it was a fine china kind of day

Valentine's Day is a good reason (or excuse) to bake and decorate some pretty sugar cookies. Hearts, tulips and butterflies. The tulips must be red. My parents and grandparents always had red tulips in their gardens and yards, the kind with the yellow inner basins and black stamens. Of course now I believe that a tulip garden is incomplete without those specific red ones. Wish I knew the variety name. (If you think you know what tulip variety I'm referring to, would you be a dear & leave a comment saying so?) I'd love to plant some. Anyway, I baked and decorated some sugar cookies.

But grandma always said "the way to a man's heart is through his stomach".

Since My Darling Husband is a Meat Consumer of the First Order, I reused the small heart cookie cutter on the sausage. Heart pancakes and heart sausages baked with love for breakfast. The first use of our wedding china. My advice on the matter of love through body parts is thus--if you really truly want to reach his heart through his stomach, have breakfast ready prior to noon.

Then dinner at a historic hotel-turned apartment building/event space in This Small Town. A local school held the dinner as a fundraiser. We were impressed with how beautiful the evening was. The room's striking architectural features were highlighted by the school's frugal decorating: delicate pink balloons, red jelly beans in a glass hurricane to anchor a candle, vases of single red roses. The light dancing off the crystal was so pretty. All the servers, cooks and hosts were from the school: high school students, parents and staff. A couple of school personnel volunteered as entertainers by serenading with piano tunes all the evening long. Lovely.