Sappy New Year

With the confluence of Valentine's Day and the Chinese New Year, the choice was easy: we made lots of Chinese food. We're guilty of taking off a week from Pills baking, but refreshed our pallets with the revelation of Shenging's mirin-lip-smackin' shrimp. Kristen sweetly cheered for St. V with personalized sugar cookies that were worlds better than any other sugar cookie. How does that woman do it?

Well, we've written about clever and humbling cooking experiences past, so maybe we each have a story about a dish offered at the altar of love. (Tracy, you've *got* to have a good tale here...) As a firm believer in the romantic power of baked goods, I can pretty much accurately claim to have baked at least 100 batches of delectables for wooing and woo-related purposes. One of the simplest and most impressive is key lime pie:

4-6 limes
2 cans sweetened condensed milk
1 egg
graham cracker crust

This gem is supposedly straight from the Keys, where my dad's parents used to visit family, and nabbed the recipe from a hotel restaurant. It is tart. It is rich. It is both flirtatious and soothing to squeeze limes with someone by hand (a reamer is a little too violent -- you wouldn't suggest skinning a fresh-caught rabbit to your date, now, would you?), and while the ingredients seem comically simple, they come together like a sleight-of-hand trick. How did you pull that silver dollar from behind my ear? How do these few components combine into a silky, citrusy, almost-too-much gratification?