Chicken and olives with pine nuts

Allrecipes.com's chicken and olives -

which has key differences from the one I made

Don and I just enjoyed what I had hoped would be our Valentine's Day dinner. I actually had great ideas for this dinner, and I actually had planned on serving it not one, but two days ago. First, I'll share the recipe. Then I'll explain why this ended up moving from Monday to Tuesday, and finally, Wednesday on my menu plan.

Chicken with Olives

For Two

1/2 cup pine nuts

1 Tbsp. oil

4 chicken thighs (or two chicken legs)

1/2 cup of green olives

1/2 tsp of sage

1/4 cup water

Toast the pine nuts over medium heat in a 10" skillet, shaking often. Remove from pan.

Heat oil, brown chicken on all sides. It should take at least 10 minutes. Remove from pan, drain fat from pan.

Return chicken and nuts to pan. Add olives, sage and water, continue cooking over medium heat for 30 minutes or until meat closest to bone is not pink.

I was cutting a cookbook recipe down to one-fourth for this, but the pine nuts I only cut from 2/3 a cup to 1/2, because I wanted to use all of the pine nuts in my small package. I wasn't sure if this was going to make too many pine nuts, but I ended up pleasantly surprised. The pine nuts absorbed so much chicken juice, what I ended up with reminded me of quinona, a grain I have had the pleasure of eating once. (I've had pine nuts before, but not so much in one serving.)

Delicious! I served it with cranberry sauce, because this was our Valentine's Day dinner, and something reddish seemed good.

So why didn't Don and I celebrate Valentine's Day yesterday like everyone else? Because he had school last night. So we knew Tuesday wasn't going to leave us time for a romantic Valentine's Day meal. That's why I had initially planned this meal for Monday. Monday was supposed to have been a less busy day than today, as we have church small group tonight and will be leaving for that soon. Sooner than usual, because we are going to hold it in a Riverside hospital to pray for the seriously ill daughter of one of our members.

Monday ended up not working out either. I made some homemade soup for dinner last Saturday, and had leftovers. I had another bowl for lunch on Monday, but Don insisted he wanted to have his bowl for dinner. I thought we had enough for two more bowls, so when Don didn't want dinner right away, I decided to wait. And wait I did until 7:40 p.m. At that time, he came into the kitchen, heated up the soup, and poured it all into one bowl!

I didn't really want to start cooking at 7:40 p.m., so I ended up going out for take-out Chinese. Don pleaded very hard that I would instead go to his favorite takeout, Subway sandwiches. He even wanted me to get him a sandwich "while I was there." Luckily, Chinese is in the same shopping center as Subway, so it wasn't hard to go both places.

I am a little disappointed how Monday's dinner ended up. But not surprised. There have been many years where I wanted to do something romantic for Valentine's Day or another holiday. But Don just doesn't tie romance to meals. I could go on and on about that. At least he does appreciate my good meals, when I get a chance to make them.

Addendum: I just checked the emails one of my favorite recipe websites, Allrecipes.com sends me on a regular basis. They were sending their favorite Valentine's Day main dishes, and one of theirs is a different chicken and olives recipes. Theirs calls for chicken breasts seasoned with garlic and tarragon instead of red meat seasoned with sage, but it seems yummy too. Because photographing dishes has some challenges for me right now, I'm sharing a photo of their dish instead.