I’m
officially a Mrs. now!!! Our wedding was better than I could have imagined and
we feel so lucky. Can’t believe that
after 5 years I can finally call him my husband.
I took
off work the Wednesday – Monday of the wedding week (we are honeymooning later
in June…) so it was back to work on
Tuesday. But my coworkers made coming
back so much better by throwing me a really wonderful party to celebrate the
wedding! They had a potluck with all the
kinds of foods I like, decorated our conference room, gave me flowers and
balloons, and best of all gave us a huge basket of food to make a romantic
dinner for two.
Food
gifts are my favorite so it was absolutely the perfect present for us! The basket they gave us was packed with every
single ingredient we’d need for the meal, down to the spices.
They even gave us caviar and a bottle of wine
(I had this one before while on a work trip to Gainesville – The
Prisoner is a spicy red blend from Napa and it’s delicious!)
We
registered for an electric grill after seeing the same one at our hotel in
Austin. I love it because you don’t have
to deal with the mess of gas or charcoal.
We picked it up the day we planned to cook our fancy meal – luckily Lance
is handy because it came in a thousand pieces and had to be assembled.
While
Lance build the grill, I started to prep our food. The recipe they gave me had a side of mashed
potatoes but I baked them whole instead (since that’s what seems to come with
steaks at classy restaurants…) I followed the steps from Gimme Some
Oven to make the perfect baked potatoes.
The salad
for our meal had grilled watermelon, which I’d never tried before. One of the dishes at our wedding was actually
a watermelon arugula salad, so this was the perfect side to go with our first
fancy meal cooked as a married couple.
To grill
the watermelon, we just cut rounds of it, rubbed one side with olive oil and
sprinkled with sugar, then put that side down on the grill for about 3
minutes. The recipe from A Whole
New Twist says to give it a quarter turn (don’t flip them) part way through
so you get sear marks both ways.
The
shrimp they gave us was already cooked but we drizzled some oil on them with
salt & pepper and let them heat up a bit on the grill as well. We also grilled up some bacon wrapped
scallops (although we had even more scallops with our main course too!
The
salad was pretty easy. We cut up the grilled
watermelon and served it over arugula with the shrimp and some bleu cheese. The
dressing for the salad was very simple too - 2 T balsamic vinegar, ¼ t Dijon
mustard, ½ t raw honey, 2 T extra virgin olive oil, and ¼ t ground sea salt. I could make a bigger version of this into a
dinner sometime.
Then we
began prepping our steaks. They got us
two giant filet mignons – and I was a bit worried because I never cook steak
myself and didn’t want to end up ruining them.
I usually leave it up to the pros at restaurants. But I followed Iowa Girl Eat’s
recipe and they turned out perfectly.
I’m
planning to use the spice rub from that recipe any time I make steak in the
future. It was a blend of salt, peppercorns, fennel seeds, red chili
pepper flakes, dried minced garlic, and dried minced onion. I don’t have a
mortar and pestle so I put it all in the food processer and blended until the
fennel seeds got chopped up a bit.
It was actually very easy. Just rub the steaks in olive oil, generously
spread the spice rub on both sides, then sear in an extra hot cast iron skillet
with 2 T melted butter until they get nice and golden. Then, put the whole skillet in a 400 degree
oven for 8 minutes (this ended up being just enough to cook them rare – but obviously
keep an eye on them so they don’t get overdone!)
Once
the steaks were ready, I took them out and covered them with foil while they
rested. In the meantime, put the skillet
back on the stovetop and sauté some minced shallot and garlic. The recipe said to use red wine (which of course
would make it even better) but I didn’t want to waste our good one on
cooking. So I added in a cup of beef
broth along with a sprig of rosemary and another tablespoon of butter. As that simmered down, it turned into an
amazing sauce to top the steak.
Then
for the scallops, pat them dry with a paper towel then season with salt &
pepper. I put these in a separate
skillet with 1 T butter and 1 T olive oil until they got a nice sear. Just
before they were done, I tossed them into the steak sauce to finish them
up.
This
is probably the best meal I’ve made for us.
It says “dinner for two”, but it really could have been for four since
it was so much food. We actually ended
up making a steak salad with homemade bleu cheese dressing for lunch the next
day with all the leftovers.
Since
there were so many steps to this meal, I don’t have the time right now to break
it all down, but you can visit these sites to get the full recipes:
Thanks
again to my coworkers for such a sweet welcome back from the wedding week!
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