Whatever. I don’t care that Valentine’s Day is an invented holiday for Hallmark. Blah blah blah.

I totally think Valentine’s Day is great.  What’s wrong with an excuse to have a nice evening with someone?  I don’t even buy Hallmark cards.  And even if I did, I probably wouldn’t lose sleep over it.  Not that there’s anything wrong with feeling morally flummoxed about the whole thing.  Good for you.

For our first Valentine’s Day Marcus and I made potato gnocchi.  Notice, I used the verb “made”, not “buy”.  This was a labor of love.  I’m talking boiled potatoes, pureed in a food processor, kneaded with flour, rolled out into long cylinders and then cut individually.  Maybe more labor intensive than necessary.  Sometimes store bought is just more worth it.  We also made a tomato sauce that came highly recommended from Marcella Hazan’s dearly loved “The Essentials of Italian Cooking”.

But really Valentine’s Day is about the dessert.  We had port poached pears (ooohhh alliteration!) with lavender honey ice cream and oreo cream cheese ice cream.  Poaching sounds so fancy but it’s almost embarrassingly easy–you just let it simmer.  And the color is so gorgeous.  Everything should be poached in wine!  Cereal. Eggs. Shoes. Pajamas. Hair.

Ingredients:

4 Bosc Pears

1 cup Port

3/4 cup sugar

2 strips of orange peel

2 strips of lemon peel

1 cinnamon stick

2 cups of water

ice cream for serving

1. in a medium pot combine the port, water, zest, cinnamon and sugar and cook at medium heat for about 10 minutes

2. in the meantime, trim 1/4 of an inch from the bottom of the pears and peel them

3. add the pears to the pot and bring the whole thing to a boil

4. lower heat to simmer and leave for 1 hour, stirring occasionally to make sure that all gets cooked through