Lonely Love Day

Happy Valentine's Day everyone! Hope you all had a lovely day (see what I did there?). I should've really prepared for today but it didn't work out so I had no valentine at all :( but one of my gorgeous friends was handing out valentine carrots (she'd bought a bag of carrots and wrote 'Happy Valentine's Day' on them) and I got one. I felt loved then.

I've been playing with food ideas for the day of romance, so for breakfast I wanted to curl my bacon strips into a heart but, in my house, when we freeze bacon, it's cut into little square bits for ease of use. So a curly heart was not going to happen. I got out my heart shaped cookie cutter to try that before and after the bacon pieces had cooked, and I eventually gave up when I ended up with globby shapes of nothingness (delicious globs at that).



I kinda skipped over lunch. Lunch was extremely unromantic, and really, slightly unhealthy in my (strict) terms. I had chicken wing meat that had very little skin on it (lowish in fat - bad), half a very brown avocado (oxidised omega 3s and not enough fat for my liking - bad), half a raw capsicum, a maaassive handful of raw spinach and rocket (abundance of antinutrients and oxalates - bad), some olives, and a heap of those chargrilled capsicum things in the jar (well coated in canola oil, an oil of evil - bad bad bad). And the lack of multiple ingredients made it worse. It was just an oily capsicum salad. Not that amazing.

I was a little more excited about dinner. I got the barbecue going and smoked up the rest of the capsicum that was halved for the salad, my valentine carrot, a heap of leek and some big prawns, and grabbed some cooked chicken wings, and decided to make a dipping sauce. Although the barbie food was really good (especially the leek and capsicum - capsicum is always good on the barbie), the thing that made it spectacular and made me feel a little more loved was this awesome concoction I came up with. I didn't really measure anything here, but I'll try.

I wanted to make a creamy lemon pepper sauce for my prawnies so I grabbed:
- 2 tsp tahini
- 1 1/2 tsp olive oil
- 1tsp macadamia oil
- good pinch of salt
- a heap of pepper
- half a lemon (you won't need that much)

Then I mixed together the ingredients, squeezing in the lemon as I tasted it (I probably squeezed in 2/3 of the half). I initially didn't add olive oil, but when I did, the whole mixture fell apart. It went all de-emulsified. The olives didn't like the sesame seeds and they just had a big fight and refused to get along. But it tasted so lick-the-spoon-able that I made them get along. I just had to stir the bowl every time I wanted to dip my prawnie in.

But it was worth it. That creamy goodness will definitely be used again.

Update!
Well I seemed to have forgotten to add my plans for next Valentine's Day! Oopsies...

This is my ultimate plan for meals as far as 2014 Valentine's Day is concerned:
Breakfast: bacon strips curled into a heart, a sausage cut in half lengthways and curled outwards to make a heart, and an egg cracked in the middle of it. And maybe some caramelised onions to top it off.

Lunch: ok so I haven't planned ALL my meals. But if I can't come up with something, lunch should be light because I want to have a dessert with rosewater in it, whether that's some panna cotta thingo or a cake or even just like a big tub of raw yoghurt with a heap of rosewater stirred in... would that even taste good? Or rosewater could just be my beverage for the entire day. Oh and rose tea from T2. Not that I've tried it yet, but it's just rosebuds so it should be good.

Dinner: I really think I should have a big, fat, meaty heart. A beef heart or something. Or maybe something exotic like a goat heart or a monkey heart or something fancy. But a heart. Because isn't that what Valentine's Day is about?