celebrating our anniversary with family & the letter S

Good afternoon, hope you’re doing well & having a great day. If you read my blog yesterday, you might remember that my husband and I were celebrating our 31st wedding anniversary. He had asked if I wanted to go out for dinner. After thinking about it, I decided I really just wanted to cook and celebrate at home with my husband and kids. After being gone for spring break & not seeing my son, Bradley, for over 2 weeks, I just couldn’t wait to get back in the kitchen! I have all kinds of new recipes that I can’t wait to try!
So, since we were eating at home, I wanted to make sure I came up with a very nice, restaurant quality meal. Here’s what I decided on whipping up in my low carb kitchen - a simple fresh spinach salad, shrimp with cocktail sauce, tender broiled steak and, for dessert – fresh strawberries with a whipped cream sauce. The meal was delicious !
One of my husband’s favorite things to eat is steak, so that’s why I decided on as a main course. Although, I must admit I didn’t think I had ever made a very tender steak – so I did a little research on how to cook a tender steak. I found the funniest web site that had an acticle called something like “cooking a hunk-of-cheap meat into a great steak” or something similar! It even had pictures. I won’t go into all of the details, but the idea was to completely cover the steak with salt and let it sit for 15 minutes to 1 hour prior to cooking. You then wash the steak well & pat dry before cooking. I had my doubts, but I gave it a try…
While the steak was ‘marinating in salt’, I prepared our salad ingredients, shrimp & strawberry dessert. I wanted to make a large salad but since my family is little picky in regards to toppings & dressings – we just each made our own salad. Ingredients included fresh spinach leaves, olives, feta cheese, montery jack cheese, mushrooms and ranch or chunky bleu cheese dressing. I bought one of those nifty little frozen shrimp ring packages from the grocery store – so all I had to do was slightly thaw the shrimp, throw away the cocktail sauce and make my shrimp cocktail sauce recipe since the packaged stuff is loaded with carbs!
While the shrimp thawed, I worked on my dessert – first I placed a cup of heavy whipping cream in the freezer to get it really cold. Next, I washed and sliced my strawberries into halves. After cleaning the strawberries, I prepared my whipping cream sauce in a small mixing bowl . My whipping cream didn’t develop “heavy peaks” but that was okay with me, I just wanted a cream sauce. If you want to try the recipe and you’d like the “heavy peak” consistency, I would suggest trying to add a little cream of tartar. That should help somewhat.
Our meal turned out really nice. The steaks were absolutely the best I have ever made and they were very, very tender. Since the salads were made to our individual preferences – they were great, too. The cocktail sauce was just right – my daughter even liked it! And the strawberry dessert was very good – although we were so full from our meal we waited until later in the evening to enjoy it. Best of all, it was great just being able to spend some time together with our family!
Speaking of spending time with family – I was just about heart broken last night when I signed my daughter’s housing application for college, next year. I admit I shed a few tears and my daughter asked why I was upset – I told her it was because I was signing papers for her to live somewhere other than with me and that really made me sad! Well, I can’t wait to spend another evening with my family tonight! I have a couple of new recipes to try out on them. I hope you have a great evening, too! See you tomorrow!
PS - funny thing, after typing my blog, I realized all of our meal last evening consisted of foods that started with the letter S!