Success!

Eric and I decided too save our money and our sanity and have a Valentine's dinner at home.  I have had the menu planned for about a month when we first decided not to go out for Valentine's day and I have been nervous about it since.  Everything that I made was experimental and I was nervous that the food wouldn't turn out.  I found all of the recipes on allrecipes.com by looking for the highest rated recipe for the type of food I wanted to make. 

We had a Spinach Pomegranate Salad that was pretty good.  Eric gave it a rating of 8 out of 10.  I think I would have given it a 6.  I really prefer the spinach salad that my aunt posted here.  But overall it was good. 

I made these really great mashed potatoes too.  I wasn't too worried about making these potatoes, how can you go wrong with about 5 cloves of garlic? They were delicious and I get to have leftovers!

The thing I was the most worried about was the salmon.  The last time I attempted to make fish, (note the word attempted) it didn't quite turn out right.  That was about three years ago.  I've been terrified of making fish ever since.  Like I might always fail at it.  But Eric loves fish and I found a recipe that all the comments said was a no fail.  So I gave it a try.  I was nervous about it until after Eric took his first bite.  (I make him take the first bite to see if I should even try it.  Kind of like my own personal food taste, just in case it has been poisoned or something)  He loved it so I tried it and it was great! The recipe really was no fail and it was so easy, with ingredients I already had on hand. 

Here is a picture of our meal on the plate, because it looks better than seeing the salmon in the pan it was baked in. 

I decided to bring in our little patio table and chairs from the porch and set up in the living room.  The kitchen was too covered in dishes I was going to have to wash and I didn't want our Valentine's dinner to be ho-hum at the dinner table like usual.  (sorry about the blurry picture, I was trying to take a picture in a semi-dark room and keep Nim away from the food.)

As you can also see, we were classy and drank bottled rootbeer. 


We finished off the meal with a mousse.  I had no idea that a mousse was such a complicated process.  It wasn't hard but I did have to dirty a few more dishes than I really wanted to.  The mousse turned out great as well and was fluffy and light but very rich. 

Eric really enjoyed all of the food.  Even the salad, which surprised me, he's not a vegetable type guy. I am definitely keeping all of these recipes and will cook them all again because they tasted great and were really easy to make!

One last picture of what I have to look forward to....

Happy Valentine's Day!!