Love Dare: Day 18

This took a lot longer to pull off than I planned. I originally decided what I wanted to cook almost 3 months ago now, and bought it two months ago. But before I start in on the details, here is the love dare itself:

Love Seeks to Understand

Prepare a special dinner at home, just for the two of you. The dinner can be as nice as you prefer. Focus this time on getting to know your spouse better, perhaps in areas you've rarely talked about. Determine to make it an enjoyable evening for you and your mate.

I ended up deciding to move ahead with the dinner despite my lack of a plan to reduce the number of children in the house. Courtney had mentioned several times recently that she missed me doing the love dares. I wasn't about to skip one, so I set a date and started making plans.

Step one was to feed the kids beforehand, something easy and hopefully filling enough to get them into the basement or their bedrooms for several hours. Hot dogs and salad worked well, even if corralling them in a remote location didn't. Josh and Ashley are more than old enough to know when to keep themselves occupied. However Austin had other ideas, though I think that only a couple of interruptions in two hours is pretty good for a three year old. Bella is a puppy, and behaved that way. Though I think our floors remained unsoiled for the duration of dinner.

Getting things together for our dinner was not as easy, I was making Cornish Game Hen for the first time and my Mom hadn't made it in so long she didn't have any pointers. The internet came to the rescue and provided me with a recipe that sounded good, though some of the ingredients were hard to come by. Fennel Seeds, red pepper flakes, kosher salt, Thyme branches, and shallots all needed to be hunted down.

I had already found most of what I needed months ago, and thankfully an herb garden was part of our recent "eating healthy and cheap" initiative so the Thyme branches were not an issue. The rest of the spices were relativly easy to find once I had stared at the spice section in Kroger for awhile.

I had searched for shallots before and didn't have any luck. I was planning to go find them the day I was going to cook the dinner, but Courtney wanted to get out of the house for a bit so she decided to take up the quest. Two stores later and a small grocer telling her that they were just green onions (they aren't) we gave up and used green onions anyway.

After returning home Courtney was starving, so she ate some with the kids and I started cooking. It is a fairly straight forward recipe, I just had to adjust it to 2 birds instead of three and forget about completing the "fine herbs" portion. Just stuff the birds, make the "rub" and apply it, and cook for 75 minutes.

I made some wild rice when it was almost ready, and took the salad out of the fridge. Courtney and I spent the entire prep and cooking time talking and nibbling on what was left of the dinner for the kids. The only downside was that our nibbling whetted our appetites and we ended up not finishing our hens. Live and learn.

We had a nice candlelight dinner anyway, with relatively few interruptions. Speaking of learning, next time I start my shallot hunt long before it's time to make dinner.

Home Movies

I haven't forgotten about the blog (or the Love Dare for that matter), I just have been really busy.

I have fixed the computer in the basement, allowing my kids access to the internet and their I-pod libraries. I finished the garden in the front, and the grass seed in the back. And I have finally started to work on creating digital copies of our home movies.

The Macbook does this really well, though it isn't the fastest process at times. I need to play each video on the camera itself with a Firewire cable hooked up to get it onto the laptop. Then I need to cut, edit, format, and save the video clips into appropriate sized video files.

But after all that is done, I simply upload them to Facebook for anyone (that has access anyway) to enjoy. I'm almost done with the last 2 years of videos, more to come as time allows!

As for the Love Dare, someone needs to volunteer to watch my kids for a night. How am I supposed to cook a romantic dinner with those 3 around? (No suggestions that involve duct tape please)