V-Day victories: Expert tips (and recipes) for nailing Valentine's Day at home
Your favourite little Italian spot is all booked out on Februrary 14. And so is the restaurant where you had your first date. A night at the pub or RSL might see you divorced. It's time to pull out all the stops – at home.
The good news is this is exactly where most food-lovers would recommend you spend Valentine's Day, avoiding pricey set menus and sappy gestures like long-stemmed red roses at the table.
With these tried-and-true tips from some of Good Food's recipe writers, it's not too late to pull off a spectacular Valentine's Day.
Julia Busuttil Nishimura
A lot of people don't love Valentine's Day for obvious reasons, but for me it has really nice connotations with or without a partner because my mum would always make a big deal about it when we were kids. She'd cook us a beautiful dinner, send us flowers at school, and sometimes even make red food to go with her red tablecloth!
I'm a bit more low-key. One of my favourite Valentine's Days was when I packed a picnic for my then boyfriend (now husband) with all his favourite foods and favourite beer at the time. I managed to track down a record from his favourite Japanese musician, Caravan, and borrowed my dad's portable record player from the 1960s to take to the park.
Now that we have kids, we might do something like go out for lunch while they're at school, or have an early dinner with them. I'll often cook my husband's favourite pasta, amatriciana, followed by tiramisu. I think it's a super romantic dessert because so much time and love goes into preparing it. This year I'm planning to make a two-tier chocolate pavlova topped with raspberries – it has to be red fruit on top!
I'll get out a linen tablecloth, light my favourite Tony Assness beeswax candles and put some music on. The small details are so much sweeter than some huge gesture.
I also like to give the kids a small chocolate on the day – it must be my mum's influence!
Jill Dupleix
Which St Val's Victory do you want? I have heaps. The day falls on my husband's birthday, so we've always gone completely over the top. There was the year I hired a boat on the Yarra River and asked our friend and celebrity chef, Gabriel Gate, to cook for our table for two, and one of our favourite waiters to come and help.
Not something you can pull off? Don't worry, I've done special at home, too. Sometimes, our dinners involved no cooking at all – oysters and prawns – while others involved soft boiling a few eggs, which were served with a jar of caviar and toast cooked via a toaster in the middle of the table.
One of my favourite wins was the year I bought a range of heart-shaped cookie cutters and cake tins (I do love a theme). The toast for breakfast was covered with a fried egg and then cut into a heart shape, through both egg and toast. Smoked salmon sandwiches for a picnic lunch also got the heart treatment. For dinner, I served risotto with scampi on heart-shaped plates, made pink champagne jelly in heart-shaped moulds, and baked soft, mousse-like chocolate cake in – you guessed it – a heart tin (pictured), and topped it with strawberries and cream. I probably had more fun than he did, but hey, Valentine's Day (and love) works both ways.
Karen Martini
Dinner must start with a delicious cocktail – it really sets the mood. Take the time to master your beloved's favourite. I like to serve it with some small things to snack on – anchovy toast with cultured butter, olives and a baguette, perhaps something pickled – while the main course comes together. Head to the market and buy the best of what's available: things like good-quality anchovies are expensive but on a menu for two they'll go far.
After cocktails, pour an Australian sparkling that has a little bit of age on it, or your favourite French wine.
For a special night like this, definitely skip the plates you use every day and pull out the special china. Place flowers on the table. I might go for a tiny but densely packed bouquet; at other times, a loose vase of poppies. Sometimes stolen flowers are the best! Don't be afraid to go a bit kitsch.
Pasta really is the food of love and one of the best I've made for two is linguine vongole (pictured right). It's a dish that cooks better with fewer portions and it always impresses because a lot of people think you can only have it in a restaurant. The bonus is it comes together in under 30 minutes and it's not heavy, leaving room for dessert and more cocktails!
For dessert, I'd make my dark chocolate and almond torta from Cook. You can do it in the morning and serve it at room temperature. I discovered a version of this recipe – the torta Caprese – in my travels to Capri, quite possibly the most romantic island. What could be more perfect?
Darren Robertson
I've made a few breakfasts that really start the day off with a bang. During my sourdough crumpet phase, it was spanner crab crumpets with poached eggs and a herb salad. And a bottle of bubbles, obviously. Back in the day it was probably champagne but now it's more likely to be an Adelaide Hills pet-nat, like Ngeringa.
Spanner crab happens to be in season around Valentine's Day so it's a no-brainer. Pipis are also at their peak or you could go all out and do crayfish. I love to do crayfish with spaghetti.
For that, I set up an open fire grill on our verandah, open a bottle of wine, and cook out there. It means you're not stuck in the kitchen and can spend time together. Split the cray in half and pop it on the grill. Brush the flesh with a flavoured butter – either miso or citrus – with chilli and garlic as background notes. Remove the meat from the shell, cook your spaghetti, finish the pasta with soft herbs, like chervil or parsley, and pour more bubbles.
Keep dessert light. You don't want an apple crumble or a pie that's going to make you fall asleep or veg out on the couch. Go for a negroni or another digestif, and a little chocolate something. I love anything with macadamias in it.
A macadamia farmer in northern NSW, Ross Arnett of Malua Farm, recently shared a tip with me: roast your macadamias at 120C conventional for 120 minutes – it turns them a beautiful butterscotch colour and the texture is almost like toffee.
Katrina Meynink
I dip in and out of Valentine's Day but one year where I was feeling super enthusiastic about it, I bought a bottle of wine from the vintage of the year we met. I also created a menu featuring all his favourite foods and printed it to set on the table. There were duck-fat roast potatoes, a tomahawk steak with herb butter and a dark chocolate pudding.
Another year, I dry-cleaned his suit and left it on the bed with an invitation to dinner – at home. I wore a red dress. Dressing up for dinner at home might feel a bit silly but I think it does give a real sense of occasion. Ditch the sweats for Valentine's Day! Printing off menus or invitations, lighting candles and pulling out a nice tablecloth all add up to a special moment.
Helen Goh
Since living here in London, my favourite Valentine's Day was in 2021, an unusual year for most people around the world. The pandemic was still raging so we knew it wouldn't be a typical Valentine's Day dinner, but what we got was more unorthodox than we imagined.
Restaurants were mostly still closed and there was no chance of the babysitter coming for our boys, who were 10 and six. But it was agreed I would have a night off from cooking. We settled on Burger & Lobster, an American-style diner, as the perfect high-low takeaway restaurant, a one-stop run where we could splurge on lobster rolls and the kids would get to have a burger.
We ordered online – cocktails, mocktails, lobster tails and hamburgers with fries – then all jumped into the car for the 20-minute drive to Knightsbridge to collect our order. Once home, the boys decided they wanted to try the lobster, then decided we should swap food. We went along with it, mostly out of amazement that they were willing to forego their burgers.
Being their first Valentine's dinner, the boys started quizzing us on how David and I met, then set us the challenge of remembering where we went for dinner on each of the Valentine's Days we'd celebrated together. All 15 of them. There were many disagreements but it was fun trying to recall (and rank) them. A long game of Monopoly followed.
We didn't want to admit it (wasn't it terribly unromantic with the kids?), but this blissfully ordinary night at home was probably our best Valentine's yet.
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Emma Breheny – Emma is Good Food's Melbourne-based reporter and co-editor of The Age Good Food Guide 2024.