Valentine’s Dinner

It’s Valentine’s Day night. It’s dark out and getting foggy. I was going to make an alfredo sauce to go with chicken breasts but couldn’t figure out what I wanted to really do. So I ended up just grating a bunch of parmesean and putting butter and cream in a pan, heating that and putting in the cheese, heating it, then thinking it too thin grating more cheese, then more … then just putting the chicken, once browned in Olive Oil in a frying pan, putting that into a big low and wide casserole dish, and pouring the sauce over it and putting it into the oven. I have no idea how this will turn out.

I have “heart” pasta to make to go with the sauce. Hopefully it’ll be fine. The pasta we got at Cost Plus World Market. It’s pink and white. Some hearts white, some hearts pink. I saw it in January and for 1.99 it was well worth it. So it’s the night to use it and I am deflated about using it. Not sure how the sauce is going to be. 🙁

I sprinkled some granulated garlic over the chicken breasts while they browned in the pan. So there will be a garlicy taste in the sauce.

I wanted to make bread last week. I had the sponge going, really not a sponge, but my “Pseudo Sourdough Culture”. I’ve kept it out on the counter since creating because it’s just not that warm in the kitchen and I have no room in the fridge, and I’ll have culture ready whenever I want it, a bit faster than the fridge would serve it up to me, that is.

So I didn’t get bread made on Friday. I had the culture all ready to be used. I didn’t make bread on Saturday, culture going even better. I kept the culture going these days, adding more flour to it, but just not getting it made into dough. So Sunday, I kept it going again. Didn’t make bread, it was Sunday, couldn’t do it that day.

So today, Monday. I wanted to make the bread dough. Just never got around to it. It’s been cloudy the last few days, so it’s tougher for me to get things done the longer it’s not sunny. Today I took a nap in the early afternoon too, so that put the bread on the backburner again.

I wish not though. I surely wish I had fresh bread to go with dinner tonight.

🙁

I used to make a parmesean noodle side dish, it was always really good. The sauce I made tonight was supposed to resemble that noodle sauce, but I don’t have the recipe book anymore. It got ruined through some freak child accident/violent treatment of something. :rolleyes:

So I put too much cream in the sauce pan, I am sure of that. I put a ton of parmesean in, but not nearly enough to go with the cream 😉 If the sauce gets thicker in the oven with the chicken … good. It should, but I hope it’ll be a nice texture when I take it out to serve it.

I have a ton of cookbooks. I have one huge Chicken cookbook –dedicated to chicken recipes, glossy pages, tons of photos– not one interesting “cream sauce” type of chicken recipe in that book. :veryshocked:

Not one recipe for a real alfredo sauce in my any of my books either. It’s not that I couldn’t find one online, I just didn’t like the ones I saw … I had one in my head from before and what I put together is just a weirdo thing, out of proportion, I could’nt control myself, just dumping the cream I had in jars into the pan. 🙂 Well it’s an experimental creation and we’ll see how well it turns out. Frank says my “experiments” are always good.

So it’s in the oven, I just put foil over the top, it was browning on top, the cream sauce, that is. It’s ending up that we’ll be eating later than I had wanted to. That’s just the way it goes sometimes (a lot more often than not, actually 😉 )

So this is a family dinner, not a sweethearts dinner. We have nothing smooshy going on this year. Just the smooshy heart pasta, that’ll be it. 😉