Valentine's Day Dinner

I admire people who brave the crowds and venture out to eat on Valentine's Day. I am not one of them. For the past few years, I've prepared dinner for Kalon on the 14th, and then he takes me out later in the week. It's a tradition I hope to continue for a very long time! Here is our rustic, very low key Valentine's dinner:

Cutting the fettucine. I love my KitchenAid pasta roller!

Creamy carbonara sauce

Aren't steamed asparagus beautiful?

I think you have to serve a chocolate dessert on Valentine's day. These individual lava cakes are so easy to make and bake in eight minutes.

Happy Valentine's Day! I hope you all have something fun and romantic planned. I realize not everyone enjoys this "Hallmark holiday", but I've always loved it! When I was little, I looked forward to cards from mom and flowers from dad. And, when I was older, silly gifts and gestures from boyfriends made me feel special. Today Kalon and I set aside work and schedules to just enjoy each other's company.

I love making handmade cards, especially Valentines for my friends and family. Here is the one I sent out this year:

I used my Cricut machine to cut the circles for the front, and then stamped the heart design in the center.

I used the Valentine as an opportunity to debut the logo for my new company, "Little Partridge". More information on that to come!

One Small Step

When I look at the sprawling backyard in our new home, I choose to see the future. The future grass is green and without weeds. The future fruit trees provide shade and abundance. And the future flower beds are lush and colorful. In reality, the yard needs some love. I'm not sure the last owners did a thing besides water, and, as a result, there are about a million weeds that need eradicating. In order to create a good environment for our future garden, we'll be doing this by hand, without chemicals. It's hard work but I don't mind at all, because all I see is the future.

This is the very first cleared section of flower beds! After pulling out all of the weeds and roots, I worked compost into the soil. Until I'm ready to plant, I'll protect the surface from new seedlings with a water permeable barrier and mulch. The little stick in coming out of the mulch is our fig tree, a cutting from the Morris fig tree in San Clemente. Thank you to the city of Oceanside for providing unlimited free compost and mulch to residents!

I didn't take a "before" picture of the exact spot we cleared, but the entire perimeter of the yard looks similar to this. Not for long!

Winter Menu #5

I've started a new tradition where once a month I cook a complete meal from the Martha Stewart's Dinner at Home cookbook. I can't say enough how much I adore this book. I love how it is based on seasonal ingredients; there are 52 menus, 13 each for spring, summer, fall and winter. Each four-course meal can be prepared from scratch in about one hour. The photographs (there is a picture for every dish) are beautiful, emphasizing the freshness of the key ingredients. It doesn't hurt that my copy is signed by Martha herself!

By no means is it a perfect cookbook. Sure, the meal takes an hour to prepare - if you have superior knife skills and everything is pre-washed, peeled and chopped. And since each menu calls for at least a few unique ingredients (what, you don't have Bosc pears just sitting in your pantry right now?), dinner at home can get expensive. This is why I'm choosing to use this cookbook as a special treat - a perfect monthly tradition.

Here are the results from my first dinner of 2010 - Winter Menu #5

Artichokes on Toast: love when raw garlic melts into hot toast

Wilted Chicory Salad: delicious, even though I forgot the splash of balsamic vinegar at the end

Spaghetti with Clams: is pasta con vongole ever a bad idea? These were the biggest little neck clams I'd ever seen!

Grapefruit in Moscato: I definitely need to work on my segmenting skills! But it was still a sweet and bubbly end to the meal.