Valentine's Day Dinner

I'm going to apologize in advance, I forgot to take a picture of the dinner Adam and I made together, it would have been a pretty picture.

We made ribeye steaks from Ralph's Packing House, cooked using the technique in the previous post, long green beans with Arkansas bacon from Ralph's and three cheese ravioli 9that I cheated and bought pre-made from the store, hey at least it wasn't frozen) with the most decadent cream sauce you can imagine. I have a couple of tips for the steak technique I posted yesterday...#1 make sure the cast iron skillet is REALLY hot, you want those steaks to have a slight crisp to them on each side before putting them in the oven #2 that recipe is for a fillet, or a thick steak, I lowered the time in the oven and still could have lowered it a little more. Our ribeyes were about an inch thick, so for your average steak I would cook them in the oven at 400 degrees for 3 minutes rather than 5-7 for a medium rare steak. Don't get me wrong the steak was amazing, I'm just a perfectionist when it comes to cooking...if I'm going to eat the calories, it better dang well be worth it! #3 Don't grab and pick up off the counter, a full-size cast iron skillet that just came out of a 400 degree oven with your bare hand, it hurts... really bad. Thankfully I have a sweet husband who helped do things I couldn't do with just one hand.

The cream sauce... oh the cream sauce, I am more excited that I figured out the cream sauce than anything else about the dinner... even thought it all was very delicious! We ate at a new restaurant in town called Brooklyn's a few weeks ago and I had chicken and cheese filled ravioli with cream sauce. The sauce in that dish was so velvety and smooth and rich words can't even explain! I tried replicating it a couple of weeks ago and it was good, but just not exactly what I was looking for. However, last nights was perfect! In fact, it was so good I could have tipped the sauce pan back and drank all of it... and licked it clean. I'm going to do a separate blog post on the cream sauce so it's easy to find in a search.

To sum it up, our Valentine's dinner was amazing, the entire dish! However I had a bag of ice in my right hand and could put it down with just enough time to cut a bite of steak before it hurt so bad I couldn't bear it anymore, then had to quickly grab it to ease the pain. I even had to sleep with it in my hand, not very fun, but apparently it did a lot of good. It's feeling better than I ever expected it too this morning!