Champagne for our anniversary dinner.

This is a few days later than I intended since I was posting about the Belize trip. Our 24th anniversary was this past Monday, and the Belize trip was really a part of that celebration, just a few weeks early because of timing. In addition to scuba, one of the things that we enjoy doing together is cooking. We both have our specialties and we also try new dishes. We decided to go with “gourmet at home” for our anniversary dinner this year and that was initiated with a trip to Total Wine. Anniversaries are worthy of Veuve Cliequot champagne and Total Wine is one of the few places where we can find Loire Valley Anjou white wine. Yes, I am aware there are better whites, but the Anjou wines are quite good and I am sentimental about them. With that said, on to the simple, yet lovely menu we prepared.

Stone crabs are in season, so we began with those. We added marinated artichoke hearts to Hugh’s mixed green salad and skipped them for me. We had some leftover vegetables in cheese sauce and there’s nothing wrong with using leftovers for a meal like this. The main attraction was lobster in a modified hollandaise sauce served in puff pastry shells. And yes, I use the Knorr mix and Pepperidge Farm shells. I like Knorr and I find it much less stressful than tackling that type of sauce from scratch. (I do not wrestle with puff pastry sheets, although had the week not been so hectic, I would have used phyllo sheets and had lobster napoleans instead puffed pastry.) Dessert  was admittedly pre-made, a nice peanut butter and chocolate sauce ice cream pie; the very small one considering what we had for dinner. I think I have mentioned before that desserts are not my forte and I rarely bother with making them myself.

It was a delicious meal, and had it not been quite so windy, we would have dined pool side. Trying to hold down your napkin while eating does take a bit of the romance away. Oh, I guess I should have put candles on the table, too. Ah well, maybe next year.

Lobster in Puff Pastry Shell as main course