Valentine’s Day is around the corner. February is an exciting month. It’s the month of celebrating love for your partner, family, and friends. Chinese New Year also landed in the month of February this year. Many years ago, when Kevin and I first started dating, we celebrated Valentine’s Day at Cottage Inn in Ann Arbor. We ordered a large pizza to share, a side salad, and garlicky bread sticks. Both of us had such a good time chatting over a delicious, simple meal. We wanted to recreate the experience with a simple Valentine’s Day dinner this year. Since Valentine’s Day is on a weekday this year, Kevin and I decided to celebrate the holiday this weekend. We celebrated with a simple meal of garlic knots with marinara sauce, a fresh salad, and a cast iron pizza. For dessert, we had vegan iced coffee with bits of chocolate chips blended into the drink. You can make a version of my iced coffee here. I am a huge fan of garlic knots and typically make shortcut garlic knots with marinara sauce when I’m short on time. For our Valentine’s Day celebration, I wanted to spend a little extra time by preparing pizza dough the evening before and using the pizza dough to make garlic knots from scratch.

Happy Chinese New Year eve! The evening before Chinese New Year is often my favorite part of the holiday festivities. The evening before is when families come together from near and afar to have a large family dinner. I try my best to return home for Chinese New Year at least once every two years. Last year, Kevin and I both traveled back to Brooklyn to celebrate with my family. This year, it was only Kevin and I celebrating together. I don’t consider myself a very superstitious person, but my parents definitely are. They would instruct us not to sweep, eat congee, or wash our clothes on Chinese New Year day. In the days leading up to Chinese New Year, my dad would buy some nice floral blooms to decorate the home. My mom would thoroughly clean the home from top to bottom. My brothers and I would write down what we want for the family togetherness dinner on the night before Chinese New Year. On the morning of, we start off with a vegetarian meal, usually some form of vegetable and noodles.

It has been a while since I had potatoes. I usually have potatoes at least once a week, but I haven’t picked up potatoes in over two months. I haven’t even picked up my favorite frozen fries and tater tots from the supermarket in weeks. I can’t believe I haven’t had potatoes in nearly two months considering potatoes are an absolute weakness of mine. My drought from eating potatoes changed this week. After my work out earlier this week, I was craving some starchy potato goodness. I ended up washing a few russet potatoes, cutting them up into wedges, drizzling on some olive oil, generously seasoning both sides of the wedges, and then roasting them in the oven. As the potatoes were roasting in the oven, the most wonderful smell filled my kitchen.

I woke up this morning feeling mostly tired, but I was also ready to tackle the day. Sunday mornings (during the winter) are usually when I head to the gym to squeeze in a morning run. My runs during the winter feel much tougher than my runs during the spring or summer. For some reason, I feel especially energized during the spring and summer to work out, but I have the complete opposite feelings during the winter. Winter makes me want to curl up with a fleece blanket into my favorite corner of my couch, watch movies, and veg out. Cooking, baking and the occasional bathroom break are the only activities which keep me from sitting in my corner of the couch all day long.