Breakfast this morning was half of a white grapefruit with a maraschino cherry for color, a bowl of steel-cut oats with brown sugar, milk, and walnuts, a glass of orange juice, and several cups of coffee.
I weighed 156 pounds this morning. Lunch was fried rice and a cup of orange and spice tea.
For our Valentine’s dinner, Gretchen and I started by making dessert — or rather the topping for our dessert. We made glazed apples that we would serve over vanilla ice cream later. The first step was to pour ourselves a glass of Bolla Merlot. Next, we gathered our ingredients.
- 4 large Apples (peeled, cored, and sliced)
- ⅔ cup Raisins
- 4 tablespoons Butter
- ⅓ cup Shrub
- pinch each of Cinnamon, Allspice, and Cloves
Peeling, coring, and slicing the apples was easy, since I got Gretchen a peeler, corer, slicer for Christmas. This was a lot of fun, since we had to get our hands on the food and there were invariably the few odd imperfect pieces of apple slice that we did not want in the topping and we got to pick them out and feed them to each other while we were cooking. Next we melted the butter and sautéed the apples and raisins. Once the apples were soft, we added the shrub and the spices and turned the apples until they were uniformly coated. We covered this mixture and set it aside until we were ready for dessert.
So now the question arises, “What the heck is shrub?” Shrub is a light syrup. From the information on the bottle “Recipes for ‘fruit shrubs’ can be found in 18th and 19th century cookbooks including those by Martha Washington and Mary Randolf.” In addition to its use here, shrubs make a nice base for soft drinks or as a flavoring in a Champagne cocktail. We received a bottle of Raspberry Shrub from Tait Farm, just across the valley from us, from my sister-in-law for Christmas.
Once our dessert topping was finished, we went on to making our entree of Soy Braised Chicken. We had left over white rice, from my binge the other day, to go with it.
While we were waiting for the chicken to braise, we fed each other an appetizer of shrimp cocktail.
So, that was our Valentine’s Day dinner — in reverse.