Sunday Night Dinner: Surf and Turf

Sunday evenings are the time of the week Dave and I have decided to reserve for each other. It's a great opportunity for us to catch up before the busy week starts and spend some quality time together. Most Sunday evenings, we spend our time in the kitchen cooking a nice dinner and enjoy it with a glass (or two!) of wine. This past Sunday was no different.

I had ran errands on Friday and made a stop at Sam's to pick up dog food. Of course, no trip to Sam's is complete without perusing through the grocery area to try out a few samples and that's exactly what I did. Last time I was home, my mom had mentioned that Sam's offered fresh seafood on Friday's and Saturday's...low and behold as I picked up my pita chip with hummus sample, the seafood station was in sight. They had some lovely ahi tuna, shrimp and huge king crab legs.

As I was taking a look at the crab legs, the person working the station had just pulled together a one-pound bag and said "I would jump on these if I were you, they're the best ones of the day." She must have seen my huge eyes and knew that she could take advantage of my weak moment. But, hey, it was a holiday weekend and at $16.99/lb I figured it would be a good meal to celebrate the end of summer. Or at least that's what I told myself at the checkout line.

Cooking crab legs really isn't all that difficult, as most people just steam them for a few minutes and serve with butter or lemon juice. While that is a great method of preparation, we were looking for something a bit more unique that would give the meat even more flavor. That's when I stumbled upon Emeril Lagasse's Drunken Alaskan King Crab recipe on Food Network. Seriously...what could be better than crab steamed with beer? Since crab is the one of the components in Steak Oscar, it was decided that we would go all out for the evening and splurge on filets as well and serve them with a side of homemade mashed potatoes and roasted asparagus. Dave happened upon this Wolfgang Puck recipe and used it for inspiration for our meal.

In keeping with the fancy theme, the night started with dirty martinis to enjoy while we were prepping in the kitchen (or just waiting for water to boil).

Olives. Vodka. Yummy.

Next, came the choron sauce prepartion. While I am a lover of anything that is vinegar-based, the aroma from reducing the wine and vinegar combination was too much for me to handle. Luckily, Dave is much tougher than me and manned the kitchen while I was trying to catch my breath outside.

Sauce. Reducing.

A couple drinks and about an hour later, the masterpiece was complete.

While it was a lovely Sunday meal, I think that it was a bit too much food for us (and we even split the filet pictured above!). I would definitely recommend Emeril's method of steaming the crab with beer rather than water and we'll probably be trying it again in the near future. Next time, we'll just save the steak for another night :)