Every year for 22+ year now, my spouse and I have taken turns planning out a special Valentine surprise. The last really big surprise we did was pre-pandemic in 2020, when we went to a German restaurant. Otherwise, this past year was half-hearted because nearly everything was in disarray or shut down during early 2021 due to Covid. This year, with partial reopening, we agreed to make it a very lazy and indulgent day of food, wine, entertainment, and pajamas.
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Our Valentine Tradition
After decades of taking turns arranging a Valentines day celebration, we both decided that what we would like to do this year would be to spend the day doing absolutely nothing, but eating tasty, snacky food, drinking good wine, while being entertained and staying in our pajamas all day. There was an agreement to plan this out together, so no one had to do anything special.
So we did a little pit of planning to arrange deliveries, hire a dog walker for the day, and went out each day the week prior to ”hunt and gather” what we wanted on hand. That in itself was special as, between the pandemic and my knee surgery, we had not been going out together more than the daily dog walk. This time we went out shopping several times, picking up plants for the garden, then to BevMo for white wine, 4th Street food shopping and lunch, and then the Gourmet Ghetto area of Berkeley for cheese shopping.
- Wikipedia: The Gourmet Ghetto is a colloquial name for the business district of the North Berkeley neighborhood in the city of Berkeley, California, known as the birthplace of California cuisine.
Breaking Out from Tradition
Valentines Day started with all of us sleeping in beyond 7:30 am, including the two dogs. The blackout shades in the bedroom did as they were designed and we were all cozy and quiet in a darkened room. Ah to actually sleep in … and just like that it was over.
Maggie, the Havanese, started whining for attention and Charlie, the Goldendoodle, needed to go out. Both wanted breakfast. My spouse unexpectedly handed me a Valentine’s card, which of course made me feel all mushy. Then, when I looked up from the card, I saw my spouse looking at me in a way that mimicked the puppies — all three were essentially beseeching me to get up and feed them.
With a big internal sigh, I got up and fed the dogs first, adding some salmon treats to their bowls so they’d have something special too today. Then turned to making my spouse’s quick breakfast.
Sweet Breakfast
We had bought everything beforehand, so breakfast turned out very easy. While my spouse started the day by resting from the hard night of sleeping and watching an older TV show on the iPad, I toasted a thick slice of pumpkin bread, made a large glass of Earl Grey iced tea, and brought it upstairs.
The family tradition is that after breakfast is finished, my spouse will walk the dogs. So they generally sit around my spouse waiting, although this day they were barely able to contain their desire to be out and about. Luckily for our intent to relax all day, we had arranged for a dog walker to take the dogs out both times, so we could have our full day of nothing. Close to when we stopped eating, there was a noise downstairs and our now barking dogs ran off to protect us. Rather quickly it got very quiet, and we heard the front door close again.
While reading the news in bed, I felt myself nodding out again, but right then received a notification text that the gift I had secretly bought was on our porch. So I told my spouse there was a surprise on the porch waiting for “someone” to pick up. Before I could get my house-shoes on, I saw the back of a head running downstairs.
It was now mid-morning, and the Fudge Chocolate Cake I had ordered from A Taste of Denmark Bakery arrived. My spouse, a chocolate nut, oooh’d and aaah’d over the dark richness of fudge. We both had a slice, and I was warned to not put the leftovers in the fridge, as it would ruin the taste. I promised not to and finished my slice, finding the cake delightfully light and airy, so while rich, it was not dense. (Frankly I prefer cake that way when there is icing, when I am eating a cake without icing I like the batter to be thicker.)
Since we were downstairs by this time, we moved operations from the upstairs to the living room and continued to be entertained while drinking water and tea. At 12 noon I started to make lunch.
Charcuterie Lunch
Charcuterie is just a fancy French term for, as we currently define it, cured meat; literally the word is closer to “cooked flesh,” although some define it as a ”pork butcher shop.” This 15th century French word was created during a time of no refrigerators, when people used every last piece of meat, and yet storefront butchers could not sell raw pork. The French store owners got inventive.
In this time period, leftover pork was probably pig-ends and offal, and the store owners or butchers decided to mince, season, and stuff these leftovers into a natural (probably pig) casing, and preserved the meat through a curing process to make dry-aged, salted meat in sausage form. Although the process of curing meat was around during much earlier Roman times, this allowed them to sell processed (not raw) leftover pig meat.
A Charcuterie Board is a platter (cutting or serving board, platter, etc.) that has a specific theme of finger food displayed around the base of cured meat. Often those foods might be cheeses, veggies, fruit, nuts, spreads or chutneys, breads or crackers, and so on. The drink in those olde days would be generally wine, but today finds that anything goes.
Earlier in the week we had gone to the Cheese Board Collective to pick up some bread and cheese for a Valentines Day off. OMG their bread was fresh from the oven, with an aroma that would have left me aching for a loaf if I was just walking by, luckily I was in line to buy some.
But I was also there for cheese, and what I found was a $20 USD surprise cheese package, where they selected cheeses and wrapped them up in a brown paper bag, and while all the cheese is unnamed, you are assured of its quality and a good price for what you get. We bought a bag and were definitely NOT disappointed.
We had also gone to the Market Hall on 4th Street in Berkeley for nibs-n-nabs of food the day before, as we anticipated making a charcuterie board we were going to nibble on for the day and needed nuts, deli meats, and dips. I wanted to stay with traditional pork so we bought some pepperoni sausages and a spicy salami. But the meats could be any of these: cured meats, fresh and smoked sausages, pâté, andouilles, andouillettes, black puddings (blood sausage), boudins blancs, sausagemeat, hams, galantines, and pâté en croûte.
All the rest of the food we already had on hand. But just as a reminder, you could make a variety of styles of charcuterie platters, just create a theme, decide the meat, then build around it.
- While we picked up chutney, you could use any dips or jams.
- We added carrots (which were great with the Mango chutney) as a veggie, but we could have added other veggies or even pickled veggies as well.
- I chose dried fruit since I had some in the pantry, but fresh fruit goes just as well, like grapes, sliced stone-fruit, berries, pears, apples, etc.
- For cheeses I always prefer a selection of soft and hard cheeses.
- For wine I always prefer a dark red wine or port and my spouse prefers a white (non-Chardonnay) citrusy wine.
Our Charcuterie Board consisted of the types of foods we both like that we could nibble on for days as it was going to be our lunch over the next few days.
- Dried fruit: cranberries
- Mixed nuts only slightly salted
- Pepperoni & Spicy Salami
- Rice crackers, rosemary crackers & sourdough baguette
- Cheese: two soft (one was brie) and three hard (one was a cheddar, one a sheep cheese, one tasted like a form of Swiss but not sure)
- Vegetables: carrots
- Dips: a lime pepper chutney and a mango chutney
Mediterranean Dinner
Later in the day my spouse fed the dogs and we waited for a food delivery, as we had preordered a nice mixture of Mediterranean food from Chez Mansour for dinner. We pre-ordered a fairly typical restaurant meal of:
- Mesa plate with hummus, dolmas, mojardara, tabouleh, baba ghanoush
- Falafel and Pita bread
- Chicken kebab with basmati rice
- Kofta kebab (beef) with small potatoes
- Cucumber salad
- Mixed olives
- Tabouleh
- Green salad
There was an over abundance of food so we carefully wrapped it all up for the next few days of eating. We have plenty of lemons in our back yard, and additional pita bread, so leftovers are very welcomed from this dinner (as well as leftovers from lunch). We are in PattyCook heaven, as far as I am concerned, I absolutely love finger foods and my fridge is very full.
We also knew that the food must be heavily flavorful, as the aroma attracted the land sharks, aka Maggie and Charlie, to sniff, roam, and plead with those darn puppy eyes for anything we’d drop their way. They did get a bit of the chicken and beef but nothing else. Too much garlic which is not healthy for them.
Salutation
We continued our day into the evening with complaints that we ate too much. But we complained with a smile on our face. Pretty much, we ended as we started, with a whole lot of doing nothing, such as reading, watching TV, writing, entertaining the dogs, talking with each other, laughing, and sharing stories. At the end, all four of us were ready for more snuggling, with our bellies full, and satisfied with a day that was relaxing, and yet full of culinarily adventures.
Hope your day was as satisfying as ours.
—Patty
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Happy to hear you had such a sweet and tasty Valentines Day!???