Cooking together

We often 'celebrate' things by cooking together. Early in our first year of marriage we agreed to keep the gifts we give each other to a minimum. While giving and receiving gifts is fun, we usually stick to exchanging cards and cooking a meal together. Cooking can be a great way to spend time together or it can be terrible. Just in time for Valentine's Day, A Couple Cooks wrote a post with helpful tips on cooking together. Several of the tips stood out to me as challenges we've faced and moved past (most of the time).

I am notoriously over-ambitious in the meal-planning area, especially when we're planning a "fancier" meal than our everyday stuff. Often this would result in a scenario where dinner would be later than I wanted and I would be hungry and really stressed. This is not a fun way to cook. Over the last couple of years I've working on keeping myself in check during the planning process.

Part of this process has been deciding to slow down and allow myself more time to cook. Feeling rushed (usually by my need to get things done 'on time') is unnecessarily stress-inducing. This change alone has made the times I cook so much more enjoyable.

While we aren't perfect at the meal planning and cooking thing, we have really gotten to a place where it is far more enjoyable - allowing us to really enjoy the gift of cooking together. Now if only I could get the husband to clean as we cook (best-ever advice from my mom and echoed in the blog post I mentioned above).

With that in mind we decided to make lobster ravioli for our Valentine's celebration. The husband is great at making pasta so we knew what to expect with that part of the meal. I also opted for a relatively simple dessert that I could prep ahead of time.

We knew that the husband would be working on Friday and that we wouldn't get started on pasta making until he got home. This meant that we would eat later. I made sure that we had a snack on hand to compensate for our later dinner time.

We did not have a side to the meal and kept it simple with just the lobster ravioli. Four raviolis were plenty of food and included some veggies! :) We modified this recipe for the lobster filling and it turned out really well. We did not use lentils or crab meat. The husband insists on non-pasteurized crab meat and it was really expensive so we compensated with more lobster (it was on sale)!

My grandmother was awesome and tracked down a recipe for the sauce. She had lobster ravioli at Violino Ristorante Italiano and loved the sauce. She called the restaurant and the owner/chef kindly provided her the recipe for the sauce!

Lemon Sauce a la Violino Risterante

Pour 1 glass (I would imagine that to be about 1 cup) white wine into sauce pan. Add a pinch or so Rosemary. Reduce slightly. Zest 1 lemon, keeping for later, and add juice from lemon to pan. Add 1/2 cup of heavy cream and 1/4 cup of butter. Salt and Pepper to taste. Pour sauce over dish and sprinkle with lemon zest and grated Parmigiano Reggiano.

We completed the meal with Milk Chocolate Souffles with Nougat Whip. While the recipe had really great reviews it wasn't my favorite. The nougat whip was pretty good but I didn't think the souffle had enough flavor. I prefer the Cooking Light souffles I made a few years ago (and you can freeze those). Oh well!

We really enjoyed our dinner and the time cooking together. It made for the perfect celebration!