Valentine's Day Dinner 2012

Well, It has been a while already since Valentine's day but I would like to share with you guys what we had for this year's Valentine's dinner.

Since we have a baby and he goes to bed around 8:00pm every night. It is quite difficult for us to eat out at night. So the year's Valentine's day, I made a special dinner for two.

The dinner part went quite well but the dessert was not so much of a success. Well, it tasted good.

For dinner, I made Roasted Pork Tenderloin with Apricot glaze.

Pork Tenderloin is something I always wanted to try but never really had so I thought it will be a perfect dish to make. I found this recipe on All Recipe web site. Here is the recipe from All Recipe web site.

It tasted really really good. I thought roasting pork tenderloin will be a lot of work but it was not too difficult so I know I will be making this again! This recipe is spicy and sweet. You rub pork with dried spices before and then glaze with apricot glaze and roast.

Well, actually, in the recipe, they grill the pork and then glaze. But I didn't want to grill so I just add half of the glaze and roasted in the oven. Also, the recipe called 1 table spoon of cilantro but my husband and I love cilantro so I added like one cup of cilantro. It was great!

This is how it looked before putting in the oven. Well, this picture has only a little bit of glaze but I added a lot more before putting it in the oven.

Then, this was how it looked after roasting.

For side dish, I made green chili rice and boiled broccoli.
Here is the green chili rice.

Broccoli is just boiled.

Pork tenderloin is little bit pricy but it normally has plenty in one package so we can have at least two meals out of this one packet.

Well, so for the dessert, I made chocolate dipped strawberries. This is something I made last Valentine's Day and my husband loved it so I decided to make it again this year. This year, I decided to have a prettier decoration on it but that was a mistake....

This is how it came out.

Well, it looks OK from far away but if you look at them closely. You can see that those drizzled chocolate decoration is not really a drizzle but more like dollops.

Oh well, I tried. My husband liked them anyway.

I also bought nice flower for the table.

My son was so curious about this flower. He wanted to touch it so I let him touch. In the beginning, he was touching them very gently but after a while, he started to tear them apart and start eating them so I had to take them away from him. It is amazing to see how he develop. He is very curious about different touch. And now, he is walking all by himself! I feel like he is not a baby anymore. It is great that he is growing up but at the same time it is little bit sad that he is growing up so fast. I am really enjoying every moment with him right now. Ever day, there is something new and he brings lots of joy to our life. He is a miracle!