Happy Anniversary! (to my wife and I)

13 years today. Kind of interesting meeting the woman who'd become your first and thus far only wife in your 40s, and at that, she found you via online dating. Of my friends and generation, I personally know of two couples married longer. My parents celebrated their 60th a couple of years ago. I have a cousin who is celebrating their 40th in a couple of weeks, which is very cool. But I'm quite happy making 13! I'll be ecstatic to make 25!

Last night we went out to the best place in town. They're only open on weekends, so it was last night or next weekend. Ended up having to take the dogs because a massive storm swept in to the area. This place is amazing: a double-wide manufactured home and you'll drop $40+ per person. Six tables in the main dining room, two in the back. The food is absolutely awesome and it did not disappoint. And they gave us a $10 off card for our next meal, in the past it was a free dessert for special occasions. And our dessert was a strawberry shortcake that was the best strawberry shortcake that I've ever had.

And the crazy thing: we had the place to ourselves. They do breakfast, brunch, lunch, and dinner on the weekend, and we were the only reservation last night.

Today I was going to make my no-cook pasta sauce for dinner along with garlic bread and a coconut cake with a salty chocolate caramel sauce for dessert, but I screwed up: no eggs and I didn't have heavy cream. And I slept in WAAAY LATE today, which made going down and grocery shopping and getting back even later. Wife had no problem with me pushing dinner and cake to tomorrow, and I had leftovers from last night (BIG portions at this place!).

Last night before going to bed, I wanted to look at salty chocolate caramel sauces before going to bed. After a bit of Googling, I found three for consideration. I was surprised that one was from the Betty Crocker web site, the surprise was that in my experience they commonly used pre-manufactured products in their recipes, things like canned soup or Koolwhip for ingredients, for example, and I don't roll that way. But their recipe appealed.

So part of my shopping included a half gallon of Bryers vanilla bean icecream and a pint of Talenti Double Dark Chocolate. And I decided to go with the Betty Crocker recipe. It had the shortest ingredient list: brown sugar, butter, heavy cream, and chocolate. That's it. I ended up pulling salt and vanilla extract from other recipes. I knew the traditional way to make caramel was to melt sugar typically in water or by itself, this recipe called for melting it in the heavy cream and butter! I decided to give it a try because even if it failed, I had two other recipes.

It didn't fail.


(click to embiggen)

We added some chopped roasted almond pieces, and it was amazingly good. I put 1 tbsp of the salty chocolate caramel per two scoops plus one around the base.

And here's the recipe:

Silky Salty Chocolate-Caramel Sauce

* Prep 10 min
* Total 10 min
* Servings 16

Ingredients
¾ cup packed brown sugar
⅔ cup heavy whipping cream
10 tbsp butter (1 ¼ sticks)
4 oz chocolate chips: 50/50 mix of bittersweet and semi-sweet
2 tbsp vanilla extract
1 tsp kosher salt

Steps
* In 2-quart saucepan, cook brown sugar, whipping cream and butter over medium heat 2 to 3 minutes, stirring constantly, until mixture comes to a full boil.
* Add the salt, stir until fully dissolved.
* Add chocolate; cook about 2 minutes, stirring constantly, until chocolate is melted and sauce is smooth.
* Add the vanilla, more stirring.

Serve warm or cover and refrigerate until serving time.



Adapted from: https://www.bettycrocker.com/recipes/silky-chocolate-caramel-sauce/4fefdf33-5740-4ee4-af07-2ed8e2202889


Can you believe how simple this recipe is?!