Guest Post by Jeffrey: Dinner for Two

For Valentine’s Day dinner, Jeffrey was head chef in the kitchen and wanted to tell you about the dinner he made. This post is all by my valentine.

I promised Marci as part of her Valentine’s Day gift that I would make my first guest post about the dinner I cooker for her, so here we go. As you all know, Marci doesn’t eat red meat often (i.e., ever). I like steak and wanted to cook her a good filet for Valentine’s Day. We don’t like to go out on this Hallmark holiday (especially when it’s on a Monday), but we like to cook together. On the menu was a beef filet recipe by Ina Garten (my favorite tv chef…she’s so soothing), steamed asparagus with slivered almonds, leftover cranberry sauce from Thanksgiving (we freeze it), and roasted baby yukon potatoes.

For dessert, we had some special dark chocolate truffles from a chocolate shop in Dallas called “Dude, Sweet Chocolate.” More on that later.

Roasted Potatoes

This one wasn’t tough–I started with a recipe but just sort of threw it together based on what we had in the house. We had about 10 small yukon potatoes. I quartered them, drizzled with EVOO, salt, pepper, 4 minced garlic cloves, greek seasoning, and fresh parsley and baked them on 350* for 35 minutes (turning them about halfway through).

Asparagus

This was nothing special, but they were crisp, healthy and tasty. In a pot of boiling water, add asparagus to the bowl (trim the ends first), and steam for about 5 minutes. Drain and pour into an ice bath to blanche them and retain color (Ina taught me that). Add the slivered almonds, salt and pepper.

Cranberry Sauce

Recipe link here. I don’t eat (and am pretty much scared of) the usual condiments (ketchup, mustard, etc.) so the cranberry sauce was our garnish sauce for the meat. I also like horseradish, but we didn’t have any.

Filet Mignon

And now for the main attraction.  As I said, this technique came from Ina Garten. I’ve never made filets before–we’ve made a beef tender once before, but this was my first time doing this.  It was a great recipe, very easy, and everything came out so juicy and good.

• First I patted down the two filets with a towel to dry them.  Then I rubbed them with EVOO, mixed a lot of salt and pepper on a plate, and covered all sides of the steak with the mixture.
• To cook it, I used a cast iron skillet, heated it up for about 5 minutes on high to get the skillet really hot (no oil), and then seared each side of steak for about 2 minutes on each side. I dabbed with butter on top before the next step.
• To finish the cooking, we moved the steaks on the skillet into a 400* oven for 10-12 minutes, until they were cooked at about 125* on the inside (for medium rare/medium).  Following Ina’s technique, I took them out of the oven, immediately covered them with foil for 10 minutes to let them rest, and then sliced them.

They were perfect–although next time I think I’d let them cook in the oven a bit longer to get closer to 130* as I usually prefer steak medium.

Dude, Sweet Chocolate

Dinner was delicious and our dessert was special too. Last weekend in Dallas, we went with some friends to the Bishop Arts District, an eclectic part of Dallas outside of downtown with little shops and restaurants. We stumbled upon a chocolate shop specializing in dark chocolate. We bought two varieties to try on Valentine’s Day. Here’s the box they came in.

And this is what they looked like. The toffee squares were our favorite, kind of like a truffle brownie with hints of fig. It was soft and very rich and intense.

The crack in a box was like a very hard brittle chocolate with nut clusters. Delicious too, but the toffee was softer and very flavorful.

Of course Lily had a valentine’s cookie too. And perhaps a few bites of steak. She is a meat eating dog!

Well, it’s been nice guest posting.  This is probably a once-in-a-lifetime event, so Marci better have enjoyed this. Have a nice day.