Valentine's Dinner

My half anniversary falls on Valentine's Day.  I've always treated it as a special day, despite who it is named after.  Its foundation is universal.

I make a special dinner.  Never go out.  This is my time to do something special for my wife.  There is always a card, sometimes with a cat theme, sometimes one discounted of little special meaning.  I buy wine for dinner, this year a Spanish red.  Menu planning starts a week or two in advance.  Some years milchig, which affords me flexibility with dessert.  My wife would choose tiramisu, but commercial kosher tiramisu can be hard to find.  For some reason, lady fingers rarely have kosher certification so I would have to make my own. Mascarpone cheese does carry a hechsher.  I have tried to make it, but this is one of those efforts where the commercial sources have a big advantage over the home baker.  This year, I made fleishig.  Honeycake for dessert, a simple recipe.  I had three mostly used plastic jars of crystallized honey which I gently simmered until I could pour it.  The total came just shy of what the recipe called for so I topped it off.  Honeycake can have all sorts of additives:  raisins and nuts are the most common.  I used chopped walnuts.  And the spices vary a lot.  Some have orange in the form of juice or zest.  Mine uses coffee, freshly brewed in my fleishig cone.

I found a vegan vegetable soup recipe worth trying.  Chopped vegetables.  sauté some.  Add others.  Will use bullion instead of broth.  It gets an immersion blender session.  Had some coconut milk that I can add.  Not much in the way of spices, though.  Had a corned beef in a vacuum package that's been in the freezer forever.  I thought it was precooked, so all I had to do was steam the slices.  Not so.  It is raw corned beef.  I've made my own from flat brisket and curing salt many times.  At the end it gets boiled a few hours in a pot with an onion, carrot, celery, and some peppercorns.  I have sourdough bread and pita.  Roasting a beet is easy.  It takes about an hour and a half.  And since I found kasha on sale, I'll make kasha varnishkes.  Making it takes a few steps:  coating the grains with an egg, then cooking the egg, boiling seasoned water to which the coated grains are added, sautéing half an onion to add at the end, boiling a handful of bow tie pasta to add at the end.  Only the beet requires an oven, but I may have to juggle some stove burners. Or cook things in shifts.  

In the end, it's one of those days when my organizing skills get challenged to the joy of somebody else.