We stayed home and had a nice relaxing day. Well, it was fairly relaxing for me, as I stayed in the kitchen cooking most of the day. Mr. A spent several hours replacing a bypass hose on my 13 year old vehicle.

One of the recipes I made today is one I came up with years ago, but never got around to making it. Now that I’ve finally made it, turns out I was right! It is delicious! If you love potato soup, you will love this version. The soup basically tastes like potato soup, with coloring from the beets. If you are a beet hater, you can just pick out the hearts.

Valentine’s Day Hearts Potato Soup

2 1/2 cups chicken stock
1/2 cup diced onion
1/2 cup diced celery
2 Tablespoon butter
4 medium potatoes
2 small beets
1/4 cup cream
salt to taste

Slice the beets into 1/4 inch thick slices, put in a small pan, cover with water and simmer until tender.

While the beets are cooking, melt the butter in a pan and add the onions and celery. Saute until the celery is bright green and the onions are turning translucent.

Peel the potatoes and dice 3 of them. Quarter the fourth potato.

Add the stock (or water) to the celery and onions, and add in the potatoes. Cook until the quartered potato is fork tender.

Check the beets periodically, when they are fork tender, remove them from the water. Keep the bright colored water for later. After a few minutes the beets will be cool enough to work with. Use a knife or box cutter to cut the beets into heart shapes. They don’t have to be perfect and you can cut larger, or smaller, or tiny hearts.

Remove the quarter potato, mash and add back into the soup (it has a nice thickening effect).

Add some cream until the soup looks nice and creamy. Now add in the heart-shaped beets. The beets will color the soup. You can also add in a few tablespoons of the brightly colored water if you want it to look pinker or redder. As you can see in the picture below, the soup looks creamy, and I’ve added in some beets which are starting to color the soup. But I wanted more than light pink swirls, so poured in a few tablespoons of the water leftover from boiling the beets.

We’re having a very nice dinner with a nice New York Strip steak that was on sale for $3.87/#. Asparagus was $0.97/#. We’ll grill both of those. We’ll have the pink potato soup on the side, with sauteed mushrooms. For dessert, I made chocolate sorbet and a heart shaped upside-down cheesecake, which I am not sure if it will turn out since I thought I had sour cream on hand, but turns out the containers had other items in them. Well, that’s what happens when you recycle.

I made the chocolate sorbet mix last night, and got my Donvier ice cream maker insert in the freezer. The cheesecake was made in a heart-shaped baking tin, and I’ve also made tiny truffles to decorate the cheesecake, as well as cranberry sauce for decoration. Improvise, improvise! I wanted raspberry or strawberry sauce, but we had cranberries in the freezer so I used them. I put about 20 cranberries in a small pan with water to cover, boiled about 10 minutes. Added some honey and then hit them with the stick blender. Added a bit more honey to sweeten the sauce a bit and that was that. The truffles were so simple.

I used this Dark Chocolate Truffles recipe here, which was amazingly simple. Basically you use equal parts dark chocolate and cream. I had a part of a Lindt Excellence 70% Cocoa Intense Dark candy bar that had been sitting in the fridge for several weeks, and 5 Dove Dark Chocolate pieces of candy. Between the two I had 2.8 ounces of dark chocolate, so then I measured out 2.8 ounces of cream. Heat the cream until it boils and pour over the broken up pieces of chocolate. Let sit one minute and stir. Refrigerate and make into balls. Simple! I’m going to use the truffles to decorate the cheesecake.

Some of the truffles were dipped in cocoa, some were dipped in white sugar and pink sugar, and some were dipped in crumbled chocolate sandwich cookies.

And here’s the Valentine’s Day upside-down cheesecake.

Okay a little bit more tweaking, using some beets as decoration. I’ll let you know how it tastes sans beets. 🙂

I hope you had a lovely Valentine’s Day.

Yours Truly,