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I cooked a 3 course meal for valentine's day because I'm just that special kinda guy. Here I recount you with my tails of chivarous do. The nice thing about this is that most of the stuff, except the risotto, can be made in advance and then just cooked on the night. Starter - Greg's Prawn and Mushroom Risotto ----------------------------------------------- Just like this http://drinkbroken.typepad.com/drink_broken/2005/10/prawn_and_chest.html and it was awesome. Main - Feta stuff chicken breast ----------------------------------------------- Fairly simple - I mixed together some crumbled feta, some chopped rocket (any peppery salad leaves will work) and some toasted pine nuts and then stuffed them into a chicken breast which I had cut a pocket into. A note - this is definitely one occasion to go for good quality, organic, free range, bi-weekly massaged chicken breasts - the taste makes all the the difference. To go with this I had a simple peppery leaf salad with a balsamic dressing and bundles of 5 or so pre-blanched thin green beans wrapped in a rasher of smoked streaky bacon. The chicken went in the oven at 200 degress Celcius for about 20-25 minutes in a pan with a ladle full of chicken stock. Then beans went in for 15-20 minutes depending on how crispy you want your bacon. Oddly both girlyfriend and I agreed that the beans could have done being cooked with a sprinkling of maldon sea salt flakes on them. Dessert - Raspberry wacky cake ----------------------------------------------- I used this recipe here http://www.axis-of-aevil.net/archives/2005/10/wacky_cake.html but I'm a bit of a spaz when it comes to baking as I don't get much practice. As a variation I added When I was making the batter I don't think I put in enough cocoa (I sort of ran out at 2.75 table spoons) and I put too much water in (not to mention the raspberrys would have had even more moisture). Also, the oven was at slightly too low a temperature for a while (I knocked it by accident) and so instead of taking 35 minutes to cook it was still a tiny bit too moist when I took it out of the oven over an hour later and went to bed. A brief taste this morning confirmed that it was still a little bit too gooey in the middle and there was a slight taste of flour which is, I presume because it wasn't cooked at a high enough temperature. I don't know if it was because of this or the slight lack of cocoa but it wasn't really chocolatey enough for me either. Didn't taste any raspberrys. Still, it definitely looks like something I'll want to try again soon in order to perfect.
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