Fancy Dinner

Last night, DH and I went out on our regular Thursday night date night. For the first time in a while, I actually showered and got dressed up nicely. We just went to see a movie and grab a quick bite to eat, but it was wonderful to actually go out, just the two of us, and spend some time together. We saw The Blind Side and we both thought it was great. DH will probably kill me for saying this, but he bawled the entire way through the movie :). I was melting - the movie theatre was about 5,000 degrees, and all I could think about was how I was roasting!

As I thought about it, I'm not sure DH and I have done many "real" date nights since November. We were caught up in holidays, and then date night was suspended when my grandmother fell, and then we were in Florida for my work, and then we lost most of February because of blizzards. I was thinking back to the last date night I could really remember, and I realized I never posted my update about that dinner. So, this is a post from November, one of our better date nights ....

I haven't had much time to post lately - between my morning sickness, Micah's fever and teething, and all my work, well, I'm drowning and way behind in everything! Last Thursday night (November 5), DH & I went out for a nice dinner with friends for our "date night." My mom and dad stayed with Micah (we almost canceled because he had a fever), and off to dinner we went. The restaurant is about 40 minutes away, and it is relatively new in the area and has been receiving rave reviews. To top it all off, the chef is one of the contestants on Top Chef, so we were dying to go eat there. We ate in one of the tables in the kitchen, and we had a 6 course tasting menu. The food was DELICIOUS, and the chef was very kind to us and even came over to talk for a bit.

I was able to select a vegetarian menu. We started off with a bunch of meringues served on these ceramic spoons - it was an opening "salad" of sorts - I had a beet meringue, a lettuce with caesar dressing meringue, and an onion meringue. It was pretty fascinating! The textures and the flavors were amazing. We then had several other delicious bites of food - a sorbet, and a few other things. I have to be honest, I'm not sure I remember now what all the different bites were, but each one was delicious! These bites were just our "amuse bouche" - not even part of the 6 courses being served.

Our opening course was a soup - the vegetarian menu had this AMAZING shitake mushroom soup with a foam and just a hint of chili oil running through it. The meat-eater menu had a clam chowder. The soup couldn't have been more perfect! The second course was a goat-cheese filled ravioli with a brown butter sauce. The meat eaters had a choice between the ravioli and a duck liver dish. The duck liver was served with little toasted breads, had some pistachio nuts and a vanilla foam. The third course was a scallop dish for the meat eaters, served with forbidden rice. The vegetarian menu had the forbidden rice and some mushrooms. The forbidden rice was unbelievable! My one friend had red quinoa instead of the forbidden rice, but it was extremely salty. We did inform the chef...apparently, to apologize, he threw in an extra course! For most of our table, the extra course was quail. To be honest, I have no idea how that was prepared, but all the meat-eaters seemed to love it. I was given an assortment of vegetables - different colored cauliflower, beets, potatoes and squash and farro. It was heavenly, and so full of flavor. The fourth course... was a pork belly dish for the meat eaters. The fifth course was an eggplant dish, prepared a few different ways. Some of it was grilled, there was a sous vide eggplant, and a deconstructed eggplant parmesan, and an eggplant caponata - basically, chopped up eggplant and tomatoes. It was delicious! The meat eaters had a pork belly dish that was apparently quite decadent. For dessert, we were given a white chocolate mouse, some bitter chocolate cookies, some chocolate caramel, a cannelle of chocolate ice cream, and bitter chocolate shavings. We were given a little bonus dessert of mini ice cream sandwiches.

It was an incredible dinner, and it was so much fun to watch the chef in action in the kitchen. He even came over and spoke with us a bit! What an amazing night.