Sweethearts Cooking

Valentine's weekend didn't start out with much of a culinary bang in terms of creating, just some steaming hot bowls of fabulous bean soup from J's plant, along with cornbread and biscuits. It's some of the best bean soup I've had, even beating out my grandmom's recipe. J used up the rest of the biscuits in the morning when she made herself, Pie and me bacon, egg and cheese biscuits for breakfast. Lunch both Saturday and Sunday were homemade pizza for our pizza-insatiable boys. J had wanted to take over for Saturday dinner, too, switching the dinner I'd planned to today. However, she relented when she heard the recipe for Alice B. Toklas' gypsy goulash. This is my revised version:

1 1/2 lb. filet of beef, cut in thin, bite-sized pieces
2 tbsp. bacon fat (you could also use lard or Crisco, but that was on hand & sounded good)
1 tsp. salt
1 tbsp. paprika
1 tbsp. flour
4 lg. onions, sliced
3 potatoes, sliced fairly thinly
2 c. red wine
1 c. + 1/2 c. sour cream
Beef broth (Alice B. advises enough "to cover" the casserole...I'd use less, unless you want soup...it took 32 oz. to cover for me and that was way too much, even when I added extra sour cream and some cornstarch mixed with water...maybe 16 oz would do well?)
Egg noodles, cooked & drained

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Brown the beef in the bacon fat with the salt, paprika & flour and set aside (it might work better to toss the beef with the salt, paprika & flour, then cook). Cook the onions & potatoes in the same pan until softened. Put in casserole with beef, wine and 1 c. sour cream. Mix well, cover tightly and bake 1 hour. Add 1/2 c. sour cream before serving over noodles. I served corn with this.

Incidentally, there is a rather amusing story to go along with this section of recipes in the Alice B. Toklas Cookbook. Indeed, the whole cookbook is also a fascinating look at the life of Gertrude Stein through the eyes of her lover, Alice.

Sunday, the boys slept through brunch. Their loss, since J made delicious grilled chocolate sandwiches that resembled stuffed French toast. Actually, they subsisted most of the weekend on J's pepperoni pizza, Little Debbie Cosmic Brownies (Pie) and generic honey buns (Boot, who loves those crazy things. They give me the willies, especially the fact that you can peel the icing, intact, from the top and wave it around. SHUDDER!). One of J's co-workers gave her a recipe Friday & this is J's adaptation:

1 egg
1 tbsp. milk
2 slices challah
2 oz. thin 70% dark chocolate bar (J used Nestle's Chocolatier line)
1 tbsp. butter
Powdered sugar

Whisk eggs & milk together in a shallow dish. Make sandwich with challah & chocolate. Dip in egg mixture to coat both sides. Melt butter in skillet and cook sandwich, pressing occasionally with a spatula, until golden brown on each side. Cut in half and dust with powdered sugar before serving. Easily serves 2 and you will want milk. Or at least a big glass of ice water!

Since I like grilled cheese better than French toast and since I was curious as to how chocolate sandwiches would taste with cherry bread, I made more grilled chocolate sandwiches on Monday. This time, I cut 4 slices of the little loaf of cherry bread J picked up from the Toledo chapter of Rainbow Families. I buttered one side of each slice and then made 2 little sandwiches with another few squares of the same chocolate. I then browned it on either side in a dry skillet. It was yum, too. We had good, strong coffee with it. Next time I make banana nut bread, I am trying it with that.

Sunday night, once we were dining a deux again, I made our real Valentine's dinner. I went for a French bistro feel with croques monsieurs, pommes frites and steamed artichokes with lemon butter (1/2 stick better melted with 1/2 lemon) and garlic dijon aioli (Trader Joe's) for dipping. I left the skin on two potatoes and cut them into nice finger-sized pieces, then shallow-fried them until they were going golden before draining on paper towels and salting properly. For the artichokes, I simply trimmed them, popped them in my steamer, added a lemon slice and a garlic clove (smashed) to the flavor tray and steamed them for 50 minutes. The croques monsieurs were a tad more complicated. I used the recipe in the Gourmet Magazine cookbook, which can be found here: http://books.google.com/books?id=PwJgZhXZVNkC&pg=PA190&lpg=PA190&dq=Gourmet+cookbook+croque-monsieur&source=bl&ots=i_aQJqWcrH&sig=O7QJ25Zu3RpQkXxDeNc5M0v6vMQ&hl=en&ei=ZeaaSfC1Ht-BtwfguPGvCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result if, for some insane reason, you haven't yet got the cookbook. But, I use recipes from it all the time & love it. It's well worth the investment.

Last night, J made really tasty lasagna for us, but I do not have the recipe, nor am I even certain she used one. If she did, it is probably the recipe from the box of no-precooking-necessary lasagna noodles.

Oh, one last sweetheart tip. For a perfectly romantic accompaniment to a special dinner (or just to pamper yourself, chill a bottle of Lindeman's Framboise Lambic. It's superb.