Linden: Easter dinner

In England, we get a four-day weekend for Easter - Good Friday and Easter Monday. On the Thursday leading up to that weekend, me and Chris returned to our favorite restaurant - the Theo Randall at the Intercontinental in London.

This is the kind of place where Papa would say to Mama, "Our children have become accustomed to a luxurious lifestyle", despairingly. It is expensive and fancy, in a restful, luxurious, enjoyable kind of way. It also has the most amazing lemon tart, and amazing chocolate cloud cake, and also the beef ragu that inspired me to find, try, and add to regular rotation my pork ragu. And this time, we happened to be there on the day his new cookbook came out, and Theo Randall came out to talk to us and sign his book for us. (It turns out, his ragu tastes better than mine because he adds a stick of butter at the end.)

Now I don't buy a lot of cookbooks (usually, they are finicky and fiddly and either super fatty, use super expensive ingredients, or lots of simple carbs), but I bought his, because it has all three of those recipes. And it was super worth it, because it had a recipe for leg of lamb that I used three days later for Easter dinner. It called for butterflying, which I had not done before but was pretty easy (plus, it meant we did not have to cook a massive leg of lamb for just three of us. I did cut it into thirds and froze the other two portions). Then I seared it and put it in the oven to finish. We had it with a traditional roast dinner.

Plus Yorkshire puddings (which always seem to come out 3 minutes after you've sat down to eat). Every time I cook Yorkshire pudding with roasts that aren't beef, Chris says to me, "but Linden, why are you making Yorkshire pudding? We're not eating beef." BECAUSE THEY ARE DELICIOUS. And, because it's not like the English have ever been able to accurately and faithfully cook any other culture's food, they have no leg to stand on. And, ALSO, because some midlanders told me recently, that in Yorkshire, the HOME OF YORKSHIRE PUDDING, they make it with everything ever, and this roast beef thing was just made up by southerners. SO I WIN. Yorkshire pudding with everything!
The best thing about Easter was that while I was cooking Easter dinner, he and his mum did the spring gardening, and our garden now looks less like a wilderness.

And then for dessert, I made a french apple tart, which . I had a moment when making this where Chris asked, "Is this hard to make?" And I said, "No, it's pretty straightforward, I'm not sure why I didn't make this years ago" and then had to backpedal - BACKPEDAL - because in the negotiations of how often I cook this, Chris thinking it's straightforward is not in my interest, and in reality, it's not exactly Level 1 dessert making (brownies and cookies); it's more like Level 4 or 5. You have to make the tart crust and chill it, prepare the filling, and peel, core and quickly&regularly thinly slice your apples and then arrange them on the top of the tart. I didn't make it 4 years ago because it would have been really hard then. But it is so worth it, except that it disappears so quickly? And Chris got really upset that I sent some of it home with his mum?

 

 

It is SO GOOD that I'm including the recipe here. Set aside at least two hours unless you are an apple peeling ninja. (Modified from here)

Pastry:
1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
1 pinch salt
1/2 cup butter slightly softened
1 egg yolk
3 T cold water

Frangipane:
1/2 cup butter, softened at room temperature
1/2 cup white sugar
1 egg, beaten
1 egg yolk
1 T Cognac or calvados or apple brandy (traditionally it's made with calvados, which is a French brandy made from apples, which is different from apple brandy, which is American brandy made from apples. You can substitute cognac, which is what I did because it is more flexible and if I'm going to buy a big bottle of spirits that I'm going to use 1T at a time, I'd rather it work in more than one dish.)
2/3 cup ground almonds
2T all-purpose flour

3-4 medium sweet apples (I used gala) peeled, cored, halved and thinly sliced.
Powdered sugar for sprinkling on top.

Directions.
1. Pastry: Stir together flour and salt. Add butter, egg yolk and water, and stir until the mixture forms large crumbs. Add water until you can form a ball. Wrap the ball in plastic wrap and refrigerate at least 30 mins. (Pastry dough easily lasts 2 days in the fridge if you're doing this in advance. Wrap it well, and don't leave it next to bananas or onions, because dough picks up fridge odors.)
2. Frangipane: Cream butter and sugar. Mix in egg and egg yolk. Mix in cognac. Mix in almonds and flour.
3. Roll pastry dough out to a 12 inch circle. Put in 10-inch tart or pie pan. Press into bottom and sides. Prick with a fork and flute the sides. Put back in the fridge and chill until firm.
4. Preheat oven to 400F (200C). Place a baking sheet inside oven while it preheats, on a lower rack.
5. Spoon frangipane into chilled pastry and spread into even layer. Arrange the apple slices in an overlapping spiral pattern. Each slice should have one edge pressed into the frangipane until it touches the pastry base, and then overlap the previous slice. Start at the outside edge, and work towards the center.
6. Place the pie plate on top of the baking sheet in the preheated oven. Bake for 15 minutes, or until the filling begins to brown. Reduce the oven temperature to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Bake for another 10 minutes, then sprinkle sugar over the top of the tart. Return to the oven for 10 more minutes, or until the sugar caramelizes slightly.

Done! Eat warm.

Xan: Sous-vide leg of lamb for Easter!

As usual, we had leg of lamb for Easter!  I was really excited to sous-vide it, because leg of lamb is a cut with wide swaths of fairly lean meat, yet also a decent amount of connective tissue.  So I hypothesized that it would really benefit from an extended stay in the water bath.  I did 24 hours at 137 degrees F, but next time I might even go down to 12 as it did not need that much tenderizing.

Before we get to the cooking, though, I want to say a quick word about how I trim meat. Look at this leg:

There's a pretty thick fat cap. People tend to either take it all off or leave it all on, but I think that's missing a great opportunity. My goal is to take most of it off, leaving just a thin layer of fat:

It doesn't require super butcher skills. It doesn't have to be pretty. Just make it look something like that, and don't worry, it will be beautiful after it cooks.


Ode to crispy fat. 
Shall I compare thee to a simmer's bay leaf?

No, because that would be silly.  But I will tell you why you should bother to follow my trimming instructions.

You should bother because there's nothing so delicious as browned, crispy fat, and only the outermost surface of the fat will ever get crispy.  Non-crispy fat can be good too, although frankly it doesn't hold a candle to crispy fat, and if you leave a lot of fat on, most Americans will simply cut it all off anyway.  But everyone loves a thin layer of crispy fat.

I mean, that's basically what bacon is.  That's the reason everyone loves bacon, even though it is 50% fat, even though they trim the fat off their steak without a second thought.

Nevertheless, you could conceivably go your whole life without explicitly noticing that crispy fat is the component producing max deliciousness.  So I'm here to beat you over the head with this obvious-in-retrospect fact.  It's easy to verify.  The next time you are trimming your steak at the table, try cutting off the very outer edge of the fat and eating it.  You won't be disappointed.

And, by the way, I think you should mostly ignore recipes that tell you to leave a big fat cap so the meat will be basted while it roasts in the oven.  Basting action can serve a purpose (effectively frying the outside of the roast), but a little goes a long way, and fat takes a long time to render. After the roast is done, you will probably be left with a thick layer of all the unrendered fat that did not baste your meat, so what was the point of it?  If you happen to be surrounded by people who like to eat that stuff, then by all means, leave it on.  Otherwise, you can get 95% of the flavor boost with 5% of the waistline boost by trimming most of it away.


Results.
Anyway, so I bagged the lamb with olive oil, garlic, and thyme:

After cooking, the lamb was quickly seared, to produce this:

I served it with carrots and asparagus, and Israeli couscous which I combined with my egg-lemon soup recipe, which turned out to be a really good idea:

As you can see, the meat is perfectly pink.  There is no visible fat, only a thin crispy layer working its invisible magic on the look and taste of the final product.


To Victory!
And now I would like to make a very special announcement: Victory!  As we know, lamb is an acquired taste, and one that most Americans have not acquired.  Less than one pound of lamb is consumed for every 100 pounds of chicken in the US.  And there was a time when Catherine too did not like lamb. She would eat it, but only begrudgingly.  I have worked hard to change that, because lamb is one of my very favorite meats.

Recent months have seen considerable progress.  First, she started to complain when I would cook lamb for myself and chicken for her.  Then I started to get actual positive reactions.  And with this dish, I got a genuine rave review!

Wolf me down, and your journey towards the lamb side will be complete! 

Furthermore, I have since replicated my results with a lamb shoulder roast (forthcoming), so it wasn't just a fluke.  It's safe to say that Catherine now loves lamb, just like me and many of my fellow Vongsas.  Huzzah!  It's only fitting, now that she's a Vongsa too :)

Xan, Catherine, Ryan, Kris, Cammy: Apple-picking!

Folks, it's apple-picking season!

Last year, apple picking was a bust.  An early warm-spell/frost killed off all the apples in the midwest.  Instead, County Line orchard hung up miles of rain gutters and stocked them with pre-picked apples flown in from Washington.  They helpfully decided to inform us by advertising on their website not only that they were open for picking, but furthermore that it was in fact "raining apples."

Needless to say, we showed up at the orchard excited and left disappointed.

Despite their devious lies, we returned to the orchard last weekend, after verifying that it actually had apple-picking, of course.  

Gala, McIntosh, Jonathan, Golden Delicious, and Jonagold.  Here's the haul:

As you know, I like climbing trees.  It's kind of the main point of apple picking for me, actually.  But I haven't been able to find any orchards around Chicago with big trees.  All the places that offer apple picking were planted in the last 25 years and the trees just aren't that large.  I think it's actually becoming more usual to plant trees closer together and keep them smaller because it makes picking easier, but even the "old-style" trees they have just aren't big like the ones we grew up with in the DC area.  "Climbing" a tree at most consists of taking 1 to 3 steps up the tree.  What?  Moreover, they are mildly annoying steps, because small trees have lots of leafy shoots everywhere, because even the "interior" gets sunlight.  Nevertheless, I enjoy it because it is my natural habitat.  And I think the trees enjoy being inhabited by a native as well.

A farmer guy yelled at me for climbing a tree.  He said I would break the tree and then break myself.  It's not his fault; the tractor is his natural habitat, and he does not recognize his agile woodland kin.  I continued to climb trees away from the farmers, because it is socially optimal to break rules that are not designed for you, so long as you can avoid getting caught.

The farmer reminds me of a particular security guard at Pomona.  The golf cart was her natural habitat, and she had it out for the parkourists.  However, golf carts cannot do parkour, so she only ever caught up with us when we weren't doing parkour.  A catch-22, or perhaps a not-catch-4.  In exchange for her hypothetical lectures, let us say a prayer for our pathbound kin, it is not their fault.

Anyway, where was I?  Oh yes, pie!  We converted our bounty into an apple pie and applesauce:

8 apples each

The crust was really good, which was Catherine's doing.  She has made Kenji's recipe a few times now and is getting it down pretty well.

Recipes for crust and filling:
http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2011/07/easy-pie-dough-recipe.html
http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2011/10/perfect-apple-pie-recipe-double-crusted-thanksgiving-dessert.html 

Or for the science behind those recipes:
http://sweets.seriouseats.com/2011/07/the-food-lab-the-science-of-pie-how-to-make-pie-crust-easy-recipe.htmlhttp://sweets.seriouseats.com/2011/10/the-food-labs-apple-pie-part-2-how-to-make-perfect-apple-pie-filling.html

I know some of you like the vodka pie crust method.  That was also developed by Kenji (during his time at Cooks Illustrated).

If you are having problems with your apples turning too soft, this pie recipe with fix that.  Before filling the pie, you soak the apple slices in hot water for a few minutes.  This gives the pectin time to convert into a heat-stable form that won't break down at higher temperatures in the oven.

For the applesauce, I used this recipe:

http://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/applesauce/

I put in 2 cinnamon sticks instead of 1, because Catherine specifically likes cinnamon applesauce.  It was delicious, and so easy!  In fact it was so good that we just bought more apples at the grocery store and made another batch of applesauce.  I guess we did not pick enough!

Ryan, on the other hand, picked a lot of apples.  He walked away with a couple bags, and a pumpkin too!  Doesn't this baked apple look delicious?

Unfortunately that only gets rid of one apple...

And here is his pork tenderloin with cinnamon applesauce:

Apple sauce, that's more like it!

And here is our parallel dinner:

You might think that's a pork chop, given that it looks like one and is served with applesauce.  But actually it is lamb!  I do not regret this, although I do wish we had included peas, and put the applesauce in its own bowl.

Xan: Iceland and England (Part 3): Lammykins and puffins and whales, oh my!

Do you know Mark Bittman's minimalist steak recipe?  Salt pepper meat heat eat.

The Icelandic version actually has an extra step: Salt pepper meet meat heat eat.  It is a peculiar fact that in Iceland, I saw most of the animals roaming free before I saw them on my plate.  Lambs, whales, puffins, hot dogs...you name it. (Joking, Mr. Perkins!  Icelandic hot dogs are made from a mixture of beef, lamb, and pork. Dog is not on the menu...yet).


Lambs are cute...

They don't really belong in this post but look how fluffy they are!

Whales are majestic...

A minke whale, the most common sighting.

Puffins are a little of both...

Lots and lots of puffins.  Binoculars are a necessity here, sorry.

Zoomed way in, you can sort of tell it's a puffin.

Evidently whales and puffins are a bit more majestic than a dinky camera can capture.  You would think they were special, if you saw them with your own eyes.  So it's something to think about, whether you want to eat these special creatures.  Personally, I did think about it, and I'm fine with it.  But your mileage may vary, which is why I decided to be tasteful and not put my live animal pics right next to the corresponding food pics.  It was a strong aesthetic urge, so...you're welcome, Lin.

By the way, note that sustainability isn't really the issue here. The puffin and minke whale (pronunciation here) are not even close to being endangered.  There are literally millions of puffins in Iceland, and an estimated 100,000 minkes in the North Atlantic alone.  Of these 100,000, Iceland hunted about 60 last year...which if you ask me is a shockingly low number.  They actually have a quota of about 200 whales, but they did not hit it.  Apparently a whale can feed a lot of people.

Okay, let's meet the meat.  Now that I've eaten whale, let me tell you what I think.  I had a "whale burger," but it's really a whale steak in a bun, not ground whale chuck (or whatever the whale equivalent of shoulder meat is).

Sorry I don't have a picture of the inside; it is a red meat that looks a lot like beef.  And it tastes a lot like beef, too, but with a distinctive whaley flavor (gamey? funky? fishy, maybe? don't tell the marine biologists on me) which subtracted more than it added. It was really interesting, but probably the best reason not to eat whale is that it is a more expensive, less tasty version of beef.  At least that is my first impression, based on a single steak from some unspecified part of the giant animal.


The puffin, on the other hand, was excellent.  I'm not a food critic, and I just had a little bit, and it was marinated in something, so I really don't know if I can describe what puffin tastes like...but what I had was tasty.  Not particularly strongly flavored or anything, just...nice.

Marinated puffin with blueberries

So to see these animals off the plate, we caught a whale-watching boat out of Reykjavik.  It first took us past the puffin island pictured above, where thousands of puffins were nesting.  They didn't seem to mind our presence, and we were able to get pretty close.  Very cool!

Then it was out to sea, where we saw half a dozen minke whales, at least one of which is pictured above. (poor taste!  poor taste!)  For comparison, half a dozen is six more than we saw on our family vacation to New Zealand in 1998.  So, pretty successful by that metric at least.


Unfortunately, Catherine has another metric called an "internal thermometer."  It is basically all she really cares about, and it was more than a little cold and windy on the boat.  The sea was angry that day, my friends.  "I'm not going to make it," she said.  I thought we were sunk.  


But the crew saved the day with a supply of windbreaking red "overalls"...and I really do mean overalls.  Here's Catherine all decked out:

And here she has stolen my binoculars to look at puffins:

I call this one "Wall-E"

On Linden's suggestion, I combined this with an old picture of myself hiding from biting flies:

What's so funny, E-va?

Xan: Iceland and England (Part 2)

If I didn't say so already, Iceland was pretty awesome. Somehow no one in America knows this, although it's just a 5-hour flight from New York. But we here at Vongsafood, we know it, because somehow a majority of us have been to Iceland.  Let's face it, economic collapse is good for tourism, and Icelandair has great package deals if you'd like to stop by on your way to Europe.

I'll tell you about some of the more interesting sights we saw, but first we have to get there.  Our story begins as so many of our days began: with a long drive out of Reykjavik, broken up by both planned and unplanned stops.  You have to understand that in Iceland they drive on the right side of the road, except when they don't.  If, say, there is construction on the right side of the road, your tour van might find its way over to the left.  And then a steamroller might suddenly decide to reverse into you without looking.  Hypothetically speaking, this is something that could happen.

Here's what it might look like, if it did happen:

Artist's rendition of a hypothetical Icelandic steamroller, thoughtfully entitled, "Before and After"

This piece is entitled, "Van with Crumple Zone Leaks Radiator Fluids"

And then you would probably have to wait, like, a couple hours for another van to come pick you up.  Or something like that.

If this happened an hour into your first tour on your first day in Iceland, you would probably be like, "Jam Doughnut, I really wish that guy had looked over his shoulder!  You gotta be careful with those things!"  Well, if wishes were horses...

Wait!  Horses!  Icelandic horses!

There are friendly horses everywhere in Iceland, and they are always happy to come over and say hello to stranded travelers.  They like to be hand-fed the exact same grass they are already eating, and also they will let you pet their soft noses.

They did bring the flies, but Catherine improvised a fly mask. 

Apparently these horses were brought over from Mongolia long ago -- as you can see they are short and stocky -- and the population has remained unadulterated since then.  Iceland has strict rules about importing horses, and even an Icelandic horse is not allowed back in once it leaves.

What could be better than a few friendly horses to kill an hour?  More horses! All of a sudden, a hundred horses came stampeding down the road, kicking up dust and shaking the ground beneath our feet in a serious way.

They were being herded by a sheepdog and a handful of riders on horseback.

So, yeah, that was pretty cool.

Speaking of livestock, Iceland also has a lot of sheep.  It probably isn't much of an exaggeration to say there are sheep within sight of the road most of the time.  And at this time of year, many of them are cute fluffy lammykins.

A black sheep!

If you have to be a sheep, Iceland is a great place to be.  They roam free all year until the fall, at which time they are rounded up and sorted back to their owners.  As a result, Icelandic lamb has a reputation as the ultimate freerange lamb.

Lamb shanks!

I was very excited to try the lamb boat (Pinnabatur) from Hlolla Batar, and it did not disappoint:

Note the fried onions!

Look how much lamb there is!

As a matter of fact I went back a second time.  It was right in the city center.


I also bought some lamb at the grocery store.  Most of the lamb was marinated in some sort of orange mixture, so I figured I should try that.  Bounty from the Bonus supermarket:

These fried dried onions are delicious and ubiquitous in Iceland. Needless to say, I smuggled a few bags home.

Gratuitous fried onions!

The ingredients were in Icelandic, but paprika accounts for the color.  In any case, we enjoyed it!  But I don't know how much of that was the lamb versus the marinade.  Maybe someone else can tell the quality of the lamb under all these spices; I myself do not claim such a discerning palate.  I just like lamb, okay?  I care a lot more about the simple fact that lamb was so abundant than the supposed quality difference.  In fact, there was more lamb at the airport than at my home grocery store.  For real!  Even though that makes no sense!

Am I missing something?  Seriously, why would you buy meat at an airport?

Xan: Lahmacun!

I made these "lahmacun" from Best Recipes in the World.  Thank you Mark Bittman, they were good!

Lahmacun=turkish meat pizzas.  I am just going to go ahead and assume that lahmacun refers to all the ground lahm, as lamb is called in whatever language it is they speak in Turkey.

I'm being facetious of course, pretending not to know the official language of Turkey.  Some languages don't sound anything like the country they're spoken in, but this one has a pretty obvious connection.  In Turkey they speak  gobbledegook.  Gobble gobble.  Gobble gobble gobble.  Other than a few isolated words like lahm, that's pretty much all they say.  Structurally it's a lot like Norse code.  For example, "Gobblegobblegobble.  Gobble, gobble, gobble.  Gobblegobblegobble!!!" means "Help I'm being eaten!"

Anyway, gobbledegook is inefficient but delicious. Just like these meat pizzas.  I can't actually remember what was in them, other than lahm and acun, oh and I put an egg on one because why not:

Gobbled it down.

Xan and Catherine: Please join us in not celebrating Valentine's Day

I have been busy.  So some of this food was made a bit late for Valentine's Day, and all of it is late to the blog.  But better ever than never.

First of all, I am blessed to live in a household where valentine's day is not a real holiday.  That said, we did accidentally appear to celebrate it over the course of several weeks.

It started with a...what to call this? Let's go with Orange Upside-Down Brownie:

So we found a heart-shaped silicon mold in the dollar section of Target.  It doesn't matter that it's heart-shaped, what matters is it was in the dollar aisle.  And this brownie was just to test our new pan out. Okay?

Catherine also managed to buy an entire crate of probably the sourest clementines I have ever tasted.  In an attempt to fix this, I decided to caramelize a couple of them them (i.e. slice them up and cook in sugar water).  Then I put them in the pan with some of the liquid and poured the brownie batter over them.  Problem solved?  Honestly, no.  The clementines were somehow still sour, and in any case we still had a mostly full crate of sour clementines.  But it was an interesting experiment.

For those who would doubt my conviction, let it be noted that if I celebrated valentine's day, I would have made this cheesecake, not a brownie.  As it is, I refuse to grant cheese amnesty for such a lame holiday.  Incidentally, at the link you can find the recipe for caramelizing your own oranges if you're interested.

Okay, moving right along.  I think the following may be the meal that we just so happened to eat on the 14th, which is a regular day in February.  That does not make it "celebrating" Valentine's Day, but it coincidentally happened to be a good meal so I am sharing it here because that's what we do on Vongsafood.  First, these potatoes deserve their own closeup:

You say potato, I say patata: Behold Patatas Bravas from Serious Eats

I'm pretty sure they were cooked in enough oil to qualify as deep-fried.  Therefore they were crispy and delicious, especially after being coated with salt, pepper, and smoked paprika of greatest awesomeness.  Can't really go wrong here, right?  Unless of course you don't like potatoes.  (Actually, most people don't like potatoes, if you believe Tammy. Indeed, Tammy apparently believes so few people like potatoes that she will actually be shocked if she ever discovers you like potatoes.  I DIDN'T KNOW YOU LIKE POTATOES!!!!!!!! she will cry, mouth agape.  Therefore guard your secret closely; as you may know from one of those unfortunate incidents with childhood pets, small creatures can only handle so much shock).  By the way, regarding the aioli you see on the potatoes: more trouble than it's worth, I think, but it certainly was interesting.

NEXT UP: Lamb shoulder chops? This has probably been my most amazing ingredient discovery in the last couple months.  Watch closely:

Yes, for just a few bucks you too can obtain this steak of lamby awesomeness.  Wait, what's this I just pulled off?  Is that...?

OMG DOESN'T THAT BELONG ON A RACK OF LAMB?!?!? 

Yes, my friends, yes it does. Well, technically no, but as far as I can tell, the difference is mainly a question of how much work you have to do to get at the meat.  Here's the lowdown: Numbering the lamb's ribs 1-12, with 1 being at the front (shoulder) end, it appears that the "rack of lamb" specifically refers to ribs 6-12 (and sometimes 5).  The lamb shoulder chops then presumably contain ribs 1-5 (there may also be lamb shoulder chops that don't have a rib component...I haven't found one yet though).  I'm pretty happy with 1-5 so far; the shoulder meat is more flavorful while slightly less tender, though by far the biggest question is just whether you're willing to do more work to extract the meat from the surrounding fat and bones that are always found in shoulder cuts.  For those of us with sharp teeth and knife skills, it's not a huge deal...and it's not like you should be rushing through a lamb dinner anyway.

If that's not your cup of tea, you can always get yourself some regular lamb chops from either the loin or rib sections.  Personally though, I'm happy with these cheaper and more delicious shoulder chops. I know this might not be a big deal to those of you who have moved to England and all, but lamb is sorta expensive here in the states :(


OK, fastforward to just this past week.  These things appeared on our countertop:

This is the moment in the plot where an improbably chain of events leads to an unfortunate misunderstanding. IT'S NOT WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE!  Should I bother explaining how these icing-coated-heart-shaped-poundcake-topped cupcakes found their way into our heart pan from Target?  Should I tell you it has something to do with Catherine's friend Sneha the Indian boxing swing dancing computer scientist museum volunteer first year grad student runner?  It would sound like a fiction.  If I were to claim the existence of any such person -- and I am not -- you would scarcely believe me.  More likely I am a liar.  I will settle for the outside chance that maybe, just maybe, you will at least believe these cupcakes weren't my idea.


Actually, I've been joking Mr. Perkins.  Pardon me, it's my strange, academic sense of humor. In truth, this year I did celebrate Valentines Day: I got Catherine some flours!  Specifically, bread, wheat, and best of all, all-purpose unbleached.  Best Valentine's Day Ever.