Valentine's Day

A quick post about our Valentine's meal - in part prompted by some really interesting articles about food's relationship to this day of declarations of love - and partly for the more simple and shallow reason that I took some photos of the food!  

We certainly subscribe to James Ramsden's belief that sharing and enjoying food together is at the heart of a good relationship, but equally have long abandoned restaurants on this most over-hyped of days, for reasons described beautifully in this Oliver Thring article.  

So, having endured countless poor quality and over-priced meals on such a popular restaurant day, the only answer for us now and for a good number of years has been to cook together at home - with a good bottle or three of champers - our most enjoyable Valentine's meals have come from our kitchen at home.

So to the menu - I never used to like prawn cocktail until the hubbie made me a truly home-made and delicious marie-rose sauce.  I’ve never looked back - the retro-ness just makes me love it more.  So for these reasons this was the perfect starter.

And then it had to be steak.  Our steaks were excellent quality grass fed 28 day aged Scottish rib-eyes.  I regret now though deviating from my own tried and trusted cooking method to try Heston’s suggestion of flipping the steak every 20 seconds.  The heat in the pan dropped and I didn’t get the desired level of Maillard browning.  Still damn tasty but would have liked more of a seared crust.

Heston’s triple cooked chips however are truly things of wonder - time consuming but not difficult by any means, and totally worth it.

So there we go.  A great meal at home with the only downside being potential squabbles over doing the dishes - but that can always wait until morning.