….is through his stomach.
It’s an age-old saying, but it still rings true today. I have yet to meet a guy who can’t be won over with a delicious home-cooked meal, or at least a meal that he enjoys. I’m not sure the home-cooked factor is even an important ingredient in this recipe.
So what’s a girl to do for Valentine’s Day, the holiday of hearts and mushy-gushy romance? Cook, of course!
Dustin is usually the cook in our relationship, which I am eternally grateful for. I have the capabilities of cooking, but I don’t enjoy doing it one bit, especially after a long 12-hour work day. It should also be known that Dustin and I don’t really celebrate Valentine’s Day that much. He’s a guy, so he believes it’s a stupid holiday that was invented by girls, whereas I believe it was a silly holiday invented by Hallmark. As a result, we just make sure we’re hanging out on that day and do something relatively low-key.
Because Dustin is the main cook, I decided it would be a nice change of pace for him if I donned the chef’s hat. So for the entire weekend, I prepared us two delicious meals, then surprised him with a third on Monday.
Friday kicked off my venture to win over Dustin’s heart by cooking up some delicious chicken. Chicken can be bland or extremely tasty, plus it’s cheap. After all, I am still a college student! Also, it’s important to note that I’m training for a half-marathon, so I can’t eat anything too ridiculously unhealthy. So I headed to FITNESS magazine’s website and whipped up this recipe for terragon chicken. There were a few substitutions, but we stuck to the recipe pretty closely and ended up with a delicious thyme (not terragon) chicken with lots o’ veggies on the side.
On Saturday, Dustin pulled out the stops for a date night and took me out to Ruby Tuesday’s, where we had our first date over two years ago. I had the Parmesan Shrimp Pasta and it was so good, I was tempted to lick my bowl clean.
I took over the cooking duties again on Sunday, this time going Mexican with some chicken tacos! I also found this recipe on FITNESS’ website and my, oh, my, was it delicious! First, I seasoned cut up chicken with salt and pepper and let it cook in a tablespoon of canola oil.
Then I tossed in a bunch of tomatoes, white onion, a jalapeno pepper, a clove of garlic, scallions, lime juice and cilantro to season it up quite nicely.
After everything was mixed in together, I portioned the food on small corn tortillas and dug in! The ingredients gave the chicken a perfect amount of spice and the variety of flavors really gave my taste buds a treat. However, the corn tortillas I bought at Price Chopper were not up to par and kept ripping apart, so Dustin and I ended up feasting on this dish without the wraps. Next time we’re going to give it a go with Tostitos chips and make it a taco salad.
Dustin thought that my cooking duties were over by the time actual Valentine’s Day rolled around, but he was happily mistaken. He works late on Monday nights though, so instead of cooking, I made sure he had one of his favorite foods for dinner….pizza! I was able to order a heart-shaped pepperoni pizza from Cam’s to celebrate the day and Dustin was a happy camper.
Like I said, the way to a man’s heart is definitely through his stomach! I’ll tally this Valentine’s Day in the success column!
What fun things did you do for Valentine’s Day?