It was nice to have Valentine's day fall on a Saturday this year, so we can really relax and enjoy it. Laura picked up a new game for us, Lost Cities, by Reiner Knizia. It's a really neat two-person card game where you explore different regions of the world using numbered cards to denote your progress, a constant battle of luck versus strategy, and a great addition to our growing game collection. Along with the mushroom log, I took Laura to Home Depot for some plant shopping, where we picked up a Kalanchoe and a Kangaroo Fern to add to Laura's fern collection.

For dinner, we'd made reservations at the Dardanelles, a Turkish restaurant on Monroe Street. We started out with shrimp appetizers, cream of shrimp soup and some shrimp/beets/goat cheese mixture. The meals, served with rice and couscous, were a vegetable tagine and chicken marinated with blood oranges. Everything confirmed that we should learn to cook Turkish food, as the meals were extraordinary.

The day wrapped up by making cookies with Burr and Natalie at their annual St Valentine's Day Cookie Massacre, with one of the favorites being Choco Lots. We also experimented with making Stained-Glass cookies, which are standard sugar cookied dough formed into hollow shaped and then filled with crushed hard candy (like Jolly Ranchers). Make sure you put them on aluminum foil before cooking, or they'll be impossible to remove from the pan.