A Very Valentine's Menu

Yep. It was pretty epic. I would have also photographed the charcuterie plate but Piper ate almost all the sausage before we got home from the airport.

Valentine's Day Guide or: How to Pick Your Boyfriend Up from the Airport

A few pretty little things...

Off the Beaten Path: Valentine's Flicks

I know there are a lot of Valentine's haters out there, but I've never really seen the point. Valentine's Day is a day to celebrate love; we all (hopefully) have some form of love in our lives, be it romantic, familial, friendly. And we get an entire day to remember it, celebrate it and share it! I think it's lovely.

We enter a very important phase of Valentine's Day preparation: the film. What you watch and who you watch it with can make a world of difference between a memorable Valentine's Day and a "that time we watched Love Actually that wasn't Christmas" kind of day. We all know the classics: Titanic, Romeo + Juliet, Pride and Prejudice, etc. Boring (or not, I'll be watching Romeo + Juliet, don'tlookatme). But, dear reader, whether you've got a honey by your side on the big day or not, I shall now draw upon my five years of cinema scholarship and select five more offbeat films that will make your night something to remember.

Valentine's Brown Butter Spice Cookies

A few days ago I posted my desire to invent my first cookie. A Valentine's cookie. A "sexy" cookie, if you will (not some milksop sugar concoction with tastelessly sweet frosting). And voila, a few tries and a few cardboard-tasting failures later and I have found my cookie. A bit nutty, a bit chocolatey and a bit spicy. Mouth-meltingly soft. What more can you ask for? I'll still be playing around with this a bit; I had one try that came out perfectly and the others have been a bit varied, but I'll keep this recipe updated.

Valentine's Cookie Musings

I've been toying around with the idea of a Valentine's Day cookie for a little while and this morning I had a few ideas that I wanted to jot down. The usual "sugar cookie with crumbly royal icing" has always seemed a little insipid to me, especially where Valentine's Day is concerned. Those cookies are fine if they're representing some kind of little schoolgirl crush, but I want a sexy cookie (yeah, I said it.) A cookie that evokes the deep, toe-curling, passionate feeling of full-blown love.