For our one year anniversary, my boyfriend and I decided to cook a bunch of food for dinner! We had seared duck breast, duck fat fried potatoes, roasted broccoli, lamb stuffed piquillo peppers, goat cheese in red sauce, and garlic bread.
When my boyfriend and I went to San Francisco last year during Valentine's Day weekend, we had dinner at Alegrias, a Spanish restaurant. It was one of the few restaurants where we could get a Valentine's Day dinner reservation when we looked about two weeks before. We had some seafood paella and some tapas. One of those tapas were these lamb stuffed piquillo peppers that was a dinner special, and another one was goat cheese in red sauce.
For the lamb stuffed piquillo peppers, we pan fried some onions, garlic, and lamb and added a bunch of spices. We were following a recipe, but when we did a taste test, it was a bit bland. We decided to throw in some leftover tomato paste and additional spices. Once that was done, we stuffed the lamb mixture in some jarred piquillo peppers. I'm not sure how close we were in recreating the dish we had months ago, but it was very delicious!
My boyfriend was in charge of making the goat cheese with red sauce. About 3 hours before dinner, he started making the red sauce. He added a can of tomato sauce and a lot of garlic, and he simmered it for a few hours. He then put the sauce into a pan along with some goat cheese and baked it until the goat cheese was melty. We also bought some garlic bread from HEB to dip in the sauce and cheese. This was really delicious and garlicky, and it's one of our favorite recipes to make.
For the main course, we decided to make duck breast. It was my first time cooking duck, and I found this recipe from Tasty that looked simple to make. I scored the duck skin with a knife and seasoned it with salt and pepper. Then I placed the duck into a cold pan to slowly render out the fat. After I seared both sides, I placed the duck in the oven. Meanwhile the duck was roasting, I fried some parboiled potatoes in the leftover duck fat and added some rosemary afterwards. I plated the duck up with the potatoes and some roasted broccoli. I had slightly overcooked the duck breast to about medium well instead of medium rare, but it was actually still really delicious! The potatoes were one of our favorites probably because the duck fat made them extra good. I think next time I cook duck breast, I would take them out of the fridge for about an hour before I cook them, so the duck breast can get to room temperature.
Overall, this was a very delicious meal! We definitely cooked too much food, so we had leftovers for a few days. For dessert, we had some 100 hour brownies, and I have a blog post about that here. We were both in food comas after dinner, and I actually fell asleep on the couch later that night. I would definitely cook all of these foods again!