Phase 2 for Valentine's Day

I have a trainer to try to get me in shape without ruining another part of my body. Donna was here this morning. After she left, I started on dinner and another phase of the Valentine’s meal. There is another cooking blog called A Year of Slow Cooking. As I had so much to do, I used her Slow Cooker Chicken with Apricots and Dates recipe. I served it with rice and asparagus. It was delicious beyond words and just the easy thing I needed today. If you want to make it, goggle her site and plug in the recipe name. Her name is Stephanie O’Dea. She has a book called Make it Fast, Cook it Slow. Unlike me that just follows recipes, she actually makes them up.


Again, the 2008 Old Moon Zinfandel was served with the dinner; a perfect wine to accompany this chicken with apricots and dates.

After setting up dinner, I went back to Julia and cooked the marinated pork. When it finished we hide it from Max in the microwave while we went to the store to buy the fixings for the salad and the appetizers for Valentine’s Day. The pork smelled divine. It is now cut in chunks and I have saved the cooking juices for tomorrow. While I write this, Jim is cleaning up. We have decided that we will work tonight on expanding the table and setting it. Expanding our table is not an easy task as we have a fixed glass table. However I had a pl counter made the exact same size with legs. So we will bring it up from the basement and have a large square table to seat the 10 of us. Tomorrow I will get up and finish the Cassoulet to the baking point and make dessert. We are busy, but having fun.