Date Night!

We have a tradition at Chez Butter that we’ve kept up for a while now.  We both love to cook, but given our work schedules, we don’t often get a chance to cook together.  So every now-and-then we’ll have a ‘date night’ in which we both cook something fun, go for a walk, and watch a movie.

At a local estate sale we picked up a cookbook created by the Friends of Pike Place Market in 1965.  It’s a tall and skinny cookbook, filled with recipes from the market’s vendors and devotees as well as local restaurateurs.

Two recipes in particular caught our eye, both by Peter Canlis, the founder of Canlis, one of Seattle’s most decorated (and arguably most picturesque) restaurants.  We decided to try both recipes for our date night.

First, we made the salad, halving the recipe since it was just the two of us.  I was silly and forgot the bacon, so our salad was missing one very flavorful ingredient.  I am happy to report, however, that the salad was wonderful without the bacon.  The lemony salad dressing and crisp romaine leaves were perfect together, as were the hints of herbs.  Saveur published an updated version of the recipe in 2009 and I can see how the addition of herbs in the croutons would be nice.  The Saveur recipe also adds a lot more fresh herbs to the dressing, which I think would be a welcome addition.

The highlight for the meal for me was the Canlis shrimp recipe.  We found some luscious Key-West prawns at our local market.  The vermouth sauce paired perfectly with the sweet shrimp, in fact, the sauce was so good I had to go find bread and mop up the extra.  I would *love* to make this again with angel-hair pasta.

The only problem with this recipe, as Kevin pointed out to me, is that one ends up cooking the shrimp for too long.  Thankfully, Kevin noticed this before we cooked ours into oblivion.  Next time, we would probably cook the shrimp until almost done, cook the sauce separately, and introduce the two together at the end.  Seriously folks, I cannot compliment this recipe enough.  Mmmmmmm.

6 Comments

  1. Reply
    gollum April 19, 2010

    Yes, that will be fine. You can resubmit any photo, and there’s no limit on the number.
    XX00

  2. Reply
    alison April 19, 2010

    Thanks!!

  3. Reply
    Cat Berner April 20, 2010

    Alison, we’ve discovered things run much more smoothly if I’m the only one in the kitchen and my husband just takes a seat on one of the bar stools while I cook! We still get to chat and spend time together that way. Oh, and that shrimp recipe sounds great!

    • Reply
      alison April 20, 2010

      @Cat Yeah, I understand. My husband and I have to work on separate dishes since we both love cooking and being in the kitchen but we have a hard time letting go of culinary control. 🙂

  4. Reply
    theUngourmet April 20, 2010

    What a lovely date night dinner! That’s too bad about the bacon though. Oh well…next time. Great book too. I love Pike’s Market!

    I don’t have an email address for you but wanted to let you know about the play book somehow. It was a Giveaway from Molly the Pirate (She has an Etsy store too. ) I won it last spring. If you want more info shoot me an email. kkautto(at)yahoo(dot)com. 🙂

  5. Reply
    theUngourmet April 20, 2010

    Oops! Pike Market not Pike’s Market. 🙂

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