What was your special V-Day treat?

'Special' days often seem to revolve around food - often, it's not so much 'did you have a nice day', but rather 'what did you eat (or drink) that made it a nice day'. Nothing wrong with this in my opinion; the consumption of food and drink can be tremendously sensual experiences and provide sensory memories that are very evocative of important and enjoyable moments in our lives - and what better day to highlight this than Cupid's own holiday? It's certainly as good a time as any for sparkling rose wine, luscious chocolates, long lingering brunches and aphrodiasic-laced dining.

Seems as if every restaurant in Glasgow seemed to be on this bandwagon with their special menus for lovers over the weekend - multiple courses for inflated prices says the cynic in me - but a lot of people enjoy this no-fuss, save your energy for other things approach to a romantic dinner out so these restaurants must be doing something right. Of course, for some, the important part of the night might not be the dinner but rather a show, a night of dancing, a film or etc.(!) and dinner is just something that you do when you are out for the evening. I struggle to frame the world in this fashion but I realise that this is just my perspective!.

For our part, we had our Valentine's dinner in. I always agree to cook our Valentine's dinner if we can agree something fairly simple that still seems a bit special - and the beautiful flowers I received for my V-Day surprise made me not mind cooking in the slightest. Yesterday's dinner was a lovely beef stew that spent the day in the slow cooker - such an easy recipe: brown beef (1 kilo), throw in chunks of carrots (around 6 medium), chunks of potatoes (around 6 large potatoes) and thinly sliced onions (1 large onion), add several tablespoons of chopped fresh rosemary (around 3 - less if you are not so keen on rosemary as we are) and a liquid brew comprised of ketchup (1/2 cup), boiling water (1/2 cup), red wine vinegar (1/4 cup - I acutally used closer to 1/2 a cup as Ilke the tanginess) and soy sauce (about 3 tablesspoons - could also be replaced with worcestershire sauce for those who can) and seasoned with salt and pepper. Sounds odd maybe but it's delicious - the resulting gracy is rich and tangy without any significant tomato overtones. I also threw in about a 1/3 of a bottle of red wine that was left from the previous evening and thickened everything at the end with a cornflour slurry (being gluten challenged) after about 5 hours on high in the slow cooker. Thickening could easily be have been done by dusting the beef with flour prior to browning the chunks as well. No fuss, little muss - and leftovers for at least one more day. Plus I had a happy hubby who got to dip bread into rich, tasty, beefy gravy at the end of the meal which won me the biggest kudos of the day!

Hope your V-day was as nice as ours...If you had something special, please tell us about it the comments - we'd love to hear about it.