Green Girl Gardener

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I know some people are cynical about Valentine’s Day, we’ve all heard someone say ‘every day should be Valentine’s Day’, but let’s face it, that’s just not feasible is it? Life gets in the way, and that’s perfectly normal. Others say it’s a made up day for commercial gain, well, you know what, Winnie the Pooh Day’s made up too and I’m not going to stop celebrating that either! What’s wrong with taking the time and putting the effort in to celebrate your love on one day a year?

This time last year we celebrated the day with a meal at one of our favourite restaurants, Los Banditos.

As you can probably tell from the name, this is a Mexican restaurant and the food is always top notch! I nearly always have chicken fajitas. The eagle-eyed amongst you might notice that on my skillet is steak. I remember now that the staff were run off their feet and also dealing with one very large and very demanding table (for demanding read rude) and I felt awful telling them they’d brought me steak instead of chicken, but they swapped it quickly and all was well.

As an aside, I can’t believe how much my hair’s grown in a year! I’ll have to put that jumper on to check, but I reckon it’s down to the middle of the next white diamonds now.

Anyway, I digress. This year’s been a bit different. Obviously we couldn’t eat out and hubby is now at work, and I met my sister-in-law for a walk early doors, but in between times we have celebrated in our own unique way.

First I made us an afternoon tea. Ok, so maybe it’s a bit more relaxing if you don’t have to make the afternoon tea yourself, but the benefit of making it yourself is that you get to choose exactly what’s on it!

Our heart-shaped sandwiches were filled with tuna mayonnaise and sweetcorn, cheese and pickle and cheese and red onion mayo (hubby is still being pescatarian so no meat today).

We also had olives and crisps (Walker’s Sensations Thai Sweet Chilli – the king of sharing crisps!) which you wouldn’t normally get with an afternoon tea.

I didn’t take an individual photo of the scones, but they were yummy. It’s such a shame that for something so delicious, they get overshadowed by controversy! First of all, no one seems to be able to work out how to pronounce them! Is it scone as in gone or scone as in flown? It’s perfectly simple as far as I’m concerned – it has a magic ‘e’ on the end, therefore my scone is flown! But then that theory doesn’t work for gone. No wonder people get confused by the English language! Then we have the cream or jam first debate. Are we supposed to go the Devon way of cream first and jam on top, or do we follow Cornish traditions and slather on the jam first with a dollop of cream on top? I go with Devon. Surely the cream is a substitute for butter, and when would you ever put butter on top of your jam? Also, if you have decent clotted cream, then it will be significantly more dense than your jam, meaning it’s much easier to spread jam on the cream than vice versa. Maybe it depends whether you think of your scone as a savoury treat that happens to have a sweet topping, or as a dessert. I think of a scone as essentially a savoury snack, hence my feeling that the cream is a butter substitute, but if you think of it as a dessert, then I guess the cream would go second in the same way that you would put cream on the top of an apple pie, not the other way round. I don’t think there will ever be a definitive answer on this, but I am perfectly prepared to do extensive personal research in search of the solution!

I may be shot down for saying this, but I always feel that an afternoon tea is too heavily weighted towards the sweet with insufficient sandwiches so I redressed the balance. We had one main cake which was my banana bread which is the easiest thing in the world to make, and I do so most times that we have over ripe bananas to use up, and I made some dark chocolate dipped strawberries to go on the side.

Yum, yum and some more yum!!

After we’d devoured our afternoon tea, we laid out all my craft supplies on the table. Hubby is back at work at the hospital and even though he’s not working on the Covid wards, he’s obviously still at higher risk of coming into contact with the virus so he’s doing his best not to go in shops so he doesn’t inadvertently pass it on, so we decided to make our Valentines cards this year.

Here’s his card to me.

Quite minimalist and tasteful I think …. until you look inside!

Still, he’s thinking outside of the box by decorating the inside of it. He was laughing to himself as he was gluing away and said at one point, ‘you’ll just have to tell people V made it!’ V is my five year old niece. This might be feasible if she didn’t live over a hundred miles away (and she also probably wouldn’t have made me married to a one armed, naked husband). However, I love it and we had lots of fun together making the cards.

Mine to him is a bit more cohesive, shall we say!

It doesn’t have buttons and a ladybird inside though!

I hope everyone who wants to is managing to celebrate this day of love in the best ways, despite not being able to do the usual kind of things. I’ve probably enjoyed this Valentine’s Day more than any other I’ve ever had.

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