Time Flies

So January is over already! I can't believe it, but hopefully that means that February will fly by as well - I'm ready for the warmer weather of March in DC. Not that we've had too much cold weather this year... but I digress. Eating has been very good in our house for the last couple of weeks. We have tried out quite a few new recipes, but before I get into that I need to discuss our dinner last night. We went to Restaurant Eve -- YEEEAAA. Definitely still our favorite place! We started with cocktails - an Eve's Temptation for me and a Black Currant Fizz for Andrew. Both were amazing. Dinner was jerusalem aritchoke soup and seared ahi tuna for me and a housemade charcuterie board and monkfish for andrew, accompanied by an amazing verdejo. The revelation of the evening was that the very yummy bed of greens that my tuna was resting on was actually swiss chard (something I have never liked before). Our waiter (who was wonderful!) confirmed that they were actually pan-roasted with a little olive oil and garlic and I think I spoted a few carmelized onions as well. I will now be on a mission to re-create something resembling that dish. Dessert, because you have to have dessert, was apple doughnuts filled with carmelized apples, swirled in apple sugar syrup, sitting on a little pool of creme fraiche, accompanied with a dollop of apple butter and a quenelle of ice cream. They were to quote our waiter "heaven on a plate." Unbelievable.

Okay, onto our more common homemade meals. Over the past couple of weeks our kitchen has turned out Rachel Ray's Buffalo Chicken Chili (very good, also makes good tacos as leftovers if you some additional meat); a few recipes from Cooking Light: 1) Spicy Cocoa Beef (interesting flavor, but good - we served over buttered egg noodles and it was a good pairing); 2) Cumin dusted chicken with guacamole sauce (i really liked this, but Andrew thought the rub on the chicken was a little too sweet; the "sauce" was great); 3) falafel sandwiches for lunch (good alternative to the standard turkey sandwich that I get bored with); 4) fettuccine alfredo (not my favorite, but I was distracted while making it as well and didn't follow the recipe in a quite a few places so it may need to be made again before I write it off).

As for new twists on recipes, we are still trying to perfect Andrew's spicy tomato soup. I think we're very close. The base tomato soup is flavored with a great combination of spices including ginger and cumin, but then the recipe calls for blending it together with a jalepeno which always seems to dilute the flavors and translate them to just heat. So I came up with the idea of leaving the base soup sans jalepeno and then make a jalepeno cream to swirl in upon serving. I made the cream with the jalepeno, some buttermilk, sour cream, a little mayonnaise, and a little green jalepeno tabasco. The effect was perfect - I was worried that the cream wouldn't add enough spice but it really did and we were able to taste all the components of both the soup and the cream perfectly. A success.