Marie Guaragna: Hi! I am Marie Guaragna with MGB Special Events in Arlington, Virginia. Today, I am showing you how to make a wonderful romantic dinner for two for your Valentine. And we are on the first step now of our on tray. We’re going to start with the spinach sautéd in olive oil and garlic. And the ingredients that you are going to need, of course are spinach, some garlic, I like to use a shallot in this, you could use an onion or you can even delete it if you want. Some salt, some pepper olive oil of course. The only tools that we will need for this are a pairing knife, a tong and a frying pan.

So let's get started on our sauted spinach. I have got my heat on medium high and I am just going to coat the bottom of this pan, frying pan with the olive oil. This is so simple, you can do this anytime, not just for Valentine's Day, but for anytime you need a nice vegetable as a side dish. I am going to go ahead and press my garlic, just a couple of cloves into the olive oil. Careful not to burn it; just give it a quick squeeze; throw in some shallots, not too many, just about a half of shallots just to give it some nice flavor. You could use a regular onion in this, but the shallots are little bit sweeter, I want to lower this a little bit, because this garlic is kicking it up. This is so simple. Just going to get a nice light color. See it's already turned yellow, just about -- here it does, it doesn't take very long.

Now, I am going to take my fresh spinach. You can get it so easy nowadays. It is already pre-washed in the bag in a grocery store and I am going to go ahead and just throw this all in. If I am going to be cooking for more people, I would probably use two bags because once you cook this down it is not going to be nearly the size of what it was when it was fresh. Now, I am going to spray some salt and a little black pepper. You can use fresh ground if you want. If you like it hot you can even throw in some, say, some red pepper flakes and we are just going to cook this down. You can cook this as much as you want or as little as you want it is clearly a preference. I don't like to mutilate my vegetables. I like them nice and leafy. So we're just going to go just a couple of minutes on this, not very much at all. If you wanted to as a variation you can even throw a little bit of white wine in here, if you like. It is basically up to you. Lots of different things that you could do.

You could even toss in maybe some almonds in here or some pine nuts. Lots of different things you could do, just be creative when you are cooking, that's what I tell all my students. So it's getting -- look at that beautiful green color it is getting now, just till every leaf has had equal billing and this is going to be such a nice compliment to that filet and basically, it's done. We are going to put this in a little nice dish just for serving purposes and that is it; all done. Coming up next is our delicious fresh strawberry desert with homemade whipped cream, infused with almonds extract and we are going to top it off with a beautiful raspberry sauce.