De-Lovely

For our Valentine's Day dinner, we had coq au vin and for dessert, I introduced Ryan to crepes.

For the chicken, I modified a recipe from Pioneer Woman (view it here). Instead of using a whole chicken (I don’t know how to quarter a chicken… yet!), I used chicken thighs. A disclaimer: there is nothing remotely healthy about this recipe. I told Ryan my only nod to health was the whole wheat enriched egg noodles I served along with the chicken (with some butter and nutmeg, how my mom has always prepared egg noodles). 

Here's a couple process shots (with a few shower gifts in use - I'm not wasting time!).

In the interest of keeping it real (something I’m going to try harder to do moving into year three of this blog), here is how we attempted to keep our oven door closed tight.


















One of our not-so-favorite topics of discussion is which one of our antiquated appliances is going to stop working first, thus requiring us to drop a cool $1,500 on a replacement (no doubt the day after paying our mortgage and credit card bill). Lucky us, the fridge, washer/dryer, oven and dishwasher all seem to be about the same vintage, so once the first one goes, it will likely commence some sort of appliance replacement/bankruptcy domino effect. For the record, my money’s on the oven as the first to go. But I digress.

Moving on... here’s a few shots of the Valentine’s Day table, set with our new wedding China, place settings and linens. It looked so great!  So did the beautiful flowers my Valentine contributed to this very chic tablescape.

How delish are those navy and white Ikat napkins?  My family and friends really have impeccable taste.  Well done, all.

Midnight in Paris and crepes for dessert were de-lovely (I’m being extra clever with my blog post title since Cole Porter is in Midnight in Paris, FYI). I used this “Easy Crepes” recipe, which indeed was easy, and made them the night before. All we needed to do were heat up the crepes and pick our toppings. Topping selections included chocolate sauce, Nutella, raspberries, strawberries and crumbled Sweet Sloops.

For those of you uninitiated, drop everything and immediately seek out and try a Sweet Sloop. Now. They are made by Harbor Sweets in Salem and are sailboat shaped almond butter crunch candies with white chocolate, dark chocolate and pecans. You have no idea.  Bonkers. 

No pictures of our crepes because we ate them up as soon as we rolled them up!  If Valentine’s Day isn’t a free pass from Shedding for the Wedding, I don’t know what is…