Valentine’s Day: a day losers like to say is “manufactured” and “forces us to be romantic when we’d rather be romantic every other day of the year” (usually said by people who do zero romantic things the rest of the year as well! Yay!)
I’ve always loved it because it doesn’t try to be trendy, sexy, or subtle. Instead, it encourages neon pink frosting on everything, the concept of asking someone to be your valentine (while I’m pretty sure no one actually knows what that means although I’ve always thought of it as a hybrid of ‘date’ and ‘sacrifice to cupid’) (huh?), and shopping for toy gorillas that dance to Hunka Hunka Burnin’ Love, usually found at drugstores, next to the paracetamol and diarrhea medication.
I love it, I love planning for it, and this year, with so much more time on my hands, I decided to really get down to every last detail, for a day that should have been absolutely perfect.
And then, it absolutely wasn’t.
February 14th started as most days in Ireland: with pouring rain thrown from the sky with determination to ruin any last bit of hope for going outside. Step One in our fun-filled day of activities was to watch a Valentine’s Hallmark movie, and to bake our brunch while the meticulously-crafted Hallmark storyline of business-woman-learns-true-value-of-farmwork would unfold. However, due to the rain somehow affecting The Concept of The Internet, we couldn’t stream nor download our movie. So, we watched our usual obsession, Married at First Sight, instead. If you’re in the market for a show that makes you give up on love, this is the one.
Brunch was a no-brainer. Jeff loves blueberries, and I, being a very thoughtful person, found a foolproof recipe for baked blueberry French toast, topped with crispy bacon. Per the instructions, I prepared the French toast the night before, and popped it in the oven in the morning “until blueberries burst”. I baked it the full time, but the berries weren’t bursting. I got mad. I put the French toast on the top rack and spun the oven wheel angrily until it was on Broil. The bread burned. The blueberries remained intact. I got more mad. I cooked the bacon but it wasn’t crispy. I gave up. I took the French toast out of the oven and topped it with the rashers which, to be completely, unapologetically honest, looked like wet little dog dicks.
Altogether, brunch looked and tasted like barbecued vomit. The eggs hadn’t properly cooked in the bread, and floated freely under our toast in blueberry-dyed chunks. The bread itself was gooey. Jeff did his nice guy thing where he says “it’s alright!” But that actually annoyed me more because the least he could do was look me in the eye and tell me what a disappointment I was.
Surprisingly, that was all it took to put me in a horrible mood. I’ve never messed up breakfast before, and ON VALENTINE’S DAY?!
So we started drinking, and things were good again.
Then, these roses arrived. I have never seen roses of this colour before. They are this shade of lavender that has no warmth to it which makes them look so unique, and they’re absolutely stunning. Jeff did an amazing job picking them out. He also gave me another bouquet of red roses the day before, so I’m incredibly spoiled, and he’s the sweetest person in the world.
A few drunken coffees and four national anthems played for us by Alexa later, I Skyped my mom and Val, and they, as always, gave me such beautiful, thoughtful, girly Valentine’s day presents, which made me miss them even more.
But then, the rain stopped, revealing the most gorgeous cotton candy pink sky. There was work to be done…we had a video to shoot. Part Three of our Valentine’s Day Spectacular was incorporating a styrofoam airplane we had into a Valentine’s Day film. I’ve been dying to fly this plane for weeks, and I’m so glad we finally took it out on the strand, except Jeff flew it into traffic and things got scary for a moment.
Anyway, the film went great, and here’s Jeff in one scene:
We walked back with this sky as the backdrop. It was so perfect, but I was still so mad about brunch.
Next came the drinks.
We have a trillion gallons of whiskey at home, and I happen to love Whiskey Sours, so my goal was to brave the world of egg whites in drinks, and to make fancy cocktails before dinner. I then realized that I have to also make pizza sauces from scratch, so, to save time, Jeff was tasked with the cocktails, and I worked on the pumpkin and Alfredo sauce recipes.
Jeff, to my knowledge, has never made a Whiskey Sour before. He is going to be mad at me when he reads this, but it must be said: he isn’t good with recipes. So, Jeff did not shake the egg whites for very long. He then assembled my cocktail, handed it to me, and I took a sip. And you know what? It was okay! And then I took another sip, and ended up swallowing what felt like a big booger. Can YOU guess what it WAS? YeS IT WaS EgG WhITE ThAt HaD NoT FrOTHed.
I…..cannot begin to describe the sensation, and I don’t have a photo of the cocktail, nor much recollection of the few minutes that followed. To add insult to injury, Jeff then announced that he himself “did not want a Whiskey Sour” anymore. Perfect.
Anyway, moving on to the pizzas. I remember when I was 12 in elementary school, we made pizzas. Every single one of them was delicious. Everyone’s was a winner.
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| Fig, arugula, Goat cheese, pumpkin sauce - the best tasting one but still yuck |
This year, we thought it would be romantic to recreate the pizzas we had in Rome, in our favourite little place called Pinsere (yes, technically they aren’t pizzas but they are..)
We bought four little pre-made crusts, then I spent two weeks gathering all the fancy ingredients: figs, smoked Italian black forest ham, pizza-specific mozzarella, artichokes, and so on. The pizza crust packaging said to bake them for 6-8 minutes.
We topped them and baked for 15 minutes. Each and every one of them came out sopping wet/raw/soft/disgusting.
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| Italian ham, artichoke, ricotta, white sauce - nasty |
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| Pistachio, ricotta, prosciutto, pumpkin sauce - blergh |
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| Just NO. |
What was supposed to be a romantic candle-lit dinner turned out into a stress-fest of tearing off chunks of wet cheese in a brightly lit room while Jeff ran back and forth reheating what we thought we could still salvage.
After finishing our meal, I decided to do the dishes and put on some music to help pass the time and move the evening to its completion. “Turn off Weird Al Yankovic,” Jeff said. “I know you feel defeated, but this is not you.” Apparently, I was having an Amish Paradise breakdown.
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| Artichoke, red sauce, prosciutto, mozzarella, who cares |
Then, we settled in to a nice, romantic movie. Except we don’t really do romantic movies, so we put on Sex and the City 2 because Jeff always gets really mad at every scene and I find it very funny. With our movie, we had the final culinary masterpiece of the night, a frozen Almondy Toblerone cake, very similar to the ones you get at Ikea. Can’t screw that up, right? Wrong. I can’t describe what was bad about it, but it was so bad that I, a sugar addict, took a bite and threw the rest in the trash. It was so bad, in fact, that after trying it, we both just looked at each other and laughed. The movie, of course, was awful and altogether horrible to watch, plus it’s like seven hours long and by the end of it I just wanted Valentine’s Day to be over.
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| But they looked so promising before we put them in the oven :( |
I don’t know if it’s because of the lockdown putting extra pressure on events having more meaning, or the fact that we have been dieting so much that we had really been looking forward to a cheat day of delicious food which turned out to be a massacre of filth, but I just felt really down, disappointed, and annoyed with myself for not soaking the bread properly. Or, maybe, it was a means by which I was allowing myself to accept the sadness of what we, as humanity, are going through. Probably just the eggs though.
Then, I opened Jeff’s valentine’s day card to find two little foxes in a hot air balloon, and in that moment it really felt like Us, holding on tight, through the pandemic, our tiny claustrophobic apartment, the daily grey skies, the internet that disappeared from rainfall, our injuries, the endless physio, the goals we didn’t reach, the pain we’ve overcome, and the valentine’s day that Jeff said we will always remember as the day of “really, really gross food”.
We put on a song that wasn’t the national anthem, and Jeff danced with me the way you slow dance with a dumb cry-baby. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see my nails which I had painted with hearts, but which actually looked like they were done by a golden retriever who had learned nail art way too late in life. The last of my planning, up in flames.
I know I am incredibly lucky, not just for Jeff and my family, but for everyone I have the honour of caring about and loving, in my life. I never lose sight of that. So important is my acknowledgment of the people I love, that Jeff's gift to me aside from the roses, was this framed photo of me with my mom and sister, a reminder that Valentine's Day isn't just about romantic love.
But still, Valentine's Day was fucking gross this year. Some things you just cannot sugar-coat.
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