#Valentine's Day

Yesterday was Valentine’s Day. We don’t go out for supper anymore on Valentine’s Day, for various reasons. It is such a hassle to get reservations and parking is usually a pain in the butt. Restaurants jack up their prices and they are packed to capacity. It's never a relaxed affair.

So, like every year, we stayed home and had our traditional Valentine’s dinner. Traditional for us. My wife made a duck. With the duck we ate white cabbage and boiled potatoes. And, of course, a bottle of wine. My own homemade wine. This year we drank Australian Cabernet Shiraz.

Our duck dinner was much cheaper and better than we could have had in any fancy restaurant. A duck takes nearly three hours in the oven for it to be done correctly. A duck is fat and all the fat needs to be broiled out of the skin. We never ate duck anywhere that was done right. Either the meat was tough or it had a thick fatty skin. Besides, you get only small strips of meat and you pay a small fortune for a duck dinner. The other problem is that duck is only on the menu in expensive restaurants.

Usually, we have Savoy cabbage, but we couldn’t find it in the stores we normally shop, except Safeway carried it. However, when we saw the price my wife and I said, “Forget it. We’re not going to pay $3.00 a pound.” Cabbage by nature is heavy. We probably would have paid ten bucks for a head, so we bought white cabbage instead for 77 cents a pound. We love white cabbage, anyway. Even cabbage needs to be done the correct way, and, as with duck, not every restaurant serves cabbage. I’m not talking about coleslaw here; I’m talking about steamed or boiled cabbage.

Well, our Valentine’s dinner was delicious, a culinary feast, if I may say so. 

Since I write a poem for my wife for every holiday, I wrote her one again for Valentine’s Day. That’s also tradition for me. I don’t publish the poems I write for her, because they belong to her and are not mine to publish. They are her private property.

Here is a poem I wrote that didn’t make the cut to be included in her collection:

A Valentine’s Poem

By Herbert Grosshans

If I were a monkey wild and free

Living in the jungle in a tree

Would I buy flowers for the love of my life?

Would I give roses to my monkey wife?

Would we go out for a Banana feast?

Would it matter that I’m a beast?

Perhaps these questions may sound silly

But I’m not asking them just willy-nilly

This morning when I got out of bed

From lack of sleep my eyes still red

And in the mirror I saw my reflection

It caused in me a strange reaction

The face of a gorilla looked back at me

I hadn’t shaved for a few days, you see

I feared I may have changed into an ape

With my beady little eyes and my mouth agape

But then I saw you, my dear Sweetheart

And what I saw gave me quite a start

Your lips were formed into a big pout

It almost looked like you had a snout

It seems we are a perfect pair

So we’re monkeys, I don’t care

I’m hanging upside down from a vine

And wonder:

Will you be my Valentine?

Who says I'm not a romantic?

Hope your Valentine's Dinner was as good as ours.

A belated Happy Valentine's Day