Courting with Chinese cooking - C Date

It’s Chinese New Year on Saturday so the supermarket down our road currently has masses of lucky, waving cats and Chinese cooking ingredients on sale. Last week, I spotted fortune cookies on offer so on Monday when it came to deciding what we wanted to do for our ‘C’ date I was set on cooking Chinese food and having fortune cookies. Still quarantined with a poorly toddler I sent out my husband to buy the cookies only to find that they’d sold out. I’d totally set my heart on having them so I decided I would go out the next day (to check they really had sold out!) and look for them. It’d been a long week and I was feeling pretty stubborn!

The next day I head out. No cookies. I wondered hopelessly for a while before deciding, “yes, I could make them!” So, I grabbed the ingredients we needed and we were ready to rustle up a Chinese feast. (In case you wondered, yes this is another night in. We will eventually go out! But after two weeks of sick bugs in our house we weren’t quite ready for braving the outside world again yet.)

We made broccoli and beef and cashew chicken, along with some egg-fried rice. It was incredible. Whilst eating we decided we really mustn’t order takeaway as this was just as good, but let’s be honest you order takeaway because you can’t be bothered to cook so I doubt we’ll stick to that!

Check out the recipes here if you fancy cooking them, they’re super easy:
Cashew Chicken
Broccoli Beef

I found a fortune cookie recipe online. My fortune cookies were more like cake in texture. I’ve arranged them specifically for the photo below to try and get the right angle but realistically they were not good (can you tell that the fortune cookies are a sore spot for me?!) I did discover though that there is a fortune cookie database online. We could have gone all romantic and written our own but I think part of the fun is the ridiculousness of them!

No fancy bowl could save these!

So we found ourselves, cooking Chinese food and eating fortune cookies (cakes). We sat down to eat and I said, “the only thing that would complete this would be watching a crime drama” (how handy that Silent Witness was on and that it happens to be one of my favourites!)

We reflected after this date about how much we love cooking together, we always have, and it’s something we haven’t done for absolutely ages. When I was pregnant I was really nauseous the whole way through so my husband took over cooking, and then since we’ve had the little guy it’s always just been one of us cooking whilst the other finishes up at work, or watches him. So, this actually made a very simple date really quite special.