I’ve been invited to contribute to this blog, with food and recipes my suggested topic. I do enjoy eating and don’t at all mind cooking, but I don’t have any recipes of my own, really. I get mine from Epicurious, or from one of the very few cookbooks I own, or my wife clips them from magazines. I may alter them to suit the ingredients available to me, or, more likely, shrink them by a factor of two, three or four. Most of my meals are made for two, although we occasionally entertain guests.

With all that in mind, let me present for your consideration a meal I made to celebrate St. Valentine’s Day. We opted for a home-cooked Valentine’s supper to spare us the expense of going out – and, since I had the day off, the deal was that I would select the menu, shop, and prepare the meal to be ready when my wife came home from work.

An interesting recipe on Epicurious caught my eye: Rosemary Lamb Chops with Swiss Chard and Balsamic Syrup. I went to the Pennington Market for most of the ingredients. It has an excellent butcher shop, but the lamb I bought came vacuum-wrapped from a NJ source: Catelli Brothers French Rack Lamb Chops, 1.02 lb @ $19.99/lb = $20.40. This was an entire frenched rack, suitable for the fanciest of recipes. The store didn’t have any individual chops, but it was no problem for me to cut the chops apart myself. I also bought the red onion and chard there. The garlic came from my garden — some is starting to sprout, but it’s still ok. (It probably won’t last till the new crop is ready.) The rosemary came from two potted plants I keep under a shop light in my cellar. The rest of the ingredients we had in the pantry.

I made the balsamic syrup first, reducing the vinegar with rosemary and peppercorns to one-third its original volume and putting it through a sieve. We don’t have a microwave oven at the moment, so I warmed up the syrup at serving time with a mini bain-marie: I put boiling water in a tea cup and put the small ceramic bowl full of syrup on top, and brought it to the table.

I cut up all the vegetables in advance and sweated the onion and garlic with some olive oil. When my wife came home from work, I broiled the lamb chops with garlic, salt, and pepper in the oven, turning them once; it took about eight minutes. While the meat broiled, I wilted the chard in the onion and garlic. I probably used more water than the one tablespoon called for in the recipe, and I used a lid on the skillet. For once, everything was done cooking at the same time. I supplemented the recipe with some butternut squash (a family favorite), and my wife, without a hint of what would be on our table, brought home a perfect accompaniment: a 187 mL bottle of Casalnova prosecco, $5 at our neighborhood liquor store. And 187 mL was plenty of bubbly considering the dessert I’d prepared.

My wife loves things like chard and butternut; she thinks they promote health and longevity, and I hope she’s right. This was the first time I made chard that tasted good. We used the same recipe the next night with the other half of the bunch. The balsamic syrup recipe really brought to life the cheap vinegar we buy by the quart at BJ’s.

Now for dessert: The other day I saw on television NYC restaurateur Bobby Flay pour an entire bottle of Moet into a tray and put it in a freezer for his Champagne Granita. Great idea, but I can’t afford to do that with the good stuff. I went to the liquor store looking for something a little cheaper, maybe a half bottle. Instead, I found 750 mL bottles of Andre California champagne on sale for $3.34. At that price, how could I go wrong? I followed Mr. Flay’s recipe, adding lemon juice to the wine and scraping every half hour. After three hours in the freezer, it was ready to eat. The result was superb — certainly better than drinking that stuff. I served it plain, without the berries. My wife wants to try using rose water in place of lemon juice next time.

The meal was a major success. It was easy to prepare, fairly inexpensive, and it tasted great. Everything met with my wife’s enthusiastic approval, which made me feel good. I would encourage anyone with a bare minimum of cooking skill to use these recipes for a special dinner to impress a loved one.