Valentine's Day Dinner at Home

I don't know about you but we like to do something special for Valentine's Day.  We have always exchanged cards but we don't always exchange gifts. Sometimes we agree to just have a nice meal out or save the money for an upcoming vacation.  Several weeks ago I thought about making a gourmet meal at home with heart-shaped everything but as the Day neared I decided I didn't want to spend hours in the kitchen.  I've been seeing some good recipes come across Facebook lately and since it's been a cold, snowy winter the idea of hot soup on a Friday night, by candlelight, in the living room, watching the Olympics....sounded pretty good to me.  And because I couldn't decide on which recipe we'd like better I decided to try two new soups.  Both have similar ingredients to it'd be just as easy to hover over two pots on the stove as it would be for just one, AND in the end I'd have two meals to save for later in the freezer.  Score me! (for planning ahead).

This photo is the Pasta Bean Soup.  It's broth, tomatoes, cannellini beans, spinach, shell pasta, herbs and I added homemade Italian meatballs.  I always make my own meatballs.  It's very easy and takes less than 30 minutes to bake them in the oven so there's no mess.  Anyway, this was more of a brothy soup and while I really liked it I think the next time I'dd add a second can of beans as the recipe called to mash most of the beans so the ones left disappearred.  I would also add smaller pasta and less of it.  It's definitely a keeper though!

The soup below is Tortellini Soup.  This is the one I've seen all over Pinterest and FB lately.  A couple of my friends have tried it too.  This soup was delicious!!

Like the Pasta Bean it also starts with broth, tomatoes, spinach and herbs but you add cheese tortellini (or whatever kind you want to) and a block of cream cheese.  Now I could not bring myself to add the entire 8 oz of cream cheese.  I tasted the broth after it simmered for a while and I just didn't feel the soup needed all that fat.  I only used 4 oz and it turned out fine and had less fat. At first I only added half of a big package of fresh tortellini but as the day went on I decided to add the entire package. This made for less broth but it was very good.  This soup had a much different taste than the other soup even though the ingredients were similar.  After sampling all day I couldn't very well eat two bowls of soup for dinner so I chose to eat the Tortellini Soup for my meal and fished out some meatballs from the other one to add to my bowl.  Very good idea!   We had our soup with some crusty bread and olive oil and a little shaved parm on top. 

 It's just not possible to have a special dinner at our house without dessert.  I have a horrible sweet tooth!  I decided to go light and easy this year.  These parfaits were so yummy!  I used fresh berries, torn up angel food cake, lite cool whip and heated some raspberry jam to thin and use as a sauce between the layers.  Then I had some leftover melting chocolate from Christmas so made heart shapes on wax paper and used the hearts as a garnish (see below).  The parfaits were Robbie's favorite.

I mentioned above that we usually only exchange cards for V-Day but this year Bob surprised me with some new jewelry.  I got new marcasite earrings which are fancy, dangly and very pretty.  I hadn't taken a photo of them at the time I completed this post but I'll get one up here this week.  Bob's such a sweetie!