Twenty-plus years of loving each other, cooking together, and building upon our mutual disdain of dealing with crowds and reservations for Valentine's Day means hyounpark and I made a dinner worth remembering tonight.

By default, when we have pork belly around in the winter, we usually braise it in apple cider, along with a chopped onion, garlic, a little soy sauce, fish sauce, and fivespice. But we didn't have apple cider in the fridge, so I thought about what else we could use for a braising liquid, and while pondering, found a recipe on the McCormick website for a Thai Tea-Spiced Pork Belly with Condensed Milk Sauce, and my eyes lit up, because I knew we had Thai tea packets on hand.

We riffed heavily off that recipe, mostly treating it as taste profile suggestions. I started steeping a liter of Thai tea while H chopped an onion, then I sauteed the onions with garlic and ginger paste (an incredible convenience courtesy the Indian grocery store in our neighborhood), and then added some fivespice powder. H crosshatched the pork belly skin, then cut it into small enough slabs to fit in our Instant Pot. I added a few tablespoons of soy sauce and fish sauce to the stuff in the skillet, then dumped that in the bottom of the Instant Pot; laid the pork belly slabs on top of the rack in the IP, and poured the tea over everything, and then closed it up and let it go on high for 20 minutes.

While that went, H tried to turn our rice into the suggested rice cakes, but we should've used sushi rice instead of brown rice which was what we had ready. Even using the musubi mold didn't get it to stick together enough, alas. Everything still tasted delicious in the end, though, so no fuss.

Meanwhile, I made the condensed milk sauce in the recipe - we had condensed coconut milk on hand, I subbed in peanut butter for the tahini and chile crisp for the sambal - and then turned my attention to the salad. What did we have in the fridge? Half a head of butter lettuce, some shiso leaves, scallions; enough for at least a little greenery on the plate. Chopped the leafy greens and scallion up, and then, inspired, ran an apple through the mandolin. Whisked together a dressing of peanut oil, lime juice, fish sauce, a little galangal and garlic. Topped it off with peanuts.

The IP finished releasing pressure just as we finished the rest of the plating; we each pulled out a small slab of pork belly, drizzled the condensed milk sauce over it, and utterly freaking devoured our dinner. Everything just came together, building on decades of experience and familiarity with each others' taste, and we will absolutely do this again.

And it's not Valentine's for us without chocolate, so I pulled a log of our favorite chocolate toffee cookies out of the freezer, sliced and baked and ate. (Along with the last crumbs of the gargantuan king cake slice ladyjax bestowed upon me yesterday! Many thanks to her A for the baking thereof :) )

Somehow we will both get up in the morning and go for a digestive run and continue appreciating how we grow together, even as things around us are so very different from how we imagined when we began.