With All My Lemon Tart Heart

(For the record, I did not forget it was Valentine's Day, at least not in real life. I did, however, forget that my blog readers might be expecting a Valentine's Day-themed blog. So I now provide one.)

Tiffany and I don't really do Valentine's Day. Actually, now that I type that out, it isn't quite true. We used to do Valentine's Day a lot more than we do it now. The problem is, it comes just over a week after the anniversary of our first date, and, consequently, can get de-prioritized under the who-needs-two-fancy-occasions-so-close-together rationale.

But back to hearts. In the story of how Tiffany and I got together, she will always get credit for making sure we got together. But I get credit for the first official date: salsa dancing at the Brooklyn museum. That was tough to top, but just over a week later, for our first Valentine's Day, Tiffany topped it by precisely 85 stories when she took me to the 86th floor observatory of the Empire State Building and kissed me way up there in the sky.

For our second Valentine's Day, when I was still living in New York and Tiffany was still living in Boston, I took the $10 Chinatown-to-Chinatown bus to surprise her. It was a Tuesday night, and I had a class the next morning. I was feeling very romantic. I was also feeling ill. I had a terrible cold, and my plan backfired. I told Tiffany I had ordered her a heart-shaped icecream cake and that she had to pick it up at the ice cream shop down the street at 9 p.m. Well, of course, I was at the ice cream shop, but Tiffany forgot to pick up her cake, so I had to call her:

"Did you get your cake yet!?" I asked.

"Oh! I forgot. I was just sitting down to eat my popcorn for dinner," she said. (Before Tiffany and I moved in together, she used to eat snacks like popcorn for dinner. I get credit for teaching her popcorn is not a meal.)

"Well, why don't you go get it?!" I pressed.

Pause.

"Are you my cake?"

"Yes, I am, please hurry up, I'm freezing and I feel like sh*t," I said.

Anyway, this year for Valentine's, Tiffany and I are having dinner at home. I wanted to make a lemon tart as a special dessert, but I thought it would be too ambitious for a Monday night. We made it together last night after she got back from class. Or we tried to.

"Tart fail!" I screamed, when I opened the oven to check on it after its allotted baking time had passed. ( "___ fail" is a phrase I picked up from our good friend Gladys who had a "Veil Fail!" on her wedding day when she couldn't lift her veil from her face.)

Part of my tart shell pastry had fallen down in the oven and all the lemon filling had spilled into the pan. Even though Tiffany scooped it back up and re-built the pastry breach, it was pretty ugly. It did taste delicious though, which, in our kitchen, is all that really counts. Tonight, leftover ugly-lemon tart with the strawberries I forgot to serve in my panic last night. They're red, after all, and kind of heart-shaped.

We're only three stories up here in our little apartment, but the view's just fine when Tiffany walks through the door. Which she should any minute. Gotta go.

Happy Valentine's Day.