Anniversary dinner, one day late ...

Yes, we had our anniversary dinner a day late ... and no it's not because I'm inconsiderate, lazy, forgetful or any of the other reasons that a couple that's been married for two years usually doesn't celebrate the night of ... it's because yesterday we had just gotten home from the beach so we decided on pizza.

For tonight's dinner though, it was anything but pizza.  I started the night with a variety of shellfish ... not because I wanted the shellfish so much, but more because of the wine.  For those who know what they're looking at (Ross & Ben) you should realize that the shellfish were merely there to enhance the wine.  For those of you who don't know the wine by sight ... it's Didier Dagueneau's Blanc Fume de Pouilly, an incredible sauvignon blanc.  This is the last vintage that Didier produced before his unfortunate death, and is incredibly tasty with shellfish.

I drank the wine from an old friend ... the Schott Zwiesel "First" collection tasting glass from Enrico Bernardo.   I don't use it much anymore, but this seemed fitting.

I served Choptank Sweets oysters & littleneck clams for the "raw bar" portion of our first course ... followed by ...

Baked escargots with butter and basil

For the main course, I decided to serve up a 2007 1er cru MSD in recognition of 2007 being the year that Shells and I started dating (2008 was the year we started drinking real wine, so the Dagueneau was fitting too).

The main course was a dry aged strip steak topped with sauteed Shiitake mushrooms and served with pimento white beans & asparagus.  For the white beans, I must tip my hat to my old friend Freya.  She and I once had a long discussion, sitting on a 50ish floor balcony overlooking Darling Harbour, about country specific food.  While I grant to her that England has given us such culinary greats as: Marmite, boiled eel & meat pies ... she and I struggled to come up with America's contributions.

What we came down to was that America does not really create a lot of food, but what we do really well is make someone elses food better by adding cheese to it!

For tonight's dinner I took my standard shiitake white beans (White Beans) and added about 4 tablespoons of pimento cheese.  Before stirring the cheese in, I took the beans off of the heat and stirred it in slowly so that it didn't separate.  Enjoy!