Happy Valentine's!

February 12th was the 1-year anniversary of Mike's proposal, and of course, my acceptance. He surprised me with these tulips! They're so beautiful! And they have lots of blooms. Mike never gets tired of watching them open in the morning and close at sunset. (It is pretty cool.) The school was selling them at the flower sale they have every Friday. (This week they had it on Thursday as well to take full advantage of men with girlfriends and single girls. By the look of the crowds they were drawing, it worked.)










For Valentine's, we made dinner together. We did this last year and liked it so much we decided to make a tradition of it. It's a lot of fun to cook together, especially something we've never cooked before.





Mike put me in charge of finding a dessert. I was looking things up on the internet, and saw a number of recipes for red velvet cake and Mike said he loved it. I've heard of it, but I've never had it, so I figured now was a good time to try. The best part was, we only needed to buy a small thing of buttermilk and two packages of cream cheese for the whole thing. It was kind of an unspoken goal to choose recipes that only required us to get one or two things for them. It came out really well. Here I am just starting to frost the first layer with cream cheese frosting.


For dinner we decided to have lobster tails since they were selling for $4.99 each - which is AMAZING. Since I've only ever cooked whole lobsters, I wasn't sure what the best method was for cooking just tails, so again, we looked up recipes on-line and found a really easy one where we just split the tails, butter 'em up, toss a little seasoning on there, and stick 'em in the oven in a pan with a bit of water in it for 20 minutes. They came out great!



For future reference though: cutting lobster tails in half is definitely not as easy as everyone makes it sound.


Mike (and my hand) holding up our freshly chopped bugs.



















Mike shelling and deveining shrimp for the first time ever. He was intimidated at first, but when I showed him how easily the shells peel off, he jumped right in. Then he breaded them and fried them up. Again, we got half-a-pound of large raw shrimp for $3.00. If this is what a recession means, I'm all for it.









Here I am sticking the lit candles into their vases of water. (We had this all left over from last year.) You can see the plates of food. Aside from the shrimp and lobster, we made hassleback potatoes. (Or I should say, Mike made hassleback potatoes. He actually did most of it 'cause I was busy frosting the cake and sauteeing veggies. Those are on a different plate.) We both agreed the potatoes were a little dry, but hey, it was our first time, and only having one semi-flop looks like a good record. They were definitely edible though! Mike finished his off and I ate half of mine and saved the rest for today. Everything else tasted soooo good, and Mike just kept muttering, "Mmm... lobster," under his breath for the rest of the night.




Then, after about a 30-minute digestion period, we topped it all off with our red velvet cake. I saw one recipe that had coconut sprinkled over the whole of it, and I thought, "Hey, if I can do that, I don't have to work so blasted hard to keep those meddlesom red crumbs from showing through the frosting," and I was right. It also gave it a little extra oomph to the presentation and, naturally, it tasted good.

All-in-all, a very fun Valentine's evening. We went out to the cheap theater after dinner, and just spent the rest of the night hanging out together. It was so nice not to have to worry about homework since we have a 3-day weekend (4-day for me, since my only class on Tuesday was cancelled!) and Mike had already gotten some studying done for a test earlier that day, after breakfast at IHOP. Every time one of those endless buttermilk pancake commercials comes on in the few hours of TV I watch a week, I ask him if we can go. He told me he had a surprise for me, so we jumped into the car in our pajamas and it wasn't 'til we reached Hitt Rd. that I figured it out. Oh it was tastey.