"Well, don't look at me like I'm frickin' Frankenstein! Come here and give your boyfriend a hug."

I don't think there's a better way to open the doors to Valentine's Day than that! (I did give him the hug.) Since my boyfriend was working all day and we're trying to save money anyhow, we just decided to have a low-key V-Day by making dinner and dessert together and then catching a movie.

 

Unfortunately,  because we had dinner so late the only pictures I could take were once again in the World's Shadowiest, Artificialiest Lighting, so it's not too pretty. I'll just call your attention to the ridiculous champagne flute (filled with raspberry Schweppes, seriously), and the fact that I literally cooked fillet mignon and made a pan sauce in a dorm basement. For a bargain, I promise you! It was delicious.

 

Good times were had by all. Yes, we are both of that sappy breed that dresses for holidays. We were both wearing red and white. Sure V-Day is a commercialized holiday, but tell me one other day of the year where it's socially acceptable to give your friends construction-paper-and-doily hearts with lame love puns on them and I will stop loving V-Day forever. Until then I will greatly enjoy the lameness and post-holiday cheap chocolate.

Returning to the subject of dinner, though, here is dessert! It took us a while to decide what we wanted in the beginning, but we-- or rather, he-- settled on "something red", because we knew we were probably just going to be eating cheap chocolate out of hand for the next week anyway (see above).

What you see above is the red "something"-- a blueberry-raspberry tart. Tarts are on my very short list of things that I'll actually bake, along with biscotti. This one was just a (premade) pie crust topped with a mixture of all the berries, some lemon juice, brown sugar, and a little flour and butter. Fold up the edges of the crust and put it in the oven as you begin to eat dinner, and once you're finished (in 20-30 minutes)-- there you go, pie without a pie pan or second crust to get in the way of all the berry goodness!

For the movie, we saw The Wolfman. The previews for it looked good, and by "good" I mean it looked like your generic period piece suspenseful monster movie. It turned out not to be like that at all; there was no suspense, just a lot of gore, the first half of the movie made absolutely no sense in light of the second half, and the titular "wolfman" looked like an orangutan. On both ends of his transformation. I'm not sorry that I saw it, but even as a huge fan of bad horror movies I really wouldn't recommend it.