The V-Day tradition around here is heart-shaped food, and I have a bunch of little kitchen tchotchkes to make that easier–forms for pancakes and special cake pans and whatever. But no one around here likes cake, and my wife is more likely to ask for pear ginger scones for breakfast than pancakes.

Yeah, this post is mostly about food. Sherwood, you probably want to skip this one.

She got her scones, then left for work. I waved goodbye and hustled into the kitchen and got started on the “real” V-Day food.

I used a french bread recipe that makes a pretty big loaf (7 cups of flour–I have a scale but my recipes are still by volume). I split the dough into thirds and rolled them out flat. Into one third I laid chopped kalamata olives and pesto, the next sun-dried tomatoes, the last fancy parmesan grated fine and diced pepperoni. Then I rolled them back into loaves, braided them together and bent them into a heart shape. That’s what was waiting for her when she got home.

Here’s a picture of her (after a particularly tough day at work):

Looks kind of lumpy, yeah? Yeah. Still, it tastes awfully good. Next time I’ll double the amount of stuffing, and maybe combine them all into a single loaf to marry the flavors.