Monday, February 12, 2007

Breakfast with my Valentine

Hobbies: I enjoy knitting, reading, baking, traveling, learning, cleaning, walks in the park, playing with my dogs, and shopping.

Notice that "cooking" isn't at the top of my list? In fact, cooking in general just doesn't plain make the list AT ALL. While I count the Food Network as one of my favorite TV stations and emphatically love Giada DeLaurentis and the Barefoot Contessa, I really, really, really despise cooking. Love watching it on television, but hate doing it myself. I don't enjoy chopping; I get annoyed with having to shop for an endless list of ingredients; and I'm just plain awful at adding spices to anything. While I love the order and precision of baking, I don't enjoy the "little bit of this and little bit of that" aspect of cooking. It just never seems to work for me.

Thankfully, though, my husband absolutely loves to cook and is really great at coming up with delicious concoctions. In spite of having to work 10-12 hour days, he makes sure to leave me some sort of dinner almost every night. All I have to do when I come home is heat it up and chow down. Now THAT I can handle.

So every year for Valentine's Day, I try to make my husband a scrumptious breakfast as a way of showing him how much I love him and all that he does for me. Ok, so I actually try to do it a couple times a year, but ALWAYS on Valentine's Day. For some reason I can handle breakfast, and it seems to work out well. Since Valentine's Day falls right smack in the middle of the week this year, I decided to do breakfast this past weekend. Here was the scene on Sunday morning:

Vday Breakfast

I made a Breakfast Strata (layers of Italian Bread, turkey sausage, mushrooms, onions, cheese and egg), a colorful fruit salad with yogurt and granola topping, Banana Crunch Muffins (thanks Barefoot Contessa!) and we washed it all down with mimosas. The food was delish, and I have to say, the muffins were my fave! Here's a closeup to salivate over.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Banana Crunch Muffins

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