Fairly Symmetrical

This year was an interesting Valentine's Day. Jen and I very rarely do anything super special (last year was an exception)--it's right in the middle of her semester, and I'm not all that romantic at my best. :-P

This year I was planning to make our "special dinner" staple (Salmon in Puff Pasty with dill cream sauce, and asparagus with lemon-butter sauce). Unfortunately we didn't have any puff pastry, so I stopped on the way home to buy some and accidentally picked up puff pastry shells instead. Which would be great for making little fruit tarts, but aren't really useful for packing salmon into. :( So I fell back on the phyllo dough we still had. Which was old, and dry, and cracking all over the place, which made it kind of difficult to wrap around the salmon and rice. A little creative brushwork with the egg-and-water "glue" helped quite a bit, fortunately, and it turned out all right.

Then, of course, the raspberry creme brulee took longer than expected to cook (probably my fault--I put cold water in the pan instead of starting with boiling, so it probably took forever to get up to heat), so by the time it was done cooling Jen and I had fallen asleep. So I broiled the sugar on top, wrapped them up, and popped them in the fridge for another day. Hopefully they turned out good. :-P I don't know what it was, today was just not a good cooking day for me. In retrospect I should have made the brulee on Monday.

All in all it ended up being a good Valentine's Day. Jen gave me some very nice gifts, and I officially signed up to play in an adult ice hockey league; the new player evaluation skate is next Tuesday, and the draft is the Thursday after that, so we'll see what happens. :)