Valentine's Day Dinner

As our wedding anniversary is so close to Valentine's day, and we don't really celebrate Valentine's, we decided to have a special home cooked meal. 

Over a few weeks I searched for recipes and got my husband to choose which he liked best. For starter we decided to go with something we've made before and both like, Bruschetta. 

We do this very simply, toast some ciabatta, usually this would be spread with garlic butter but this time we just used plain butter. We sliced some tomatoes and red onion and mixed these together. These were placed on top of the bread and then we used balsamic vinegar poured onto the plate. 

Bruschetta

For the main we chose something I've never made before, duck breasts, Gary chose this recipe, Five spice duck breast. It was very simple and involved frying the breast in spices and the combining this with soy sauce, honey and bok choy. We found this slightly more challenging because we didn't really know what we were doing. 

Main, five spice duck. 

I served the recipe with mashed potato so it would fill us up a little more. This was very nice but parts of the duck were too rare, so could have done with being cooked slightly more, and the bok choy was too chewy. I really enjoyed the bits of duck that were cooked enough. 

For dessert I chose a lemon dessert, I'm rather enjoying citrus at the moment so this hit the spot. Lemon self-saucing dessert. This is a very easy dessert, and was delicious. Gary gave this 10/10. I served it with custard, so unfortunately you can't see much in the photo. All I can say is it was REALLY nice and definitely worth trying!! 

Dessert - Lemon self-saucing dessert

The meal was a really nice combination with improving flavours in each course, we enjoyed the experiment. Whilst we probably won't cook the duck again, due to ingredient cost vs flavour, we will adjust this recipe for use with chicken and I think Gary would definitely like me to cook the dessert again.