Holidays are awesome because they go hand in hand with feasts: loud, raucous, crazy-Aunt-Phyllis-filled feasts. Tomorrow is Valentine's Day: a holiday without a feast. If we keep with the logic I've offered above, it follows that Valentine's Day is not an "awesome" holiday as it involves little to no feasting. Sure, Valentine's Day features a few gustatory elements -- chocolate, strawberries, bubbly and low-quality candy -- but I mean, let's be real: Who is that tempted to overindulge in a box full of chalky "be mine" hearts? No signature dish emerges on Valentine's Day -- no fruitcake, no turkey, no good-luck black-eyed peas and certainly no tart made to look like a blueberry and strawberry sewn American flag. Chocolate, which comes in so many varying forms, continues to reign supreme. So, what gives?
For one, it seems to me that Valentine's Day is about anything but tradition and is instead focused on novelty, romance and surprise. Wondering what special thing your significant other is going to do for you on Valentine's Day eliminates the possibility of instituting a Valentine's Day food custom or tradition. So, seeing as Valentine's Day is anti-tradition and anti-third wheels, I'm sorry to say there is little hope of turning Valentine's Day into a Feast. (Not to mention being incapacitated by food coma is anything but sexy.)
This isn't to say feasting on Valentine's Day is out of the realm of possibility. If we look to the holiday's history, for instance, we see it has roots in Roman and Christian feasting holidays. According to the History Channel's Web site, Valentine's "feast day" was initially celebrated in February in an attempt to Christianize the Roman fertility festival, Lupercalia. Lupercalia featured such fun-for-the-whole-family activities as "gently slapping" the new crops and women of the town with the blood-dipped hide of sacrificial goats and dogs -- for fertility, of course. If you want to throw a feast and slap your guests with leather this Valentine's Day, know you are not the only one to have contemplated doing so.
Most of us modern folk, however, are content to skip the feasts and leather on Valentine's Day and opt for a sugar headache. In my mind, the only way to justify extreme sugar consumption is to make sure you're eating good candy, and because this is Valentine's Day, good chocolate. If you want to buy chocolate for someone tomorrow, the indisputably best chocolate in Charlottesville can be purchased for an arm and a leg at Gearhart's Chocolates. But if it pains you (as it does me) to drop $2 per piece of tablespoon-sized chocolate, I suggest you make your own truffles. "That's crazy! I can't cook!" you say? Calm down, the recipe for truffles (otherwise known as a ganache) is mind-blowingly simple: Two parts chocolate to one part heavy cream. Seriously, that's it. What's more, you can even make truffles using a microwave.
The first step when making truffles is to heat the cream on the stove-top (or in the microwave) until it is about to boil and steam floats across its surface. Before heating the cream, be sure the chocolate (which should be of good quality -- I like at least 60-percent cacao) is diced or in chip form. Next, dump the chocolate into the scalding cream and let it sit for 30 seconds. Then mix the cream and chocolate with a fork or whisk. If you've heated the cream to a high enough temperature, you should have a smooth ganache. (If not, put the ganache back in the microwave and heat it in 10-second increments, stirring in-between until you have a uniform mixture.) Finally throw the mixture in the fridge for a half-hour. When it's cool, form the chocolate into bite-sized balls and roll them in 100-percent cocoa powder. Voila, I give you truffles.
The fun thing about making truffles is you can be creative. Like cinnamon? Then go right ahead and mix some in. You can roll your truffles in chopped nuts, cocoa nibs or even raw sugar crystals. You can add some butter (the fattier the better), you can make them with white chocolate, add a shot of whiskey ... so many options.
If that doesn't sound easy and kind of fun, I don't know what does. Even if I can't convince you to feast this Valentine's Day, I hope I have tempted you into the world of good-quality chocolate. I promise that whomever you give these treats to will be beyond touched knowing you made them yourself.
DIY Truffles:
10 ounces chocolate
2/3 cup heavy cream
2 tablespoons butter
flavor element of your choice (cinnamon, nutmeg, almond extract, etc.)
cocoa powder for rolling (use baker's cocoa, not hot cocoa mix)
(Tip: If you want to make chocolate sauce, invert the chocolate to cream ratio.)
Chelsea is a guest columnist.
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