Date Night Part 2 - Cooking with My Sweet Baboo

Boy have we been busy. The three of us have been working as backstage help for Brunswick Little Theatre's production of "Into the Woods" and I haven't had much time to write. But I do want to share our other recent date night story.

You may have already read about our fabulous dinner out at Mr. P's Bistro while John was visiting his grandparents in PA. Another night we had a date night of sorts at home. We love to cook together, and risotto is the perfect couples dish to cook.

Risotto takes time to cook. Not a long time, but enough that we can have a glass of wine and take turns stirring (that's Jeffrey's thumb in the picture). This night, I tried a new chicken dish with garlic and lemons. Check out the recipe here. As usual, I used it as sort of a guide and made some tweaks. I didn't use a whole bulb of garlic because that seemed a bit much. And I used dried thyme because that's what I had. I also used just chicken thighs. So I got the chicken going and then Jeff and I cooked risotto. We made Parmesan risotto that night. We have made risotto enough times that I don't look at a recipe anymore. And I don't really measure anything besides the stock and the rice. When we first started cooking risotto, we used this Rachael Ray recipe. Now when we make it, we usually start by cooking some diced Pancetta. (Look for a future blog post on why Pancetta makes everything better). We take the cooked Pancetta out and cook the shallots in the pan (we add a little butter to the Pancetta grease). I also put in a little salt and pepper at this stage. Then we pour in the rice and get it nice and toasty. Then we add wine. Risotto is traditionally made with white wine, but sometimes we like to be rebels and use red instead. We also do the "add wine and reduce it down" step twice. If once is good, then twice is better, right? Then we add the stock (chicken with white wine and beef with red wine) little by little until it is all gone and the risotto is creamy. And then it's time to eat.

We do like a good risotto. But that's just part of the reason to cook it. We also like having some wine and good conversation. Our attention is focused only on the task at hand and each other. We don't mind that it takes a while to get dinner on the table. The journey to the dinner table (or TV trays in the living room so we can watch a good Disney movie while eating) is easily half the fun.