Valentine's Day: Bacon Wrapped Scallops; Broiled Filet Mignon; Roasted Pepper Risotto; Molten Lava Cake

     Jeff scheduled himself to work on Valentine's Day.  I was disappointed, but as a co-worker pointed out to me - it is a made-up holiday invented to boost sales for Hallmark.  I am not sure if that is really historically true, but I am going to go with it to make myself feel better.  I guess it really shouldn't matter.  I just like to have a day that is designated for celebrating each other, because we so infrequently do it on our own.  With that being said, Jeff is usually the one who actually makes the Valentine's Day special for me, and I am not so good at doing that for him.  This year, we said we weren't going to do anything for each other except have a great meal.  We are already over-extending our resources with a trip to California. 

     I knew that even though we said we weren't going to do anything for each other, Jeff had gotten something for me.  I figured I was going to be making the dinner, because he was working at least until 8.  Monday night, I was pulling all of my current and old February issues of magazines to try and come up with a budget-friendly menu.  I knew that we had a couple of lobster tails in the freezer, so I picked out a recipe for that and printed that up.

     Jeff came home and startled me from my food magazine immersion.  He had beef tenderloin and scallops.  The beef tenderloin was on sale at Rainbow and the scallops called to him from Sam's Club.  The request had been made: bacon-wrapped scallops and fillet mignon.  Nothing says love like bacon, seafood, and a big hunk of beef - not just any kind of beef: mouth-watering, tender-as-butter, juicy, tenderloin.  We hadn't had any of those items for a while, so that sounded great to me.

    

     I hadn't thought about the big meal all day, and when I got home after work on Tuesday (the big day), I realized I hadn't planned anything for dessert.  Jeff has a big sweet tooth, and we both love chocolate, so I was trying to find something along those lines.  I talked to Jennifer on the phone, and she said she had a chocolate souffle recipe that was really good.  I asked her to email it to me.  I wanted to print it, so I fired up the desktop.  Unfortunately, there was some issue with Google - every time I opened a Google window or tried to touch any Google-related icon on my screen, the window would shut down. 

     There are ways around that, so I forwarded the e-mail to my Comcast account.  However, when I opened up the e-mail in Comcast, the attachment hadn't been forwarded with it.  Apparently, I am not as well versed in Driodology as I would have liked.  I called Jennifer back and asked her to re-send it, which she did.  Then, when I tried to open it, my desktop said that there was an issue with Adobe.  I knew there had been a problem with it for some time but never bothered to fix it, because I rarely use Adobe on that computer.  So, I tried to fix it.  I downloaded the newest, latest, and greatest versions, which took much longer than I thought it should have, and after about an hour of dinking around, it still didn't work.

     I gave up and found a molten chocolate lava recipe from Paula Deen on the internet.  I didn't have the exact ingredients she called for, and I only needed to make two, not six, but I figured I could work with it.  I wanted to make sure that these were hot when they were served, but I didn't know when that would be or how I would time that with the meal.  I decided to have all of the ingredients as ready as possible, so when we were done eating the main part of the meal, I could "pop" these into the oven.

MOLTEN LAVA CAKES

4 ounces Semisweet Chocolate

5 tablespoons Unsalted Butter

1/4 cup All-Purpose Flour

3/4 cup Superfine Sugar

1/2 tablespoon Instant Espresso Powder

1/2 teaspoon Roasted Saigon Cinnamon

Pinch Hot Pepper Powder

2 Jumbo Eggs

1 Egg Yolk

1/2 teaspoon Vanilla Extract

1 tablespoon Maraschino Liqueur

     Preheat oven to 425º F.

     Grease 4 (5-ounce) ramekins.

     Melt the chocolate and butter in the microwave - start with a 30 second interval and stir.  Repeat until all of the chocolate is melted.  Do not overcook.

     Add the flour, sugar, espresso powder, cinnamon and hot pepper to the chocolate mixture.  Stir in the eggs and yolk until smooth.  Stir in the vanilla and the cherry liqueur.  Divide the batter evenly among the ramekins.  Bake for 12-14 minutes. 

     Slide a knife around the edges to loosen and invert onto dessert plates.

     I chopped the chocolate up as finely as I could.  I had just watched Alton Brown melting chocolate on Food Network, and he said that the smaller the pieces of chocolate, the faster and easier it was to melt.

    I combined the chocolate and butter in a microwave-safe bowl and set it aside.  Then, I mixed together the flour and sugar.  Paula's recipe called for confectioner's sugar, but I didn't have that, so I ground regular sugar in my coffee grinder until it was superfine.  I had this really wonderful smelling cinnamon that I had purchased a few weeks ago that I thought would be fabulous in this dessert, so I added some of that.  Also, I love a little kick in my chocolate, so I also added some hot pepper that I had made from dried peppers from my garden.  I just gave it a small pinch, though, because it was pretty hot stuff, and I still wanted the main flavor to be sweet.  I also combined the eggs and yolk and added the vanilla and cherry liqueur to the eggs for easy combining.  My last preparation was to spray all of the ramekins with cooking spray. 

      I wanted to start with the scallops and have those as an appetizer - okay, not an appetizer exactly: more like a first course.  I looked in the refrigerator for them.  They weren't there.  They were in the freezer!  I was thinking that was going to be a huge problem, since I needed to work with them right now.  Then, I had an "aha!" moment - why wouldn't I just put them in a strainer and run water over them, like I would for frozen shrimp.  I could prepare the bacon in the meantime.  I picked out 6 of them that were relatively close in size.

     The bacon we had was this really thick, and I was worried that it would only get flabby before the delicate scallops were cooked.  Maybe I should have left them frozen?  That might not work either - they were pretty thick scallops, and I was worried that the outsides would be fine but the inside wouldn't be cooked all the way.  I decided to partially cook the bacon first.  I placed it in a single layer and threw it in the microwave on the bacon setting, but only set it for 4 slices instead of the seven I had in the tray.  Then, of course, they were too hot to handle, so I had to go on to something else.

     What were we going to have with our protein?  The day before, Jeff had suggested corn.  We had plenty of corn in the freezer, but I thought we should have something with color in it - not necessarily a vegetable per se, but something colorful.  I looked in the freezer, thinking I might find some broccoli, but what I found was a bag of roasted peppers from the fall.  There were red, green, and yellow all frozen together in one big block.  I wasn't sure if they were sweet or hot or both.  I suspected both, or I would have labeled them as hot.  Well, you would think that I would have labeled them either way, but I hadn't.  I  was just going to take the risk.  I decided we were going to have roasted pepper risotto.  Risotto is usually made with Parmesan and Romano, neither of which I had on hand, but I did have Manchego.  I looked it over.  It is a hard, salty cheese.  It would work.

INTERNATIONAL ROASTED PEPPER RISOTTO

1 Thick-Cut Slice of Bacon

½ cup Finely Chopped Yellow Onion

2 tablespoons Minced Garlic

½ cup Dry Rose Wine

2 cups Turkey Broth

1½ cups Japanese Sushi Rice

¼ teaspoon Smoked Salt

½ teaspoon Chipolte Chili Powder

1 cup Roughly-Chopped Roasted Peppers (preferably of various colors and heat profiles)

3oz. Chevre

1 cup Finely-Shredded Manchego Cheese

2 thin slices Capicola, crisply fried, and crumbled

     Chop the bacon and toss it into a preheated pan over medium-high heat.  Once some of the fat has rendered from it, add the onions and garlic.  Cook for a couple of minutes, while stirring, until the onions turn translucent.  Add the rice and stir-cook that until translucent (another 3-4 minutes).  Add the wine and continue stirring until the liquid has been absorbed.  Add the turkey broth, a half a cup (or a ladle-ful) at a time, adding each subsequent ladle after the liquid has been incorporated into the rice.  When you have incorporated most of the broth into the rice, check it for doneness.  It should be slightly firm to the bite, but it shouldn't be crunchy or chalky.  If it isn't quite done yet, add the rest of the turkey broth, and add hot water  if necessary.

     Once the rice has reached the desired texture, stir in the chevre until it has melted into the rice.  Add the Manchego.  Serve, sprinkling the crumbled capicola over each portion.

     Once I had the risotto started, my bacon was cool enough for me to handle.  Jennifer had told me that she had bacon wrapped scallops on her last business trip, and the restaurant chef cooked them table side.  I asked how they attached the bacon, and she wasn't sure.  She said that there didn't appear to be anything holding it on there.  I was unable to keep the bacon around the scallop without any aides - I had to shove a toothpick through it to make it stay.

     I drizzled the assembled scallops with olive oil and sprinkled them with black pepper.  I wasn't sure when Jeff was going to be home, so I waited until he walked in to put them in the broiler.  I broiled them for about three or four minutes on each side.  I had hoped that there would be a little browning of the scallops, but I was so paranoid that they were going to overcook and become rubbery that I pulled them out before anything happened in the browning department.  I had mentioned that to Pam (later), and she suggested using a torch on them.  That wasn't a bad idea!  I want to make them again now to try it.

     Pele had decided that the pretty red bag Jeff had placed on the table was for him.  He is a sweetheart of a cat, after all... (At least to me).  He didn't wait for me to help him open it - he dove right in.

     He didn't care much for the camera that was inside, but he thought that the tissue paper was pretty cool.
     Jeff volunteered to take over the steak portion of the meal once we had finished our scallops.  It is, after all, a boy job to cook the red meat.  Actually, he had started it the night before.  He had thawed the fillets and seasoned them with Harley's.  It was late by this time, and he didn't feel like going downstairs to outside and upstairs to get to the grill and maneuver the grill in the dark, so we decided on broiler steaks.  They were fabulous!  They were perfectly seared on the outside, and the inside was still a beautiful Valentine color and warm.  It was juicy and salty and was the perfect friend for the creamy, rich risotto.

     I was surprised at how easy the lava cake was to put together and make.  Since I already had the ingredients all prepared, it only took a couple of minutes to melt the chocolate and butter and combine everything.  Then, I was sure that it was some kind of trick - that there wouldn't be any way that the inside would be the right consistency.  I have decided that this is going to be my new party trick.  For as easy as this is, and the wow factor it provides, I am definitely going to impress my friends and relatives with this.  The hardest part of the whole thing was inverting it onto a dessert plate.  It was a little difficult to hold on to the tiny ramekin with an oven mitt on (because it was really hot) without dunking the oven mitt into the cake or dropping the ramekin in the flip.  Amazingly enough, though, I managed.