Valentine's Day is not really a big deal to me and Davis. On our first Valentine's Day together, he made a trail of chocolates and gummy lips in our house that led to a giant teddy bear. That was pretty cute. The next year I think we went out to some overpriced restaurant in downtown Montreal. It was probably about -30C out, so I wore a turtleneck sweater. I felt like a nun compared to all the other girls there - strapless tops in February, really? - and although we had reservations we had to wait at the bar for an hour and rang up a huge, overpriced drink tab until we got to sit down. Since then, Valentine's Day has been more about scoring discount chocolates on the 15th than anything else.
But, since this is our first Valentine's not living with one of our families in six years, I thought I'd at least make an effort. I got up early and made breakfast.
This was the plan:
[from left: image by New York Examiner, heart pancakes from 24/7 moms, berry smoothie by Make & Takes]
This was what I got:
I would say I scored about 2/3 on this breakfast. The smoothies were wonderful and so easy to make with just berries and soy milk. I've been practicing the pancakes for a week or so and they turned out all right - I dropped chocolate chips and frozen raspberries in the batter as they were cooking and that tasted pretty awesome, but I couldn't stop the raspberries from burning on the surface. It was also really hard to make the heart shapes - I used a large cookie cutter that I put on the pan and poured the batter into that, but even though it was oiled the batter kept sticking to the cutter which ripped off huge chunks as I pulled it off - and that cutter was HOT!
The eggs were not a success - I tried doing them the same way as the pancakes, but the white seeped out from under the cutter. I then tried to just fry the egg normally and used the cutter afterward, which worked fairly well except I didn't know what to do with the excess whites - I felt guilty throwing them out, so I hid them underneath the egg heart and it just looked a little odd and lumpy. Oh well!
I took the morning off of school (I used to go to class religiously in undergrad, but now in vet school I'm finding that I'm much happier if I just study from home) and tonight we're going to make a nice Italian dinner - gnocchi and proscuitto wrapped around melon and bocconcini on tomato - and have some wine.
Update: dinner was a success!
What are your Valentine's plans? Fancy dinner or a cozy night of TV on the couch?
