Our Valentine's Tradition

We have a Valentine's Day tradition that we have kept up for three years now (go us!). It came about because we really wanted to make Alice Springs chicken, which is basically chicken smothered in cheese, honey mustard, and bacon, but we were in college and didn't want to spend a lot of money on one meal. We decided to save the recipe for Valentine's day and not worry about how expensive it would be, because it would be cheaper than any other restaurant we might have gone to that night. Since then it has been our tradition to replicate a restaurant meal at home. 

This year we went the Olive Garden route. It may just be soup and salad, but it was delicious. We did have plans to make the bread sticks but we didn't account for the fact that the dough has to rise for 45 minutes and we'd have to roll it out, cut it and blah, blah, it was just too much work. Together we made Zuppa Toscana soup and a simple romaine salad complete with Olive Garden Italian dressing, thank you Walmart. 

After dinner we raced to the theater to catch an early showing of the Lego movie, which is by the way, pretty weird but hilarious and worth seeing. Plus it's only an hour and a half, which I love. That's how long I wish all movies were!

After the movie we made a "fancy" dessert at home: the pizookie! My sister Ami introduced me to these just a week ago so I passed the favor along to Jared. Technically a pizookie is a giant, round cookie topped with ice cream and shared by all, but we don't have a pie pan so our cookie is a rectangle and my ice cream is tucked into the corner. Still delicious.

And of course, here are my flowers! I picked them out earlier in the week and Jared "surprised" me with them. Thanks love!