Valentines for Four

First we made a dinner date with our friends Max & Sophia, and then we realized it was Valentine's Day... Oh well! Sophia and I decided we weren't gonna let a little holiday like Valentine's Day get in the way of our friendly time! We'd just celebrate friendly love and boyfriend love! But, naturally enough, we stuck with the theme, because themes are fun.

Here's the table all set and ready to eat. Of course there were little old-fashioned heart place cards for everyone.

Sophia and Max were in charge of salad - and they made a delicious and gigantic salad with roasted beets and blood oranges and fennel. Isn't it just lovely? The blood oranges were extra super yummy too....

For our main entree, I made a big batch of stuffed shells... which are all hidden under the tomato sauce on top. The stuffing was a combo of tofu ricotta, sauteed spinach, caramelized onions, and cooked up mushrooms. Very yumsy-yums. I used to always put Isa's Pine Nut Cream (from Veganomicon) on my stuffed shells, lasagnas, etc - until my unfortunate pine nut incident. So this time, I followed the recipe for Pine Nut Cream, but used cashews instead. Guess what? It's totally magical and delicious! Hoorah! All in all, these stuffed shells were a total hit and there was not even one left over by the end of dinner. :) Plus, I got to use my heart-shaped dish, which is always fun.

We both contributed something for dessert, because we love dessert, and because we love making dessert, and because it was Valentines Day - which means you must have sweeties on the menu. I made mini cherry pies using cherries I had pitted and frozen way back in the middle of last summer. Smart thinking, former self! Sophia made some crazy delicious almond ice cream, complete with toasted almond slivers in it. SO GOOD. Sophia is a vegan ice cream master mind.

Of course, we are both sneaky, so without any discussion, we BOTH decided to make surprise chocolate truffles. Ha! Good plan! You can never have too many chocolate truffles. I made the nut butter truffles from Bryanna Clark Grogan's excellent blog - using tahini and amaretto. Sophia made Chocolate Raspberry truffles. Mine were a lot more firm than hers, and obviously the flavors were quite different - so luckily this gave everyone good reason to sample them all!

It was really fun sharing our Valentines Day together with Sophia and Max! :)