my labor-of-love Valentine's Day dinner

So...I wanted to do something special and fun on Valentine's Day this year. Actually, I wanted to do something special and fun and Valentine's Day was a pretty good excuse to do it. Haha. What I wanted to do is make 7-yolk pasta dough like I saw on another food blog here. The process involves making a "nest" out of flour and putting 6 egg yolks, one whole egg, olive oil, and milk inside.
Of course, I underestimated how many eggs I had and one of the yolks broke, so I had to adjust the flour since I had less egg matter. I pretty carefully calculated how much flour I'd need for 1.5 less eggs, so the recipe still turned out pretty well.
Then there is the hand-mixing: the logic behind making the nest is that as you hand-mix the eggs, just a tiny bit of flour at a time gets incorporated into the eggs. The technique works--it took me nearly forever to finally form my pasta dough. I was proud of myself for being patient, though.
Finally, all my hard work yields this beautiful, yellow, shiny, elastic dough:
I decided to make butternut squash ravioli with the pasta dough. So next, I cook and mash butternut squash with thyme and a little olive oil to go inside the ravioli.
Meanwhile, Georg surprises me with some Valentine's Day flowers!
While my squash is cooking, I trimmed and blanched some green beans that I planned to serve alongside the little piece of tenderloin I bought for the occasion.
Then I began assembling the ravioli. This was equally-so or more hard work, because I had to roll out the dough really thin to make the raviolis. The dough was really elastic, so it wasn't exactly cooperating. I also had to be sure to cut the dough into squares all the same size, hence the ruler.
For our starter, I boiled the ravoilis briefly, then browned them a bit in butter mixed with thyme. These were good--the dough was rich, and I love butternut squash and thyme together.
For our main course, I served the romantic-sounding dish Beef Tenderloin with Red Wine and Chocolate Sauce. Besides being romantic, this was seriously good stuff. I browned a small piece of beef tenderloin in a pan, then removed it to a plate. I deglazed the pan with red wine, then added chopped carrot, celeriac, and garlic. I seasoned the sauce with rosemary, thyme, and a bay leaf, and added more red wine and some beef broth. Finally, I allowed a single square of rich 70% dark chocolate to melt into the sauce. I put the beef back into the pan and let it simmer for a few minutes while we ate the ravioli. By the time I cut it, it was cooked to medium well. I served pieces of the beef with the sauce, along with the green beans, which besides blanching, I had sauteed in garlic butter.
For dessert, I made something quite unconventional. I stewed for about 45 minutes over low heat about 25 small prunes, a cup of red wine, about 3/4 cup of sugar, and some cinnamon. The prunes become plump and the stewing yields this thick prune-wine sauce. To serve, I put some mascarpone cheese on a plate and topped it with the prunes and sauce. We both really enjoyed this dessert. I'd never had plain mascarpone cheese before, only flavored in tiramisu. It's always described on the Food Network by Giada de Laurentiis as "Italian cream cheese," but I didn't think it tasted like cream cheese at all, it was more like a really, really thick heavy cream. It wasn't sweet, but not tangy either like cream cheese. The prunes were sweet, but not cloying, and tasted perfect on top of the mild-tasting cheese. Here's the recipe, although I've seen variations of this combination in several different cookbooks.
So that was my labor-of-love dinner. I literally worked all day on it with the pasta dough and all, and it was definitely worth it. Happy Valentine's Day!