V Day was just Mom and me, but why would I let that stop me? As you can see above, we had a nice sauteed salmon steak, basmati and wild rice blend, and cauliflower. All accompanied by a brown garlic butter on the side. [Mom had claimed that she didn’t like garlic but I was pretty sure that she had never had fresh. I was correct, she loved the real item! But I didn’t want to presume and pour it over all ahead of time.] Mom always has milk with her meals. Then of course, not pictured above, chocolate-dipped strawberries for dessert!
dessert
So I started by making dessert, because the strawberries needed to chill after being dipped. Last week, one set of my cousins sent us an edible arrangement, so I re-purposed the strawberries. These don’t look great, but tasted wonderful! Hopefully some of you will help me in the Comments, to come up with a prettier result next time. Since I didn’t have a double boiler, I just placed water to boil in a medium pan, and the chocolate in a small pan.
Once the water was boiling, the chocolate melted almost instantly! I started by spritzing the small pan with liquid butter, then melted the white chocolate, for which I had bought Ghirardelli baking chocolate. It did not dip well! It wouldn’t stick well, was kind of lumpy. But I did the best I could, placed the results on wax paper, and decided it was easier to spoon the chocolate over the strawberries than to continue to try to dip them. I made 6 white chocolate strawberries, using up the entire bar of white chocolate.
I then cleaned out the remnants of white chocolate, spritzed the small pan again with liquid butter, and melted dark chocolate. For this, I used about a dozen small candy bars we have had on hand since Halloween! This went much better, although I didn’t try to stick the berries in the pan at all, just laid them out on the wax paper and poured chocolate over them. The result was much smoother!
I did leave some exposed berry; I don’t know why this photo turned out so dark.
I then placed each piece of wax paper carefully on top of our flattest dinner plates, and transferred them to the refrigerator to cool.
Prior to serving, I peeled them off the wax paper and arranged them on an attractive dinner plate. I’ll close with those below!
rice
I next turned to the rice, since it was going to take at least 30 minutes. I chose a basmati-wild rice blend for color and fiber, specifically this blend:
I followed directions on the container: 1 cup of rice in 1.5 cups of water, no optional salt, a bit of liquid butter instead of oil. Bring to a boil, stir, cover, reduce to simmer, cook 15 minutes or until all liquid is absorbed (I forgot about checking it earlier, but at 15 minutes it was just about perfect):
garlic butter
Whilst the rice cooked, I turned to the garlic butter. I never know whether or not to use real butter. The health experts seem to disagree and struggle with clarity. So on special occasions, I go with butter because it tastes so great!
I melted about 1 Tbsp of salted butter over medium heat and gave it time to turn medium brown (salted butter without added salt gives us the best taste for the sodium, we think; if you prefer, you can use unsalted butter with or without adding your own salt). I used large cloves of fresh garlic, cut into pieces, then chopped throughout until they were reasonably small. The pieces don’t have to be even, IMO.
The garlic then went into the brown butter, to brown the garlic itself. This creates a nice nutty flavor. I then added the rest of a half stick of butter to the pan. These actions were done in this order because when I use too much butter initially, the food will never brown. When the added butter was also brown, which only took a minute or two, I poured it all into a small saucepan.
sauteed salmon
I then used the garlic-butter-flavored fry pan to cook the salmon! Starting skin side down, to get the skin nice and brown and crispy. Cooked over a medium-high flame, covered with foil to cook through the entire salmon quickly. This keeps it moist.
After several minutes, when the skin was as brown as I wanted it and I could see no more orange, the salmon was flipped to cook the rest of the outside; at this point, the salmon is left uncovered so that the middle does not overcook.
As soon as the opposite side browned a bit, the salmon was then flipped on one side, then the other, to brown all around.
cauliflower
Meanwhile, as the fish cooked, I set a shallow amount of water in a large pot on the stove to boil. I had originally planned asparagus as a veggie, everyone had it on sale, but it did not look very good and was sourced from Peru. The cauli, OTOH, looked great and was locally grown.
I broke up about half the head for 2 people, breaking into approximately even bite-sized florets, washing each and setting aside to wait for the water to boil.
As soon as the water boiled, the cauli went in to cook until just al dente.
At this point, I had all four burners going on the stove: Rice back left over low heat to rewarm, garlic butter back right on low heat to keep warm, fish sauteeing on the front left, cauli boiling on the front right. And of course pootie trivet overseeing the whole!
putting it all together
After the cauli was cooked al dente, it was drained in a colander in the sink. Once the fish was browned, it was plated, the cauli and rice added, the garlic butter poured into a matching cup. Mom’s milk was poured and her tray delivered to the living room where she was watching TV. Voila!
Yours truly, unfortunately, cannot swallow solid foods, so my portion of the entire dinner went into the blender with some extra milk for liquefying:
And I’d warned Mom that there was dessert, so she saved room, and we each finished off with one strawberry in dark chocolate and one strawberry in white chocolate, and will enjoy more tonight! [I had to eat carefully, but did manage to slowly swallow dessert without pureeing it first!]
I hope this provides you with some inspiration! How was your V Day dinner? Alternatively, what’s for dinner tonight?
Edit: I should mention that I am NR. So I am not ignoring everyone unless I comment to each. Please consider yourselves +1!