How to use this Page

So, if I had to give last week a title, it would've been A Series of Unfortunate Events. It started with the whole running out of home heating oil and Monday, continued with my car breaking down only minutes before we were supposed to meet with a potential wedding caterer on Wednesday, and culminated in Joe's car breaking down the very next day - with a whole lot of messy family drama and minor-league trauma in between (nothing I want to go into - but suffice it to say, it was a VERY bad, bad week).

Here's an example: Thursday night, Joe and I baked our traditional Valentine's Day red velvet cupcakes with white chocolate cream cheese frosting. The cupcake part was fine - they came out REALLY red and tasted divine. But when we went to do the frosting, we realized we'd left the cream cheese out too long and it somehow got rancid in our 67 degree house. We were also planning on using leftover white chocolate chips, instead of buying bars, for the frosting, but chips have a stabilizer in them that don't let them melt the way bars or chunks do. So we wasted 3 cups of powdered sugar trying to turn rancid cream cheese and unmelty chips into frosting. Which meant that Joe had to run out to the grocery store after midnight to buy replacement cream cheese, chocolate bars, and powdered sugar. This after two earlier stops at the store for ingredients we neglected to stock ahead of time.

(The sweat equity was worth it, though. The cupcakes are always a huge hit, and this year when I was frosting them I had the brilliant idea of skipping swirls and instead piping a white chocolate heart on top. It was beyond precious.)

So then Saturday was Valentine's Day, and the icky turned into de lovely. We started the morning by topping some Trader Joe's whole grain french toast with bruleed bananas, then groomed the dog and took him over to PetCo (where the pets go) for a $6 family portrait. After that, Joe and I got haircuts (one of those quick, cheapy places over by Shoprite) and then hit up GameStop, where Joe proceeded to convince me that we needed several games for the Wii. This after $1,100 in home heating oil and car repairs. I relented, though, because he got a nice little bonus at work and the week before was putting in 14-hour days trying to make headway on some projects. One of the things he picked up was actually my Valentine's Day gift - My Fitness Coach for the Wii. I'd had the Xbox version when I was staying with my parents, saving up for the house, and really loved it. We also put a $5 pre-order depost on EA Sports Active, which looks so freaking cool that I can hardly stand it.

Afterward, we grabbed our Scrabble board and headed to Panera, where we snagged - and I still can't believe our luck - the two leather club chairs in front of the fireplace. We spent the next two hours playing Scrabble in front of the fire, sipping hot Chai and soliciting tons of "awws" from people who walked by or sat near us. It was so cozy, and so romantic, and so very us.

Back at home, we started to prep the very elaborate Valentine's Day feast we'd planned. The first course was to be Ina Garten's shrimp bisque. The recipe calls for seafood stock, but since I couldn't find that, I went with Better Than Bullion's Lobster Base. Oh. My. GOD. It was a disaster. The bullion was super salty, and I made the rookie mistake of NOT TASTING IT before adding the two teaspoons of salt the recipe called for. (In my head, I could hear Tom Collichio chastizing me for not tasting my food.) We tried everything we could to rescue the bisque - adding more tomato paste, adding more cayenne, adding more roux-thickened half and half ... finally we realized we were going to have to pick up more shrimp and add more leeks to make it palatable, and put the soup away for the next day. Then Joe started having stomach cramps, so we decided to postpone the entire romantical feast for Sunday.

The next day, I made us blueberry-and-Greek-yogurt smoothies before we hit the gym. Then it was off to Shoprite to pick up more shrimp. We came home to an odd-looking poop from the dog. There was a thing sticking out of it that resembled a giant earthworm. We scooped the sample and put it in a bag, put the bag in a Tupperware container, and put the container in another bag before popping it into the fridge. Then we spent the next hour Googling intestinal parasites to see if we could identify what it was that came out Skitty's body. Joe was so creeped out he didn't even want the dog kissing him. It was ... yeah, not good.

After we recovered from the "ew" factor, we headed into the kitchen. We sauteed an extra leek and the new pound of shrimp before pureeing it and adding it to the super-salty bisque. It tamed the flavor some, but not enough so that I could enjoy it. I had a very small portion before deciding my tummy still couldn't handle it. Such a disappointment! Expensive ingredients + lots of labor should = yumminess, right? I was afeared that our Weekend of Loveliness was morphing into A Series of Unfortunate Events, Take II.

But then Joe saved the day by making Alton Brown's chocolate mousse - my absolute favorite dessert - and it was AMAZERFUL.

Soup + mousse = full tummies, so we postponed the Valentine's Day Feast yet again. Which meant that Monday morning's breakfast consisted of a petite filet mignon (that we butchered ourselves, I might add), accompanied by sauteed mushrooms and topped with a homemade blue cheese chive sauce and a fried egg. I could only get through half of my filet, but even so, it was ... decadent.

A quick trip to the vet revealed that Scouty's foreign object was not, in fact, a giant mutant Earthworm, but something resembling waxed paper. Suddenly it dawned on us that while we were out on Saturday, a spurned Scout most likely raided a trash can, fished out a cupcake wrapper, and promptly swallowed it. Even though I was annoyed at the dog for trash munching, just knowing that he was okay and not infested with mutant worms brought such a sense of relief. The rest of the day was spent catching up on work and chores, and after I taught my final creative writing class of this session at the Y, I came home to help Joe finish off this totally scrumptious Curry Cauliflower Soup and a batch of Lavendar Blueberry Muffins for breakfast the next day. The latter recipe came from Recipes for Life After Weight-Loss Surgery, which my mom got me for Christmas, and they, too, were super yummy. You make them with oat flour, yogurt, and unsweetened applesauce, so not only do they taste awesome, but they're also really good for you. We used plain Greek yogurt instead of the traditional kind, so the muffins pack even more protein.

After we cleaned up the kitchen for the upteenth time, we took the dog out and ruminated on how much we'd actually cooked in the past five days. Out of everything, we only had one unmitigated disaster (the first batch of cupcake frosting) and one minor one (the too-salty shrimp bisque). Which isn't bad, considering everything that came out perfectly, including our home-butchered filet.

And now I just realized that I've written a novel here, AND that it's already 9:15 a.m., so I better wrap up.

Hope everyone had a loverly long weekend and a happy kicky sticky sweet V-Day!