St Valentine's Day - Our Wedding Anniversary

So, yesterday was our 6th Wedding Anniversary and what a lovely day it was! The sun was shining and it was warmer than it had been - no cold nose or icy toes for me.

Some time ago, when we were in Norwich, we saw some lovely glasses and decided to get them for each other and not buy anything else this year. They were champagne flutes with gold patterns on and were reduced in the January sales. Then I found two crystal wine glasses, also in the sales, which I knew Paul would like and I bought them too. I also decided to get him a little wooden heart as an extra present.


Paul was really naughty and he'd 'forgotten' that we'd decided not to buy presents this year and had bought me some more lovely things. As well as the flowers he brought home the other day, there was a cloth bag with 'I Love You' embroidered on it, a heart shaped chocolate lolly, a tiny musical box in a bag with red roses on, a red hanging heart, some perfume and lots of little heart shaped buttons. He's also found a heart shaped stone, painted it red and put our names on it - which I thought was very romantic.



In our living room we have a glass topped coffee table which has compartments so you can display things in it. This is where we keep our collection of hearts which we've bought for each other over the past eight and a half years that we've known each other, and that's where I've put the buttons and the painted stone.






As well as presents there was the food! And drink! For breakfast Paul made us bacon and tomato sarnies. For lunch I served grilled goat's cheese with cranberry sauce on heart shaped toast with salad. But the star of the day was definitely the evening meal. We started with seared scallops on salad leaves, accompanied by 'real' champagne. The bottle was one which came from Dad's after he died, so we raised a glass to him and I tearily remembered him as we celebrated our first anniversary without him.

Our main course was rump steak with chips, baby veg and my first attempt at Bearnaise sauce - a little runny, but very tasty! I was still drinking champagne at this point, but Paul had moved on to red wine. We were watching Harry Hill's TV Burp while we ate and the alcohol made it seem even funnier than usual and we were laughing so much that we both had tears in our eyes again.

For dessert I'd made white chocolate pannacotta and served it with dark chocolate sauce. I made this once before and it turned out really well, but I couldn't find the recipe so I tried another one and it wasn't quite as good. It tasted wonderful (as does all chocolate) but didn't look very good. This was accompanied by the most amazing pudding wine, which tasted almost like a very good sweet sherry. I'm so glad I looked round the January sales as this was another bargain - from Boots, surprisingly!