Cooking For Your Date

Cooking For Your Date

Typical dates are dinner or a movie or both and first meetings are usually coffee or a drink. However, as things progress and trust is built, why not break away from the norm? Breaking away from the norm may be difficult and unfamiliar, can be a welcome change from the ordinary! Oh, you don’t know what to cook or how? Let me help you get started as we explore a simple date meal…

Planning
Planning the menu will take getting to know the other person, ask about food allergies, what they like or any dietary restrictions, after all you do not want to cook steak for a vegetarian. Once you get this out of the way you can get your menu ready and go shopping. In this article we are going to cook a simple chicken with mashed potatoes, steamed green beans and cupcakes for the finishing touch.

Your ingredients list will include:

• A whole chicken
• 5 potatoes
• Two handfuls of fresh green beans
• Roasted chicken seasoning
• Salt
• Pepper
• 1 onion
• 2 sticks of butter
• Vanilla cake mix
• Milk or dark chocolate icing
• Eggs
• Cupcake liners
• Oil for the cake mix
• Disposable aluminum baking pan (if you don’t have a deep baking dish)

Cooking The Meal
Take the chicken out of the package making sure to check inside the body cavity and neck area for the chicken heart and neck. Some whole chickens include these parts so you can make a gravy, but we are not doing that for this dinner. Place the chicken breast side up in the deep baking dish (disposable aluminum baking pan).

• Melt half a stick of butter and stir in 3 spoonful of the roasted chicken seasoning.
• Pour over the chicken.
• Cut up the remaining stick of butter and cut up the onion into wedges and place them in the cavity of the chicken.
• Pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees and place the chicken uncovered in the oven for an hour and a half.

• Next you are ready to boil the potatoes and make the green beans:
• Peel the skin off 5 potatoes and cut them into wedges or slices, either way will work
• Place them in a pan and cover with water, adding 1 spoonful of salt to the water
• Boil until potatoes are tender when a fork can slide in each potato with ease
• Drain the water from the potatoes into a bowl or another pan and add one stick of butter to the potatoes.
• The potato water will be used if your potatoes seem dry.
• Mash the potatoes and butter using a mixer or a fork.

 

• Wash the green beans and snap the ends off each
• Place wash beans in a pan with water covering and boil for 20 minutes.
• Drain the water and add a spoonful of roasted chicken seasoning to the beans allowing them to sit in the hot pan, covered for 15 minutes.

Follow the directions on the back of the cake mix box for the cupcakes. Frosting the cupcakes can be easy with a baggie. Place the frosting in a baggie and cut the tip off or you can use a knife and frost the cupcakes. Place only 5 on a plate for presentation.

Get Ready

Set your table with a candle in the center and have easy listening music playing softly. If you are serving alcohol, make sure you also have a water glass available. Cut the breast off the chicken, no skin, and place it on a platter/plate along with thighs and legs with a fork. The meat may fall off and this is OK so just make neat piles on the plate. Put mashed potatoes in a bowl with a spoon and green beans in a bowl with tongs. This is called family style so your date can put as much or little on their own plate.

 

Retire to your living room where the cupcakes are on a coffee table. Enjoy great conversation and wherever the evening may take you for the rest of the night. Enjoy!

 

Tags: #dinnerdate #cookingdinner #cooking #romanticdinner #food