Saturday Night Tapas and Dark and Stormies

By Raus

If there is one thing that Emsu and I enjoy more than anything, it is eating out. Though the food is of course important, the experience relies on so much more. Both mine and Emsu's favorite restaurant experience was during a trip to Brighton in England (my home away from home). After wandering the streets for a good hour looking for somewhere to eat (I'm fussy), we came across Solera, a tapas restaurant run by a family originally from Spain.

With the company of my best friend and former flat mate, the three of us proceeded to have perhaps the most amazing culinary experience of our lives (it sounds over the top, but trust me it was awesome). 

While the staff was friendly, the food awesome, and the red wine flowing, it's the nature of tapas I love so much. The opportunity to try little dishes of food, eaten slowly through laughs and conversation, makes a tapas place my go to for a great night out. Even bad tapas places (we have been to a few) are normally still good experiences. 

So well done Spain, you invented the perfect eating experience!

So on to our Saturday night. With a fridge full of little bits of leftovers, I set about preparing a few dishes, while Emsu made us some Dark and Stormies. 

It doesn't really matter what you're making, or whether it has a spanish flare, but four or five dishes, some drinks, the woman you love, and good conversation (we were wrapped up in a conspiracy theory debate and bad journalism), can make for a beautiful date night. 

Sweet and Cinnamony Acorn Squash

Cuddly sweaters. Crisp air. Cinnamon. Baked things. Fall is several weeks away, but we can still invoke its spirit by filling the kitchen with the scent of sweet, buttery, cinnamony (sp?) baked acorn squash!

Baha!

This recipe is simple, fun, and tastes really REALLY good. When served to Raus for the first time, he patted my head and said, "Well done baby." Although the gesture was patronizing, I knew it meant he genuinely liked this dish, and I was happy.

You will need:

1 acorn squash

2 spoonfuls of butter

2 spoonfuls of brown sugar

2 spoonfuls of honey

5 shakes of cinnamon

1/4 of vanilla

Dash of salt

Dash of pepper

Handful of almonds

Time: ~1 hour

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees fahrenheit (~200 degrees celsius). Cut your lovely little acorn squash in half and scoop out all the seeds with a spoon.

In a small bowl, mix together the butter, brown sugar, honey, vanilla, cinnamon, salt, and pepper. The measurements are approximate and adjustable. Careful when you taste test the butter mixture - I wanted to eat the whole thing.

Our cute little salt shaker :)

Take a brush and slather the mixture all up in the bowls of your squash halves and all around the top. It'll seem like a lot, but you'll want to use all of it. Wrap a cookie sheet in foil, place the halves on top, and pop them in the oven for about 1 hour.

They should come out looking like so! I put mine in bowls to lessen the mess + maximize the enjoyment of eating them.

Chop up your almonds, sprinkle them on top of your acorn squash, and they're ready to be eaten!

This is great as a side with your dinner or as a dessert/treat. Enjoy!

Cooking Idea's: Spring Rolls

During term Emsu’s time is pretty much consumed with studying so it falls on me to do the cooking.

As a result I often find myself traipsing round the Supermarket trying to think of different meals to cook on a budget.

This week in an effort to use up remaining ingredient’s, rather than letting them go to waste, I decided to make some spring rolls with some beef I found reduced.

Recipes are great but every so often I want to experiment, see if I’ve learnt anything from countless hours of cooking shows and recipes.

I made three different types of Spring rolls. First was beef with ginger, garlic and oyster sauce.

Second was beef with chickpeas in Terakihi.

And third beef with beef with spinach, carrots and cilantro (coriander to us Brits).

Mixed in with complimentary spices the final results were good, though the third kind, the beef with spinach carrots and cilantro were the best.

I haven’t listed the recipes as that’s not really the idea behind the post, just an solution to making something a bit different, use up leftovers, and play chef.

Marriage and Dating

Even when you're married, dating is important. I would go as far as to say it's especially important. Yes, italicized, that's how important. It goes without saying that married life can be pretty boring...the same person, always there, always loving you and stuff, it's really nice, but it becomes rhythmic pretty quickly.

I (this is Emsu, hi!) am enjoying the summer after my first year of law school, and Raus is enjoying working life after a year of unemployment and getting legal (ie, getting his green card). It was a tough year for the both of us, and our lifestyles + our recent marriage gave us the excuse to essentially never go out on a date. It was a dark year.

But with that behind us, we have been using our summer to leap back into the world of dating (each other) and discover our new home state of Michigan in the process.

Our first big date was to spend a day in Detroit - which, despite what the hundreds of recent news articles say (especially this little gem), is a pretty cool city (it does have many problems, but I think there's some sort of renaissance taking place there).

Our Date in Detroit!

My co-workers mentioned that I needed to try The Pupuseria, an El Salvadorian restaurant, so the date began with lunch there.  The place is famous for their pupusas, which are fat, corn tortillas filled with your choice of meat, beans, or cheese. They are delicious and criminally cheap (I think each one was like $2, and 2 would be enough to fill you up). They also had pineapple Jarritos...so that along with the cheap delicious pupusas made this place amazing.

Raus and I then drove over to the nearby John K. King Books; four stories of stacks upon stacks of used and rare books - a book nerd's heaven. We randomly got lost in the yearbooks section for awhile, reading all the little notes Wendy and her friends had scribbled in her junior high yearbook from 1982. Ended up leaving with a couple classics, totaling $7. It's the largest used and rare bookstore in Michigan! So it's awesome.

Next up was the Detroit Institute of the Arts. If you haven't heard, some of the artwork from the museum may be sold off soon in order to pay for the city's debt, so I recommend checking this wonderful museum out before it starts getting chipped away. It really is a wonderful museum...lots of interesting pieces, with little pods placed throughout the museum that explain the meanings behind some of the paintings and photographs. This is much appreciated by people like me, who like art but don't really know what's going on. 

And then (this was a busy date) the Heidelberg Project. I had never heard of this place until the beginning of the summer, when a friend recommended I check it out. It's a whimsical, weird, playful, incongruous outdoor art installation located on the east side of Detroit. It's really awesome and makes me wish an entire city looked like this, with polkadot people to match it. It was probably my favorite part of the date...not counting the pie part (keep reading).

This one reminds me of Roger Rabbit...when the toon world meets the real world!

For dinner Raus and I wanted to experience all this Detroit jazz people kept going on about, so we went to Cliffs Bell's downtown. It was really nice - live music, excellent food - but it was pricier than we expected. Actually, this whole blog post was going to be dedicated to going on "cheap dates," but then we went here and that concept no longer made sense. We enjoyed it, but are definitely going to look for a cheaper jazz bar/restaurant option the next time we hang out in Detroit.

Us in black and white, to make it look more jazzy! (and to cover up our funky sunburns)

The night ended with some mini pies from the local grocer's in front of the TV. The date was a good one, made great by the grocery store pies finale.

Raus and I want to document our dates in hopes that we encourage other married (and non-married!) couples to make the extra effort to plan nights out together. We know it's not easy. We also know most of our dates won't be as elaborate as this one, but even just going outside somewhere for a few hours together every week would be great for us and our marriage. More dates to come, and we hope this post kindled some ideas out there!