Reminiscent Dish

My brother and sister-in-law gave us a cookbook as part of our wedding gift from them. It was fancy. I’d never owned a cookbook before, let alone a FANCY one:

For our three month anniversary (month anniversaries are VERY important that first year), I cracked open the cookbook and attempted to make a pasta dish. I was intimidated by the ingredients.
Pesto? What was that?
But I powered through. My husband is a pasta lover and a shrimp lover, and I knew he’d go bonkers for this dish -if I could pull it off.

I went to the store and searched for pesto and wanted to throw up when I saw how much shrimp cost.
But in the end, I pulled the dish off.
My new husband was so impressed with what a good cook I was. We made the dish whenever we could afford it, and after a year or so, we quit bothering with separate plates. We just put two forks in one heaping bowl of goodness. Here’s an old picture from 2005, when I made the dish for our first Valentine’s Day together:

When we were pregnant with Lacy, we moved out of our first home as a married couple. And somewhere in the move, we lost our beloved fancy cook book.
I was devastated. I searched high and low for it!
A few months ago, it resurfaced! I danced. I was big and pregnant, but I danced.

Saturday afternoon, my husband went to the store and came back with shrimp and garlic and pesto and grape tomatoes… he got a thoughtful itch to date me in my own home. My parents were nice enough to take our older two kids for a couple of hours while my husband and I cranked Amos Lee’s Pandora station and cooked our old faithful dish.
We started out with a clean kitchen and commenced to thrash it. Eets for fun.

Cooking is something we really enjoy doing together. We don’t do it very often because he’s usually too tired to cook after coming home from work, and if he isn’t too tired and he DOES decide to cook, I’m more than happy to let him at it. And I go take a bath.
But when we plan it and work together, it’s a lot of fun.

My husband said he’d like to make this a once-a-month thing.
We also have a small (but hopeful!) dream to attend a cooking class together at The Cottage Place.
It’s one of “our” places -we like to eat there on special occasions (read: very rarely because they’re expensive). They were named one of the top 100 restaurants in the USA for 2012 which just validates our good taste, right?
The cooking classes are $50 per person and last for about 2 1/2 hours.
We’ll probably be able to take a class next year when Miss Alice isn’t attached to us. Not that we mind…

For now, we’ll settle with our own signature pasta dish and our own little house.

I didn’t have anything fancy to drink with our fancy dish, so I just put lemon slices in our water. Instant Fancy, right?
And now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to eat the leftovers. Cold. Right outta their tupperware. They’re amazing that way.
Cheers to my husband and his thoughtful date idea… and cheers to my husband for finding the Pesto in Safeway. A true hunter.