Valentine’s Day Dinner

We don’t really make a big deal out of Valentine’s Day. It’s a no gift affair, but we will do a nice dinner somewhere. Sometimes not even on the day itself unless a particular menu catches our eye.

Having just got back from a few months away, we didn’t have a lot of time to think about where to go, so I decided to cook something different from the usual instead.

Menu

Starter

Garlic Bread

Main Course

Neil Perry’s Squid-ink pasta with scallops, chilli, tomato and garlic

Dessert

Snixy Kitchen’s Frosted Earl Grey Brownies with Rose Petals with clotted cream

Recipe Notes

I cheated with the garlic bread and just bought ready to bake stuff.

The pasta was straight forward to do, but I did deviate from the recipe by using fresh tomatoes plus a bit of water instead of tinned chopped, which is why my sauce is more dry. Still absolutely delicious, but more saucy would have been just as good. The seasoning was just right for what I would like, because as the recipe states, the roe will add some natural salt.

As an interesting point of note, the scallops I purchased had a combination of orange and pale coloured roe, and I found the orange roe didn’t hold its form as well as the pale. Haven’t looked into the reasoning for that, but I did use more scallops, reserved a few of the whole pale roe for topping with the scallops, and whizzed the rest, including the broken orange ones, up in the sauce (love my stick blender for things like this). Which probably worked out for the best anyway, as the orange made for a more colourful sauce.

Even with the extra steps needed for the scallop and roe, it’s a quick and easy cook, but don’t sub out the squid ink pasta for plain. I don’t know what it is, but there’s a certain je ne sais quoi about squid ink that always adds an extra layer of depth to pasta dishes.

The Earl Grey Brownies are also a quick and uncomplicated bake, provided you have the flours on hand, which I do from my forays into making gluten-free breads which don’t taste like cardboard. The dense fudgy texture described in the recipe is definitely from the nature of the flours used, but you could achieve a similar flavour profile (if not the texture) using a regular brownie recipe with added ground earl grey.

I also went without the frosting because the brownie looked indulgent enough without further encouragement. Just a dusting of icing sugar with crushed rose petals. Had I used a lighter brownie recipe, I may have been tempted to add a little rose water into the frosting as well. But then, I do like rose water.

The clotted cream I served with the brownies cuts into the richness and density, but if you’re having these brownies in the days following baking, particular if you refrigerate them, they’ll benefit from warming to soften it up a bit.

Not bad a for a weeknight dinner, even if I do say so myself.