My Valentine's Feast

Last year, Tiffany unleashed the greatest Valentine's of all time. This year the onus was on me to, as Bon Jovi says, make a memory. While I stepped up to the plate, ready for the challenge, my home run swing at making the best Valentine's ever fell far short. I could write a thousand li-i-i-i-ines, about what went wrong, but the bottom line is cooking easy is easy, cooking hard is not easy.

With the savings challenge in mind, I vowed to cook something myself for my beautiful wife, who cooks for me almost all the time. Normally, we would be heading to a fancier restaurant than normal and maybe order a bottle of wine. Not going out to eat has been a successful part of our sacrifice, with some new and strange meals. Wednesday night Tiff threw all these odds and ends into the crockpot, the main ingredient being lentils. Both of us looked at it with sour faces as we were dishing it out, but by golly, it was good. It was really good.

So I knew we weren't going anywhere, so I had to make something nice. Tiff likes shrimp and shrimp sounds nice and expensive to me, so I set out to cook shrimp for Tiffany on Valentine's. I think this was my first mistake as I've never cooked shrimp, or any other type of seafood before and has no idea how to go about it. I searched the internet where I found a recipe that looked a little complicated but interesting enough to try.

The morning of I went to the store for ingredients. I bought shrimp, mozzarella cheese, roasted red peppers, pasta, sauce, ice cream, strawberries, and flowers. The recipe also called for prosciutto and pano bread crumbs. In my head, honey baked ham and a loaf of bread would make suitable substitutes. Hindsight is 20/20.

Tiff was determined to snoop when I got home and I ended up ruining, freely and willingly, the surprise of what was for dinner. She questioned it and had a good chuckle at my expense before I ever got started cooking. This kind of irritated me as I was both excited and mainly nervous about my attempts at cooking something new.

Long story short, once I started cooking I new I was in over my head and immediately scrapped my Shrimp Nicholas recipe of wrapped butterflied shrimp, choosing instead to make a mish-mash of flavors to cook the shrimp in. Then I just threw it romanticly over basic pasta, with essentially a jar of red pasta sauce. Mmmm.

Tiff, always the good sport, said she liked it, but she pushed the second half to the side in favor of a salad, and now, hours after the fact, all I can taste is garlic. At least, the flowers look good, but I think I still have a few years of Valentine's Days to catch up with her.

And tonight, I think both of us are very much looking forward to some leftover lentil soup. Happy Valentine's Day.