Wednesday, December 31, 2008

My own personal Chef

My dh made me a gourmet meal last Saturday night. He enjoys cooking when he has the time. And when he cooks, he cooks gourmet. He's pushing veal into a pan for our veal stew with asparagus.

Our first course was Beet and Orange salad and Basil and Olive Focaccia bread. I forgot to take off the presidents' placemat from Stephen's spot. oops.

A close up of the bread. The recipe called for whole olives in the bread. I think next time I'll make it with half olives so that they distribute better thoughout the bread. This was the one thing that I made for the meal.

And here is the Veal stew with Asparagus. The green puree is asparagus puree. The veal had been cooking for 2 hours and it had the best sauce around it.

And now for dessert. We are having roasted pears with red wine caramel. Making the caramel sauce was an "action dish" (my dh's expression). He started off with just sugar in the pan.

He heated it and waited as it started to melt...

and started to turn brown.

It is perfectly brown now.

Then he poured in a mix of red wine and water and boy did it splatter. The recipe even told us "to stand back when pouring".

The finished product. The pear was roasted in the oven for 40 minutes in the caramel sauce. Then the red wine caramel is reduced into a sauce and poured over the pear. A sprinkling of balsamic vinegar and a dollup of sour cream and you have a fantastic dessert.



3 comments:

Mike Bailey said...

very nice.

impressive.

Anonymous said...

Delicious AND beautiful-looking! Logistical question...when hubby makes these late-evening gourmet meals, who gets to clean up dishes and kitchen? And does clean-up happen the same night, or do you wait until morning?

~Betsy

Technoprairie said...

Usually he is very good about cleaning up as he cooks. I usually do the dishes for him. And yes, we do clean up that night. My mom taught me to always clean the kitchen before bed so that you don't wake up to a dirty kitchen and I've usually followed that advice.