Valentine's Recipes

[Geko]

Normally I take the missus to a restaurant. But this year money is tight as we bought a large house and then thought the rooms looked to empty, and added another baby. Background story done.

Any good recipes for a novice to impress the lady and keep the pocket happy too?

[TwoPlAnKs]

its impossible to fuck up italian food

get a tin of tomatoes or mash up some fresh ones, mix it with mince and any type of pasta and you have an italian dish. as you long as you put the mince in first and stir it about until its brown you cant reasonably kill yourself with it either

you can add pretty much anything you want to it and it will improve it. you can pretend to be a pro chef and add all sorts of random herbs and other ingredients

the other option is to get a lump of meat of some sort and roast it. a very underrated dish in this country and in general is gammon. usually people grill it presliced and just eat it with pineapple, but if you get a big lump of it you can boil it first in water to get rid of the salt, then in pepsi or coke to really give it a sweet flavour. again, add random things like bits of garlic or herbs to the pepsi. glaze it with a bit of honey or even maple syrup and dump it in the oven for a while and it is absolutely amazing. problem with that over the italian dish is that you have to boil up loads of vegetables and stuff to go with it and its the little things like that which always go wrong and make lots of washing up

moussaka is another nice one. just lamb and courgettes with some cheese i think dumped in a casserole dish. get a decent recipe from google and you could be onto a winner with that one. i'd say the key is to add as much flavour as possible to the courgettes part because my only complaint about that dish is that part being slightly bland at times

[Mule]

Italian is good. Try this - http://www.digital-forums.com/showthread.php?t=274469