should go ahead and bake the chocolate basket on which the ice will be served. Whip egg whites and sugar firmly together until it starts stiffening. Then you add flour, cocoa and melted butter to finish. Take a full tablespoon of the mixture onto a baking trey. Smoothen it out so that it looks like the size of a CD-disk. Cook it in the oven (above the potatoes) for 4 minutes. Get it out and form it over the bottom of a glass or a cup until it reaches the shape of a bowl. Continue this process ‘til you’ve used all the mixture. It’ll be sufficient for 4 chocolate baskets. Serve the ice in these beautiful bowls and have some wonderful sauce or other decoration on top. Happy Valentine's! We are always happy to here from you, so feel free to write down the results of your cooking night as a comment here on the page! |
