Sunday Dinner - Valentine's Day Edition

Tonight's menu:

• Pan-fried tilapia with beurre blanc
• Roasted asparagus
• Warm baguette slices with butter

This was an unusual dinner for us, in that we didn't plan the menu well in advance. Normally we plan a week or two's worth of menus at a time and then grocery shop every few days to get fresh produce for our planned dinners. However, this past week has been a little crazy and Matt was on call all weekend, so we didn't plan much of anything. We were at our local co-op grocery this afternoon and grabbed some fish fillets, white wine, asparagus, and shallots...surely, we thought, we could make a good meal with that?

Yes, as it turns out, we could. We simply sprinkled the tilapia with salt and pepper and fried it in butter in a skillet. The beurre blanc recipe was from our much-used 400 Sauces cookbook, which we picked up for $5 on the clearance rack at Borders. It's a very easy recipe; just saute some diced shallots in 3 tablespoons each dry white wine (we like chardonnay) and white wine vinegar until the liquid is reduced by about half. Then turn the heat off and let the whole thing cool a bit, stir in 1/2 cup unsalted butter, and season with salt, pepper, and lemon juice. Delicious!

The asparagus was cooked using our favorite method. Trim off the ends and put the whole bunch in a baking dish, coat with about a tablespoon of oil (we normally use olive oil, but we ran out today so we used Canola oil instead...it tasted fine), and sprinkle with salt, pepper, and a lot of minced garlic. Roast at 400 degrees F for about 15-20 minutes and they're done. We also threw a store-bought baguette into the oven, wrapped in aluminum foil, to heat up while the asparagus was roasting.

The whole dinner took us about 20 minutes to make, was relatively healthy (except for the entire stick of butter we used...) and tasted amazing. Plus the shallots turned a lovely shade of pink, a perfect Valentine's day surprise!

Also, I just have to say something about my Valentine's day/birthday gift, because my very clever husband got me something for the blog! It's an awesome Lowel photography light to make our food pictures clearer and brighter. I took tonight's picture with it...still getting the hang of using the reflector, plus I'm using my G1 phone camera to take the picture (my digital camera broke a few months ago) so the pics still aren't perfect, but they're getting better. Thanks Matt!