To avoid an additional unhealthy, expensive and unneeded dinner out, I decided to cook our anniversary dinner. Now, I cook dinner almost every night, so I wanted to make sure that this dinner was special. I wanted to make sure that Josh would enjoy it, but also that it also wouldn't make us feel sick from too much food or fat. My solution was to use good, quality ingredients and smaller portion sizes.
I did the food shopping the night before and only had to spend about $60 on everything I needed (including $20 at the butcher shop and $20 for a bottle of Prosecco). If we had gone out to eat we probably would have spent closer to $200 for everything!
For the first "course" I made Josh deviled eggs. I do not like eggs and therefore never make them. Josh likes them though, and recently started making himself hard boiled eggs to eat for breakfast. Since he started making them he's toyed around with the idea of making them into deviled eggs, but somehow he'd eat them all before he had the chance. I figured for the special occasion I would boil, peel and devil some eggs!
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| I originally made 4 eggs, but 1 had a fatal accident in the pot and 1 went to Teddy while he helped me cook :) |
For our appetizer course I made stuffed artichokes. Artichokes are Josh's favorite vegetable, but I never make them because they're so labor intensive! So, I figured what better time to make them for him than our anniversary.
Stuffed artichokes are one of our favorite things to order when we go out, bu they're always so heavy with all the butter, oil and cheese. I decided to lighten them up by following Skinny Taste's recipe. They were delicious. Good thing I made each of us our own because we both finished them without a problem!
For the main course I knew I wanted to cook meat. I never cook meat. It scares me. Whenever we have steak, Josh does the cooking. However, we have a great butcher in our town and we always get the freshest and tastiest meat there. I decided to try my hand at filet mignon, since even though it tastes rich, it has less fat than most cuts of steak. I paired the filet with a red wine & shitake mushroom sauce and it went together amazingly well. You never would have known, but aside from the meat itself, the only fat in here was from 2 tablespoons of butter. Served with some roasted asparagus it was delicious!
For the last, and obviously most important course, I went all out. Every tablespoon of fat that I avoided over the course of the meal went into the dessert.
A couple of weeks ago I stayed home sick from work with bronchitis. Josh, being the best boyfriend that he is, kept me company on the couch all afternoon and even let me have the remote :) . Therefore, we watched daytime cooking shows. My favorite is Barefoot Contessa. After she made chocolate pecan pie bars with a total of 9 (!!!) sticks of butter, I thought Josh was going to make me turn it off. However, he was a good sport and let me keep it on. Her next dessert recipe was for something called Brownie Pudding. Now, Josh loves almost anything with chocolate and aside from a souffle, brownies and pudding are his favorites! I used Ina Garten's basic recipe but decided to bake it in muffin tins instead of a big dish so that they would be portion controlled. I paired the brownie pudding with some vanilla bean ice cream and voila!
The dessert was amazing. Very rich, but in the smaller portion it was perfect. With another glass of Prosecco this was the perfect end to our meal. I think after this meal Josh will keep me around for at least another year :)
