TWD Chocolate Mascarpone Cheesecake

For Valentine's Day, Paul and I tend to alternate between going out, and Paul cooking dinner at home.  With Charlotte, we easily decided that this was a year to stay in.  Paul made an incredible dinner, and we finished it with the cheesecake.  Every time I make cheesecake I wonder why I don't do it more often.  It's delicious, it's easy (as long as you don't care whether or not the top cracks), and it freezes beautifully.  I actually made it a couple of weeks ago, froze it in quarters, and now we can just have a few slices when we feel like some.  I thought this particular recipe was very good, but not amazing.  I probably won't make it again just because there are so many other recipes to try.

The rest of the dinner was excellent.  We started with a garlic soup with poached egg and crostini from my favorite new cookbook.  (Yes, I know that I needed another new cookbook like I needed a hole in my head!)  For the main course Paul made seared duck with parsley salad (from the same cookbook) and two side dishes from the Ottolenghi cookbook.  One had roasted potatoes, sunchokes, tomatoes, kalamata olives, and lemons.  The other had green beans and snow peas with hazelnuts and orange zest.  Both were excellent....A funny story about the second dish.  The dish was actually one that I had made, and we had both loved, about a month ago.  When I saw Paul had purchased all of the ingredients to make it, I just assumed that he remembered how much we liked it and decided to make it again.  Nope!  He had totally forgotten that I made it, and just independently picked it out as something we might enjoy.  He was pretty annoyed that we had already had it, but I thought it was pretty funny that we both picked out the same thing.