Valentine’s Day – Better Late Than Never

On our first Valentine’s Day together, Alex showed up at my college apartment with a beautiful bouquet of red roses.  I was thrilled that he ignored our ridiculous agreement to ignore the sinister holiday that commercializes love.  Obviously he was so overcome with passion that he was willing to risk my displeasure, much like the early Christian martyrs for which the day is named.  He presented the flowers to me and shyly made his bold declaration.  “These were on your doorstep.  I guess they were delivered to the wrong address.”

Our Valentine’s celebrations have improved dramatically since that unfortunate day. The story Alex would have preferred to have me start with is last year’s, when we had a candlelit dinner of champagne and caviar and he proposed. One of the many benefits of this development is that we can now celebrate Valentine’s Day with total abandon — it is no longer a Hallmark holiday but the anniversary of our engagement.

This year, we started out our Anniversary meal with pink champagne and American paddlefish caviar. I often worry that I only like caviar because it is said to be a delicacy. I imagine myself in 19th century Albany, where caviar was so plentiful it was served in bars like peanuts. Would I have been able to taste through the snobbery of the time? While eating a meager but delicious ounce of the salty black pearls on Valentine’s Day (and a little of Alex’s allotted ounce which he most generously shared, proving that chivalry is not dead), I couldn’t help but believe that my life would have been one perpetual feast.

For the main course, we dined on seared duck breast, galette of potatoes, and steamed asparagus. The galette was a triumph, and the duck was quite tasty, although not quite perfect. By this point we were so full that we decided to skip the blood orange sorbet and molten chocolate cake I had planned. Who wants to spend all of Valentine’s Day eating, anyway?