Do French cows Moo?

Last night we got together at my favorite sister-in-law's to do our second annual "let's make great food for Valentine's Day" get-together.

Last year - Lobster thermidor. Delicious, but it took hours because we made stuffed mushrooms from scratch, then we make a fancy sort of salad that I can't remember now, we made a special rice side dish, etc. We ate dinner about 8 pm.

This year we decided to make dishes all "french" in style. Sister In Law had a couple of French cookbooks that we hunted through to pick out the recipes.

We cheated a little, started off with Brie in pastry... from the freeezer section of the local supermarket. Bake it, drop some grapes and extra crackers on the platter (Carr makes great crackers that are simple but everyone I have over seems to love them.)

Then we had French onion soup, but we didn't really put our heart & soul into it; we didn't broil cheese on top. ( We wanted to keep the rest of the meal on the timeline we'd planned.) We had a salad with a hot mushroom vinaigrette which was nice.

The main course was scallops (foo foou name of the dish: Coquilles St. Jacques) and we had a side dish which was zuchinni, rice, and cheese, all baked together with little things like shallots thrown in. Both were REALLY yummy. At our last wine class we told the owner our plans and he recommended this wine:

Chateau de Chasseloir 2002 Muscadet Sevre et Maine

It was excellent. According to Ted (wine guy) it is grown on the French coast and has a slightly "salty" taste from the sea air. (I vaguely tasted that but wouldn't have been able to verbalize that on my own.)

We also had steaks with our meal, which was a whole side drama. I try not to bag on my other brother in law in this blog but really, sometimes...he just gets on my nerves. We asked them to bring steaks because Mrs. Other Brother in Law does not like fish. Any fish. We had our menu picked out, then when we invited them, it was sort of an "oops... hey, how about you bring steaks and grill them too and it will be like surf & turf?" So we had BIL grumbling about "well I didn't know I'd have to cook them (sorry, Bobby just left) and then, although we told him 3x that we had figured out we would eat about 6pm, for some reason he partially cooked them, then turned the grill off. Hello? Remember I'm in the frigid Northeast, where things take a bit lonnnnnnger to grill in the wintertime.

So when the rest of the food was ready, the steaks weren't. And there was a basting sauce involved which was apparently a pouting issue ("We couldn't make anything that would need the stove..." - why not just make a nice steak? you have to know that BIL always wants to "wow them" and good enough just NEVER is, for him.... eyerolls galore from me on this whole issue.) The steaks were somewhere between "Moo, I'm still alive" and really rare. Mrs. OBIL seemed stressed and I felt bad, but what could we do? We didn't have an extra oven so they couldn't be broiled inside. I was just hoping no one would get sick because they were half cooked, then stopped, then finished later.

Mooooving on, we had dessert. We made bread pudding with challah bread, with white chocolate chunks and raspberry sauce mixed in. It was so good. SO good. The wine I had gotten was:

Robert Pecota Winery (California) 2001 Moscato d'Andrea Muscat Canelli

(I'm sure I am listing the phrases in the wrong order, but whatever...) I liked it. The guys didn't like it. The sister in law that I'm taking the classes with thought it tasted like a port wine. (The other one is expecting so she didn't have any wine.) We all agreed it might be nice for serving along with chocolate dipped strawberries. It's a very heavy, sweet wine. It was about $13.

We had a great evening, and made the kids try everything (that's a little crusade of mine especially with my nephew who only wants chicken fingers and fries. He's 10, just like my daughter and I follow the No Thank You Bite principle. You have to try ONE bite and and I promise that if you don't like it, when I ask you if you want more, if you say No Thanks, I'll leave you alone. ) He actually liked the scallops and so did my son. My daughter B did not, so I must keep working on her tastebuds to prevent her from becoming another finicky eater like Mrs. OBIL - how can you not like A-N-Y fish???


PS.: Speaking of kids and the sea, take a look at what that awful Johnny did to my son's sweet little Johnny Depp tribute... oh who am I kidding, I laughed like crazy....