Sweets for Your Sweetheart

Candy recipes and other sweet treats for Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day is quite an event in the South! Heart shaped cookies, petit fours, and cakes and pies with "I Love You" written in icing are filling the aisles at the local grocery stores.

The color, flavor, and smell of food all play an important part in a successful romantic meal. The Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago discovered that kitchen smells, like cinnamon buns, doughnuts, and pumpkin pie, may be more powerful than the finest perfume! Other aromas with positive effects were vanilla, strawberries, lavender, and black licorice.

The authors of "Food As Foreplay" say it all in this excerpt: "...an aphrodisiac isn't something you buy from a gnarled old woman who lives in a tree. It is the resonance, tone, timbre that YOU bring to cooking.

Love radiates from your heart, seeps into the food and gives it the mystical quality that ignites the soul. The real aphrodisiac is you."

Whether you're serving an elegant meal or everyone's favorite spaghetti or pizza (heart-shaped), do it with some candles, good wine or champagne if you like, and a loving smile!

Throwing a Teen Valentine's Day Party

Your teenager wants to throw a Valentine's Day party, are you up for the challenge? Here are a few games, crafts, ideas and tips to make it fun and safe.

• Make sure you make all rules clear from the very beginning
• Establish a list of who is invited and how many are allowed to come. Allow very few exceptions to these list should things change a couple of days before the party. Allow no excepts the day of the party.
• Do not hold an 'open house'. If your teen's friends are coming for the party, they should stay until the end of the party. And 'party crashers' normally start trouble.
• Dimming the lights is ok to do, but shutting them off is a no-no. Try using white Christmas lights strung around the room, with more lighting at the food table.
• No drinking or drugs should be permitted.
• Say it loud and clear, you will call the parents, (or the police should things get out of hand), to pick them up should they show up drunk, or should they bring alcohol to the party.
• Establish that you more than welcome other parents calling you about the party and they can come too. This is a great way to meet the parents of your teenager's peers, and get some help at the party.
• Don't hover, but do make frequent trips to the food table to refresh the chip bowl.