V Day

Mr Owl and I are always happy to use any small reason as an excuse to cook something nice/appropriate and drink something bubbly - this is at a 'Tonight's film is set in Italy?  Lets cook pasta and drink prosecco' level of reasons - so Valentine's Day provides the perfect opportunity to indulge this habit. We're both big fish lovers so decided to make a day out of driving to the best fishmonger's we have found down in Manchester ( all recommendations for fishmonger's welcome) and seeing what we could get. Seems we weren't the only people to have thought of this and it was pretty busy, but we still manged to get some lovely fat scallops and a nice piece of hake!

The scallops we pan fried wrapped in pancetta and served on a small salad with black pudding and a balsamic dressing!

The hake we cooked according to a Rick Stein recipe- Hake en Papillote. This was super easy to do but looked pretty damn fancy. We had to do our own sun-blushed (oven roasted) tomatoes and tapenade to go with. The tapenade was amazing- incredibly simple to make and an amazing flavour. We had already started planning other dishes to use it on before we finished eating.

To drink we started with a Sainsbury's Taste the Difference Vintage Cava. This was surprisingly good, we both love the TtD Vintage Champagne but decided to save the pennies and try the cava. I totally recommend it. To go with the meal we had another TtD wine - a Sancerre. Again this was excellent, if I were Jilly Goolden I would be muttering about mangoes and tropical fruit...

After all the fancy we finished it off with a custard slice- guaranteed to taste good and a fraction the price of most other puds!
I hope you all had a nice Valentine's Day in whatever way you choose to celebrate it.

Little Owl