There are so many perks to dining in.

I love having other people cook for me.  Especially when they do the cooking at my house, so that I don't have to drive anywhere (why yes, I will have that 4th glass of wine, thankyouverymuch).  The other weekend, R and I finally got back to our weekly dinner in.  We've skipped a few, as we've been making an effort to use up some of my gift cards and go to Columbia's various eateries instead.  But on this particular weekend, we decided to cook. And by we, I totally mean R, because while I can chop vegetables quite well, creating an actual meal is a little out of my comfort zone.


R gets to my house with some tuna steaks, a ton of salad stuff, assorted cheeses, wine, and a few other random dinner-y things that I wasn't too sure about.  R promised that everything had a purpose.  I just smiled and nodded, opened the wine, and let him go off in his own little world of cooking.


I did help some.  I made this fabulous looking salad. Like I said, I'm awesome when it comes to chopping vegetables. This one had spring mix lettuce, mushrooms, yellow bell pepper, grape tomatoes, yellow squash, and cucumbers.  We added croutons later.  I was very proud of my contribution. So proud in fact, that I ate the leftovers for a week.

I don't think we needed quite so much for just two people.

So tuna.  True story: I had never had tuna that wasn't from a can prior to this meal.  While I wasn't totally sure what to expect, I was sure I'd like it.  I mean, I like most fish, and L raves about her love of tuna ALL THE TIME.  Plus, I trust R's cooking skills.  He pan seared the tuna.  A couple minutes, maybe less, on each side, and then it was done.  I do know that tuna is supposed to be rare, so this wasn't a surprise.  What was a surprise was the addition a Paula Deen recipe for Lemon Pepper Butter.  This part was delicious.

I was allowed to mix the lemon-pepper butter together.  It was delicious.

The tuna before......seriously huge pieces here.

And after.  You can kind of see the actual color of the insides if you look around the edges.

At any rate, Paula's recipe said to add the butter to the tuna (and to put the tuna on grilled French bread, but someone forgot the bread) and serve.  So that's what we did.  With a side of salad and wine.

Oh...and did I mention the caramelized lemon garnish?

Looks delicious, yes?  It was pretty tasty.  But I'm still not quite sure what the fuss is about tuna.  It's good, but I definitely wouldn't call it my favorite fish.  It's filling, and was cooked beautifully (seriously, you should have seen the inside of each steak), but it just didn't seem like anything special.  Someone want to explain to me what we did wrong?  Was it in the cooking?  Or the cut of the fish?  Or in the preparation?  I'll absolutely take any suggestions and do my best to try them.


Overall, not the best dinner we've ever done. But it was still pretty good.  Especially the fresh pineapple and raspberries we had for dessert.  I *may* have eaten half of a pineapple.  But then again, pineapple is one of the few fruits that I really like and this one was particularly good.  All in all, not a bad evening.