Happy post Valentine's Day

Hope everyone had a great Valentine's Day, mine was delicious :)  I'm not really a big Valentine's person, but it is a good excuse to go get some good food.  If you can't tell, I LOVE good food.  It's a miracle I'm not morbidly obese.  Originally Aaron and I were going to go to a sushi restaurant close by called The Blue Fish, if you are ever in the Dallas area you have to go!  It is phenomenal; really cool and unique dishes and modern on the inside.  They have this appetizer, stuffed jalapenos, jalapenos stuffed with crab and cream cheese then fried and covered in eel sauce, to die for.  It is kind of pricey though so we decided to avoid the crowd and save some money, and I cooked dinner for him.  French bread with olive oil dip and spinach salad with bacon and a homemade balsamic vinaigrette for appetizers.  Then fillet topped with mushrooms and a red wine and balsamic reduction, lobster tail with herbed butter, mashed potatoes and asparagus with lemon zest and feta.  We had chocolate covered strawberries with pistachios, pecans and toasted coconut for dessert, and then we were in a food coma.

I bought 6-8oz. fillets from the butcher section, fresh, not the packaged one.  The quality was so worth the extra money. I topped them with sea salt and lots of cracked black pepper and seared them on both sides for about 3min. each.  Then I finished them off in the oven at 375 degrees for about 10 min until they were medium rare.  You may have to do more or less depending on the thickness of the steaks (mine were pretty thick).  For the mushrooms, I sauteed them in olive oil with salt and pepper and at the end added a little red wine then simmered it until it had reduced down.  Then for the reduction sauce I took equal parts red wine and balsamic vinegar, brought it to a boil and then simmered it till it was about half the amount I started with.  At the end, while the sauce is still simmering, I added brown sugar to thicken it up.  Drizzle some reduction on the plate, top it with the fillet, then top the fillet with the mushrooms and a little more of the reduction.  These are probably horrible directions if you are trying to replicate, but I didn't use a specific recipe, and I have no idea what measurements I used.  I improvise A LOT and just mix stuff together.  Anyway, it was delicious and I even impressed myself.  Great quality meat totally makes the difference.

We got all of our wedding photos back today.  They look AWESOME, kuddos to Sheryll Lynne Photographers!  If you would like to see all of them here is the link: http://slphotographers.instaproofs.com/  the password is tutt2011 

There are so many, and lots of pictures of all the guests too. If anyone wants to buy prints they are 15% through the rest of February.