Valentine's Day

So we decided to try something different this year and get Valentine's Day dinner from Tony's Market. If you aren't from Denver, Tony's is a wonderful little family owned establishment that sells fine meats and gourmet groceries. If you want excellent meats and quality cuts, go to Tony's. Anyway, Tony's was offering a prix fixe pre-order dinner for two. All we had to do was reserve the dinner online in advance, show up on Valentine's Day, and pay. The re-heating instructions were included. When you think of re-heating anything, you think dry, chewy, tough or something else unpleasant. Not this dinner. It turned out perfectly.



Here is the first course. The red rose came with the dinner, so that was a nice decoration! There was an appetizer, artfully named Mascarpone and Fig Phyllo Purses. The fig inside reminded me of apple butter, but with fig instead. The phyllo didn't get dried out or too crisp. The salad was vanilla pear with lemon Stilton and candied pecans. To die for! You can see that Jeff broke out the wine, a German Riesling. I hadn't had wine in months.



Here's the second course. The main course was jumbo shrimp with homemade cocktail sauce, and an excellent Chateaubriand with wild mushroom sauce. To me, it's difficult to cook meats in general without making them too dry--you really have to pay attention. Re-heating meat universally makes it worse. But in this case, Tony's cooked its meat in such a way that reheating it made it perfect! It was wonderfully tender. The side dishes were roasted red potatoes with herbes de Provence, and dinner rolls.



Dessert! It is a heart-shaped cheesecake with strawberry swirl. That was really, really good! It had a graham cracker crust, but it was very finely crushed and perfectly moist.



Here is my present! I was VERY excited! The skis are 142s, so just a little longer than the ones I skied on the 25th. They are for "advanced beginners." I will write in my next post about how they did the first time on the slopes.

(If you're wondering what I gave Jeff, it was a subscription to Skiing magazine. I guess great minds think alike!)