Spilly’s Valentine’s Day meal

There’s a radio ad in Pittsburgh right now that proclaims “The best words in baseball are ‘pitchers and catchers report.’” I’m not sure how that beats out “World Series Champions” or “Prince Fielder eats second base” but it’s on sports radio so it has to be factually accurate. This week we celebrate the start of dudes playing catch for six weeks as well as that other little event this week: Valentine’s Day.

In December, I ran a charity drive to help the local food bank and one of the prizes was the ability to get a meal created. Today is the first dish that someone provided the idea for: a romantic Valentine’s Day meal. So I ask you: what’s more romantic than waking up to breakfast in bed? Go ahead and feel free to make this for your significant other on Thursday morning. I guarantee it will be a meal they never forget. Let’s get started, shall we?

STEP 1: Spring Training always takes place in Arizona and Florida, so I’ve used ingredients from each place. Florida was easy, and will come in later, but Arizona to me was tricky. I don’t have cacti here to blend. Everything I know about Arizona revolves around Kurt Warner and Wile E. Coyote. I polled Twitter and got an excellent idea: guacamole! To make this, you’ll need an avocado (this is a plant you can find at the grocery store in the section you usually run past to get to the cheese.). You will also need a metal mallet.

STEP 2: Continue to beat the living crap out of this avocado. There’s a golf ball thing inside that is a lot harder to crush than the rest of it. Give it your best shot. When you’re done, you should end up with something like this:

STEP 3: I forgot to mention! We’re making pancakes! So take this green mush and put it into a bowl as we prepare the rest of the batter. We’ll want something light and fluffy to balance out the green paste of the guac. Let’s see what we have...

Hold on. Just..a second here. That cheese curl with hands is pretty happy. The hands are covered in....cheese powder..

FOODTIP: Steer clear of deranged, psychotic, and likely homicidal / cannibalistic cheese curls.

STEP 4: Pour the bag of cheese curls into the bowl and begin crushing with the mallet. This may take a bit of time as you’ll need a great many curls to make the batter.

STEP 4: We’re getting closer to having something friable, but we still need some standard Valentine’s Day fare to sweeten the pancake. Let’s go with some tried and true candies and chocolate.

One of these little heart things said “WWW.LOVE”. That’s not how the internet works, little candy piece. You’re supposed to put a bizarre country extension on the end, redirect lonely and misguided people to malware-ridden websites, financially drain them, and then watch Russian dash-cam videos all day on your giant pile of money.

Anyway, add these into your batter like so:

STEP 5: Mix it up well and you should get something resembling dough. Put it into a greased pan, set the fire to ‘hot’, and ignore. It will start to sizzle and smoke. You may need to disconnect the smoke alarm.

STEP 6: And now it’s time for the scrambled eggs! We took care of Arizona in the pancakes, but let’s deal with Florida. This is easy, of course, because the name of the spring training league itself is related to food. Find a grapefruit at the store. it looks like a really big tennis ball. Cut it in half and toss both halves into the blender.

You need to put the top on. I really should have mentioned that first because when I did this, the skin caught on the blades and I launched grapefruit everywhere. Once you put the cover on, with enough power applied you can blend the rind in with the rest.

STEP 7: To unify our Arizona and Florida theme, we’ll use an ingredient to represent the thing that both places share: decrepit old people.

Pour the grapefruit and prunes into a clean mixing bowl. You’re ready to add eggs to our...scrambled.........eggs.

STEP 8: Plop in like 4 eggs. Just drop them right in the mix. No need to crack them, the mixing will do that! Work smarter, not harder, chefs!

STEP 9: Beat these eggs thoroughly, making sure to try and break up the prunes as well. If you use a hand mixer, PUT THE MIXER ON LOW. The only thing worse than grapefruit everywhere is grapefruit AND egg everywhere. After that’s done, add in some red, festive food coloring to your eggs to heighten the Valentine’s Day mood!

STEP 10: Oh right, that pancake. Let’s see how we’re doing with that. Blow away the smoke to reveal:

Interesting! The candies are melting and frying themselves! SCIENCE IS MAGIC! Once this is done, try and pour it onto a plate. It will likely be sticky and hard to work with, but corall it into the middle as much as possible.

Decorate with more candy!

STEP 11: There’s one last ingredient for the eggs. Most of what we’ve been using is sweet, so we’ll need a counterbalance to that:

These pickles will add that briny, gummy texture you so crave in scrambled eggs. But we can do better than this! We can make them thematically appropriate too!

STEP 12: Cut each pickle into a heart and place into eggs.

Let that soak in. Okay. Now, get ready to cook this in the same pan as before.

STEP 13: Fry the eggs in a pan. You’ll want to constantly be mixing it so the eggs don’t burn! That would ruin the dish. Note that the pink will go from a fuschia to a near exact replica of common indigestion medicine.

When this is done, you’ll want to plate it carefully around the pancake and add Tangballs for decoration. Ladies and gentleman, I present to you the most romantic meal ever created:

See you next week, internet.