Our Valentine's Dinner

For Valentine's Day I really, really wanted to make nachos for dinner. I'm not joking. I had some spicy chorizo, a couple of ripe avocados, and, as you might expect, a huge stash of cheese, and aren't holidays an excuse to splurge and eat unhealthy things that you wouldn't normally eat? I think so. Unfortunately my valentine wasn't down with the nachos idea, so I ended up going a little more traditional and made steak. It worked out for the best, as Matt told me that it was the best meal I've made in a very long time. A compliment like that is the best Valentine's gift a girl could get. At least I think. Now that I'm repeating it it sounds a little backhanded, but I can assure you that he meant it in the nicest possible way.

The menu:

Homemade rye bread

Roasted broccolini

Blue cheese mashed potatoes

Rib eyes with chimichurri

Chocolate mousse with freshly whipped cream

The bread recipe is from Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day. I recommend both the book and the bread.

I bought these gigantic rib eyes because they were on sale at Whole Foods for something like $10.99/lb, far cheaper than the $23.99/lb. filets I was planning on buying. Between the two of us we didn't even eat one, which means steak salads all week for me! Just as I started to get nervous about how my pesky fire alarm was going to react to me cooking a steak on the stovetop I saw Matt's friend Sarah's tweet about Bittman's method for pan-cooking a steak in a poorly ventilated apartment with no smoke. Miraculous!

Speaking of Bittman, I used his recipe for chimichurri to top off the steak. It was so good that I used it top off the potatoes and the broccolini as well. Then I used my bread to sop up every last drop. You can find a recipe here, and I would recommend making it in a food processor as he suggests in his book rather than chopping it by hand.

I had some red potatoes that I'd boiled earlier in the week for a salad that I turned into blue cheese mashed potatoes. Simply mash up some boiled potatoes and add any combination of milk, cream, sour cream, cream cheese, and butter, season with salt and pepper, and crumble in a generous amount of blue cheese.

Since my potatoes were cold I transferred them to a baking dish, topped them with some pats of butter, and baked them with the broccolini until they were heated through.

Oh yeah, the broccolini. Toss it with a little olive oil, sprinkle with salt & pepper, and bake on a cookie sheet at 375 or so for maybe 10 minutes. It's to die for. I may be exaggerating, but only slightly.

This meal was incredibly delicious and very easy to whip together. The chocolate mousse was the only thing that took more than about 15 minutes to make, but it was far from difficult. For as delicious as it is, it's totally worth the effort. If it weren't for the sinfulness of the mashed potatoes and the fact that I don't eat much steak I would make this meal all the time.

All of that chocolate is proof that this dessert is worth making. And check out my reflection in the double boiler. Hello, me!

The chocolate mousse recipe I used was from Orangette. You can follow the link to her recipe; I'll just show you some pretty pictures of the process. The only change I made was the addition of a little cinnamon to give it a little Mexican flavor. It was my consolation prize for not having nachos, I guess.

Molten chocolate.

+ egg whites

Folding in the egg whites.

WHIPPED CREAM

Sigh.

Sigh again.

There's nothing better than licking a spoon and discovering a second layer of chocolate underneath. NOTHING.

Extra whipped cream to top it off.

The big blue bowl remains. Who wants to help polish it off?

Happy Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine's Day from More Cheese More Chocolate! I hope your day is filled with as much chocolate as mine!

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! I hope you all had a great New Year's Eve as well as a great start to 2010.

My New Year's Eve was spent at my brother's place with just a few of us nibbling on tasty bites, tossing back glasses of champagne, eating twelve grapes, and watching Mexico City ring in 2010 on Univisión because we forgot to turn the TV on at 11 central time to see the ball drop in New York. As much as I enjoy the ball drop, I'll take a piñata over Dick Clark and Ryan Seacrest any day.

Kyle, my mom and I spent the afternoon cooking. When I get married I think I'll walk down the aisle with a Buddha's hand in lieu of a bouquet.

While we cooked we sipped on Kyle's homemade limecello. Yum yum.

Kyle made lamb/pork/veal meatballs and threw them in a crock pot with some onion/milk/sour cream/butter(?) sauce in an attempt to make Swedish meatballs. We all really liked them, but the cook was slightly underwhelmed. A perfectionist, that one...

I made soy chorizo and chihuaua puff pastry bundles. Even the naysayers who were suspicious of the meatless chorizo were won over once they hit their lips.

The dessert spread. Check out the New Year's petits fours marking 12:05.

The whole spread - veggies and dip, brie and blue cheese, crusty bread, spinach and artichoke dip, desserts, and chorizo bundles. The meatballs were hiding out in the corner.

On the first day of the new year I was able to hang out with one of my very best friends, take a walk down Michigan Avenue, and eat a Potbelly sandwich for lunch. I'd say 2010 is off to a great start. I hope the same is true for all of you! Happy New Year!

Christmas Dinner

For the second year in a row I was the only one of my siblings to make it home for Christmas. While the holidays aren't quite as exciting when you're the only one home, it certainly has its advantages. For one, I get way more presents than either of my brothers. And isn't that what Christmas is about? Just kidding, Bobby and Kyle. I'm sure mom and dad gave you just as many presents as they gave me. You guys got ponies, too, right? If not you should be happy to know that they at least hung up your stockings this year unlike the last when mine was the only one dangling from the mantle.

Since there were only three of us around to eat Christmas dinner, we kept it pretty simple. I brought my pasta-making discs home, and my mom and I made an Italian dinner from scratch. Noodles, tomato sauce, meatballs, and a caprese-like salad were on the menu, followed by a chocolate tart and a mincemeat pie for dessert. Yes, you read that correctly. Three people and two desserts. That's just how we roll. If it were up to my dad it would have been three desserts and no main course. That's just how he rolls. And due to his running regimen he has no rolls.

When I was in Matt's hometown last week I picked up a deeply discounted copy of the Silver Spoon Pasta cookbook at their soon to be no longer B. Dalton, satisfying my several month long desire to add that book to my collection. I set out to make meatballs and sauce from recipes in the book, and I ended up tweaking and adding on to both dishes. For the meatballs I combined about 1/2 lb. ground beef and about 1/2 lb. ground pork with an egg, a handful of fresh flat-leaf parsley, maybe 1/4 cup breadcrumbs, salt and pepper.

The fresh parsley was key to the tastiness of the meatballs. The original recipe called for a single sprig of parsley, but I used several. It helped to brighten the flavor of the little balls of meat.

The meatballs were first browned in a little oil over medium-high heat, and then the lid went on and they were transferred to a 350 oven for maybe 20-30 minutes until they were cooked through.

My mom's 30+ year old KitchenAid may be on its last leg, but it still managed to crank out all of these pretty noodles.

Post-boiling.

The sauce was diced tomatoes, crushed red pepper flakes, Italian seasoning, garlic, and salt. It was OK (and much better than it looks in this photo), but it could have been better.

My plate.

My mom and I wanted to add olives to the pasta sauce, but since we knew my dad wouldn't be thrilled we resorted to sprinkling them on top as a garnish. It was slightly weird, in part because they were cold and raw and in part because they were of the green, pimento-stuffed variety. Next time I'll plan ahead and buy different olives and cook them with the sauce.

The salad was grape tomatoes, fresh mozzarella balls, chopped artichoke hearts, fresh basil, vinegar, and oil.

I've been going through this awful phase lately where I haven't been very impressed with desserts, but this Mexican Chocolate Tart has completely changed my outlook on decadent, chocolate things.

The tart was incredibly easy to make, it looks elegant, it tastes delicious, and it goes perfectly with a dollop of freshly whipped cream.

I was going to post a picture of the mincemeat pie, but the amount of time it takes to upload a picture with this slow internet coupled with the fact that I don't like mincemeat held me back. Maybe next year.