A selection of recipes from Deep South Dish website perfect for your Valentine's Day.
Valentine's Day Menu
To me, the celebration aspect of Valentine's Day is all about young love - both in the love between a couple in the early stages of a relationship and in that love between a parent and their young children. Young lovers should be enthralled in every aspect of love and being in love on Valentine's Day. Children, with the help of their parents, should be building Valentine boxes, making cupcakes and putting together treats for teachers and classmates - learning about what it is to care for and about others.
Of course if you're wealthy, or a celebrity, you can run off to some exotic spot and spend an obscene amount of money for a week long Valentine's Day celebration whether you are young, old, single, married or somewhere in between. For the rest of us older and maybe, not so older, married folk, the love we feel for our spouses and significant others, is something that should be celebrated every day beginning with those marriage vows. Valentine's Day should not put pressure or a burden on that in any way.
Celebrate it, or not, in the way that you want! For some of us that means a peaceful, quiet night at home. Others of us who cook all the time, might like to have our spouse do the cooking. Or maybe we bring the children to our parent's house to have a date night, out together, in a nice, quiet, romantic restaurant, just the two of us. Just make sure that you communicate to your spouse what it is that you want.
This post here though... this is for all the single ladies out there - the ones who have an eye on that one special beau. The star, is the chicken, and it comes with a story of love.
Legend has it, that the original "engagement chicken" first made its appearance almost 30 years ago now, when a Glamour magazine editor shared the recipe for a simple, roasted chicken with an assistant, who prepared it for her boyfriend one evening. A month later he proposed. And... get this. Apparently, according to the source herself, the original recipe for Engagement Chicken came from none other than The Ina Garten - not surprising since Ina is known for her variety of roasted chickens. I never knew that this story behind "The" Engagement Chicken started with Ina until she shared that on her show Barefoot Contessa one day.
Of course this story quickly ran through the social circuits and before you know it, several more engagement stories were popping up resulting from this mysterious chicken dinner. It promptly became dubbed "Engagement Chicken."
While the theory that it plays out in a man's mind to be a dinner a wife might make for her husband, thereby prompting a proposal soon after, can't be scientifically proven, if you're a single lady looking to prompt that hesitant beau, it certainly wouldn't hurt to experiment - if of course he is a worthy candidate for marriage material! Of course, serving this as a Valentine Day dinner is not likely to result in a Valentine's Day proposal that very evening, but if a ring shows up more sooner than later sometime afterward, then that's okay too. Worse case scenario, is that you'll have had a nice dinner.
And of course, if you're a married man or woman and you've made it through this far into the post, you might want to make this great dinner anyway. Ship the kids off to Mama's and enjoy just being together for a change. Since I cook all of the time, and frankly, The Cajun isn't much of a cook, I think I'll opt for the dinner out for us.
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Appetizer - Spicy Crab or Shrimp Martini
Salad - Mixed Garden Tossed Salad with Warm Bacon Dressing
Photo Credit: Google Images
Made with a mix of Romaine lettuce and Spring or 50/50 Mix tossed with a Warm Bacon Dressing and sprinkled with a few dried cranberries & sliced almonds Add cucumbers & tomatoes if they look nice.
This simple roasted chicken using butter and plenty of lemon, has a bit of a reputation of garnering marriage proposals, enough so that it has been dubbed the engagement chicken.
Side Dish - Duchess Potatoes
Dessert - Red Velvet Cake
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