Valentine’s Day Dinner

Years ago, when our boys were young we started a Valentine’s Day dinner tradition; heart-shaped French Toast. I’d buy a loaf of day-old bread, use a cookie cutter to cut out the heart shapes – saving the crusts to feed the ducks at the pond near by- make French Toast batter to dunk the bread and cook them up.

Then along came electric heart-shaped waffle makers (I have very fond memories of eating heart-shaped waffles at my relative’s homes in Norway.)  I  bought a waffle maker and switched to heart-shaped waffles for Valentine’s Day dinner, which I continue to make each year even though it’s just the two of us now.

This year, when I was up north at my uncles paging through a magazine, I found Norwegian Waffle recipe that looked good. I wrote down the recipe thinking it might be similar to the recipe they use in Norway. We decided to try it on Valentine’s Day.

In the morning I checked the ingredients and had my husband stop to pick up a couple we didn’t have on hand, and I stopped at the co-op in town to get cardamom ( maybe the secret ingredient??? ) However, I was so excited to try this recipe that I didn’t pay any attention to the quantity it makes until we had already started the batter, and then we decided it was too late to turn back. Well, four cups of milk and four cups of flour, one and a half sticks of butter plus additional ingredients, makes a lot of batter! We could have had the neighborhood over! We laughed.

We decided to make up all the waffles and freeze them…hopefully they’ll be tasty toasted.