Valentine's Day Part 4: Chicken Breasts, Smashed Artichoke Potatoes and Mixed Greens with Lemon Vinaigrette

Okay, so I have been pretty bad about blogging lately. A few things have come up that have kept me from blogging. However, I haven't stopped cooking and now have QUITE the backlog to post! I am going to try to get on it as much as possible, but it may be tough with finals coming up. I promise I will do my best to get through it all!

So for our main course, Awesome Sauce and I dined on Cognac Flambeed Chicken Breasts, Smashed Artichoke Potatoes and Mixed Greens with Lemon Vinaigrette.

This part of the meal was incredibly simple. There was no real recipe for the chicken. You take chicken breasts and coat them in a light layer of kosher salt and cracked black pepper. You then take a pan and put a large pat of butter in said pan (about a tablespoon). You then toss in some sliced almonds and put the whole thing over a medium flame. Once you can smell the almonds, you add the chicken breasts and turn up the heat, searing them on both sides. Finish cooking in the oven or very slowly over the stove. Once you take them out, toss about a shot glass worth of cognac over the chicken breasts and light it on fire!! This is best done at the table for a fun presentation. Unfortunately for us, the chicken breasts didn't want to light! :-( I have heard that others have been successful so we will definitely have to try again sometime. I can be a bit of a pyromaniac :-P

Overall the chicken wasn't bad, but wasn't anything special. We served it with a chardonnay that was recommended for buttery dishes. They did go exceptionally well together. The mixed greens were the same as the bed I placed the Crab Cakes one, so it is reviewed in an earlier post.

The smashed artichoke potatoes were a new one for us and were quite tasty. They were a unique recipe from Allrecipes and can be found here:

http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Artichoke-Mashed-Potatoes/Detail.aspx

I really liked these and am always fascinated by different variations on mashed potatoes. These ones were creamy and garlicky. They artichoke added a "freshness" to them that is difficult to describe. I would definitely recommend these and am considering making them the next time I grill up a steak. Something about the artichoke has me thinking that they would really compliment a steak well. I have tried some strange ones in my day (including peanut butter in mashed potatoes...yes, I am looking at you little sister....), but they are always fun to try.

Here is what the finished dinner looked like:





So, time for the Ratings:

Cognac Flambeed Chicken Breasts:
The Clumsy Gourmet: 6
Awesome Sauce: 4 (Awesome Sauce didn't find them very interesting and was bored by the basically plain chicken breasts. He did, however, very much like the wine with the butter sauce.

Artichoke Smashed Potatoes:
The Clumsy Gourmet: 8
Awesome Sauce: 8

Shortbread

Randomly Awesome Sauce and I will make a large batch of cookies for him to bring to work to his coworkers. we decided that Valentine's Day was a good enough excuse to pull out Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything and see if we can make a cookie.

We decided to make the Shortbread cookies on pages 714-715. We chose this recipe primarily because we could use a heart-shaped cookie cutter to create our Valentine's Day theme!

First thing is first...gather ingredients! Unfortunately, I did not quite have enough butter! I decided to improvise. I happened to have a left-over carton of whipping cream. So we made our own butter. See the pictures below:

Getting ready to whip!

For those of you who haven't used your stand mixer to make butter, ALWAYS cover with a cloth. If you don't, you will not have fun cleaning up the splatters that will be all over your kitchen. What? I didn't learn this from experience or anything.....

Finished butter!!!

A side-view of our mountain of butter!!

This recipe was simple to follow. The biggest trick is to refridgerate the dough between rolling it out or it gets too soft to work with. Some of these cookies I rolled out a bit too thin. Tip: Keep them nice and thick to that 1/4 of an inch thick! They are definitely better a bit thicker. However, the consensus was in: these cookies were great!! Junky Monkey had to request a few...just to make sure they were "still good." Awesome Sauce found them to be Delicious!

Dough out of the fridge!!

Making the cookies!

A tray right out of the oven.

The hearts are ready for their close-up!!

Finished cookie tray for Awesome Sauce's coworkers.

When Awesome Sauce took them to work he put a sign next to them saying: "Happy Valentine's Day from Awesome Sauce and The Clumsy Gourmet! Please tell us what you thought of the cookies!! Comments may be used on The Clumsy Gourmet's food blog" We asked for a comment and a rating. Here are some of our responses:

Awesome! Thanks (10), Excellente! (9.9), Very Tasty (10), Very good (9), The Best Cookies ever (10), 12:30pm..this is the fourth! (9), Nice tookes, not too sweet, but too tasty (9), Yum yum ummm (10), very good (10.1), tasty (9), I loved them (10), Bravo (2 to the 10th power....anyone figure out that Awesome Sauce is an engineer?)

Overall, these cookies were a success!!!


Rating:
The Clumsy Gourmet: 8.5
Awesome Sauce: 8.5
Junky Monkey: 9.5