Valentine's Day Dinner

Katie and I decided to cook a nice dinner at home for dinner for Valentine's Day. We headed out to the market, where we picked up a fish and some red peppers for dinner then headed to the La Vinothèque de Bordeaux for a few bottles of wine.

We always seem to see something at the market that you just don't see in the states. Here, you can buy a chicken to go. I'm not talking about a roasted or a Kentucky Fried kind, a live chicken in a to go box. I was just as intrigued as the little boy in front of me.

I have only been fishing once or twice and unfortunately never caught anything, so I have never had the pleasure of gutting a fish. Katie and I bought a whole fish and decided to try the do-it-yourself method as opposed to buying it fileted. After looking up a few videos online on the correct method, the doctor was ready to operate. As you can see, I was a little nervous.

Start from the bottom fins and cut forward.

An unnecessary photo, but I wanted to give you the full effect. All in all, gutting a fish was pretty easy, we will probably start buying more fish this way in the future. After we had the fish in the oven, we started on the first course that Katie had prepared for us.

Salade de chèvre chaud: Lettuce, toast, tomato, slices of bûche de chèvre (goat cheese) drizzled with honey. Mouth watering delicious!

We paired it with a Bordeaux Rosé that was fantastic and was only 4-5€! It was clean and crisp with some notes of strawberry and raspberry on the nose.

For a side dish, we roasted peppers in olive oil and sprinkled them with salt. They were good but little did we know that they were as hot as habanero/jalapeño pepper, hot! We only had a bite or two and saved the rest for another meal.

The finished producted: oven roasted fish covered with butter, lemon, salt and pepper.

Reds don't usually par well with most fishes but we wanted to buy a little bit more expensive bottle for Valentine's Day and we love red wines. So, we bought a red. This is a second wine of Château Pichon Comtesse de Lalande (Second Cru Classé in the 1855 classification) called Reserve de la Comtesse 2004. It is a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot. It had very distinct cinnamon quality to it on the nose along with a slight hint of pine and chocolate. We were very happy with the purchase. Paulliac wines are some of the favorites that I have tasted here, unfortunately, they are also very expensive.

It was a really good meal, not much was left as you can see.

Wilco - A.M. playing in the background for dinner music.