That I’m posting about a chocolate dessert on Valentine’s Day is entirely coincidental.

I’m ambivalent about the holiday. Some people love it, others hate it. I’m somewhere in the middle. Celebrating LOVE is a wide-open opportunity. A person could take it in a million directions which I find positively paralyzing and the reason that I have not even mentioned it’s Valentine’s Day to my children or husband. I don’t want to get cornered in the kitchen with butter and pink food coloring, nor do I want reams of construction paper cluttering up the house.

But maybe you love it? Maybe you do magical things for your children and friends? Fairy gardens, pink boxes tied up with twine, jaunty little poems, and cards with Beatrix Potter-esque illustrations? I bet it’s really nice.

Maybe I’m feeling jealous. A little guilty, perhaps. It’d be such fun to be That Person loving on everyone with boxes of hand-crafted magic. People like that are so appreciated and loved. I want to be appreciated and loved—really, that’s the only reason to celebrate Valentine’s anyway, to get our warm fuzzies on.

See, it all comes back to me. I’m so not cut out for Hallmark. (Speaking of which, there’s a whole bunch of awkward, not-really Valentine’s Day cards out there. If I were to write one, it’d say something like, “Here’s a gift because giving it to you makes me feel good.”)

I suppose I could make pizza or some other family-loved favorite for supper. A nice dessert would be appreciated, too. But truth is, we eat nice desserts and family-loved favorites rather often. Case in point, this chocolate pudding.

It happened, not because of V-day (in case you didn’t already catch that) but because I have all this cream on hand (thank you, kind neighbor!) and for some odd reason, I developed an inexplicable hankering for pudding. I recalled a post of Deb’s that piqued my interest, hit up her blog, and did what needed to be done.

Her recipe is super basic, calling for straight-up milk and chocolate chips—there’s no need to even crack an egg—but I used mostly cream because it’s what I had. I served the pudding in little glasses with spoonfuls of whipped cream dolloped on top because I believe that chocolate pudding isn’t worth eating if it’s not topped with whipped cream. I have strong feelings about this. Do not contradict me.

Serve this pudding to people you love and they will be happy which will make you feel good. This fact holds true for any day of the year, Valentine’s included. xoxo!

Chocolate Pudding
Adapted from Deb of Smitten Kitchen.

I considered naming this pudding “Pantry Pudding” because it’s made from pantry staples, but then I decided, no, that’s too boring a name for something this good. Besides, Pantry Pudding doesn’t reveal the decadent chocolate nature of said food. So I scraped the idea. (Still, I like the economy of the name.)

Deb calls for chopped dark chocolate. I used a mix of chips, both semisweet and milk.

½ cup sugar
1/4 cup cornstarch
1/8 teaspoon salt
3 cups milk (I used half cream and half milk)
1 cup chocolate chips
1 teaspoon vanilla
homemade whipped cream, not optional

Put the sugar, cornstarch, and salt into a saucepan. Whisking steadily, add a bit of milk at a time. (Add it all at once and you run the risk of lumps. Making a thick paste first and then gradually thinning it out reduces that risk tremendously.) Stirring constantly, cook the milk over medium high heat until thick and just beginning to bubble. Remove from heat and add the chocolate. Stir until they have melted completely. Stir in the vanilla.

Pour the pudding into a serving bowl and top with wax paper, pressing it onto the top to prevent a “skin” from forming. Cool to room temperature. At this point, remove and discard (after licking clean) the wax paper and cover the pudding with plastic wrap. Chill in the refrigerator. Serve with whipped cream.

It’s been a weird week. First there was the Sunday night return from the big city. It’s always disorienting to flip cultures so quickly. Plus, I was exhausted from all the gallivanting and missed sleep. I started the week playing catch up.

(While I was gone, my husband knocked a big hole in my son’s bedroom ceiling and installed pull-down stairs so now, after eight years, we can finally access the attic without shimmying up door and wall and through a little hole in the ceiling á la Spiderman. Then he added a bunch of insulation and put flooring down in the unfinished half. His productivity—with four children under foot, no less—made me proud. It also made me exceedingly grateful that I had been in NYC for the duration of the renovation. I hate renovations more than I do traveling.)

Monday was slow. We skipped the studies in favor of bunches of reading and catch up cleaning and cooking. That evening my younger daughter took off with her grandmother for the week, my older daughter came down with a nasty cold, and my older son went skiing and busted up his knee.

So. Tuesday found us in search of crutches and with two separate trips to town to chat up the doctors. One, a retired doctor who used to attend our church, invited my son into his home and straight up onto his dining room table for a good thirty minute-long exam and thorough explanation about all things ligament. He even called our GP on our behalf and then lined up an afternoon appointment at his previous place of work. There, my son got a couple x-rays, another exam, crutches that actually fit him, and a fancy knee brace. Tentative diagnosis: a partial ACL tear. Next up, and MRI, and then, if it is indeed a tear, surgery. Yay us. (My gut tells me it’s just a sprain, but I don’t know how to ask intelligent questions or push for the lowest intervention possible while still being safe. So I’m just doing what they say and hope we’re not going overboard.)

In the meantime, my daughter spent the day laying on the sofa, coughing, hacking, honking her nose, and worrying that she was going to throw up. Her younger brother ran wild and never changed out of his pajamas. In between appointments, I made a monster batch of sweet rolls to pay back all the nice people doing nice things for us: the neighbor lady who gives us milk (well, her cow does that, but you know what I mean), the friend who coaches me on knitting, and the unbelievably kind and generous doctor who let us crash his home.

By evening, what with a third trip to town to make deliveries and an older son who was coming down with the same nasty cold and a daughter who was a giant heap of uselessness, I was turning into a spinning top.

It was about then that I realized how much the children actually do around the house. With the two bigs laid up, there was no one to haul over huge wheelbarrow loads of wood, empty the garbages, wash the mountains of dirty dishes, vacuum the floors, carry the pans of sweet rolls out to the car, feed the dogs, etc. Plus, they weren’t just unavailable, they were needy. Juice, tea, cough drops, hankies, and medicine—you name it, they needed it.

How encouraging to realize that all the training, nagging, and enforcing has actually translated into concrete benefits!

How discouraging to realize that my man-sized helper may be out of commission for a number of weeks!

(At least he can read books and play chess with the youngest wild thing. That’s something.)

Yesterday I decided that getting to our studies was simply not going to be a priority this week, and we went to the grocery store and library in preparation for today’s snowstorm. This morning I woke up at five, looked outside and saw that it was crazy windy (the tin roof wasn’t banging all around as is its windy-weather custom thanks to all the snow piled on top), and rushed down stairs in a dread panic that the power would go out before I made my coffee or washed my hair.

So far, so good: it’s snowing and blowing and we still have power. I’ve baked bread and a cake, cooked beans and boiled eggs, made a pot of hot chocolate, and knitted up a little storm of my own. My husband is home from work. He plowed the driveway, but the roads haven’t been plowed yet so Oh darn, guess I’ll have to go take a nap by the fire.

One more thing: there’s been a spate of robberies in our little hamlet and some neighboring towns. The kids are on the sharp lookout for suspicious activity. Any time a car goes by (as of 2 pm, there have been three), they rush to the window to see if it looks robbery-ish. Part of my morning involved talking with the investigator assigned to the case.

It’s been such a weird week.

This past weekend, I attended a Fresh Air Conference in New York City. We stayed at a fancy hotel and ate fancy food and watched the fancy Olympics and went to a fancy nightclub and used fancy little bars of soap and rode in fancy elevators.

It was nice.

But after three days of sitting in conferences, milling around the city, eating, eating, and more eating, and spending hours on plans, trains, and metros, I was done. I missed my ordinary existence. I missed making stuff. After awhile I started to feel numb. I was slowly turning into a blob.

There were only a couple times I felt truly alive.

1. At the nightclub, I pulled out my camera and started fiddling with the settings, trying to figure out how to capture the opulent darkness. For a few minutes I was absorbed in what I was doing. It felt good.

Actually, that’s the only time I can think of. There were many enjoyable moments—listening to stories, good conversations, figuring out the art of train travel (trains are awesome)—but there was only that one time that I got deeply absorbed in doing something.

Is this odd?

I don’t consider myself a busy do-do-do person. I have no trouble putting my feet up and being waited on. I’m quite fond of sitting on my arse.

But I need a creative outlet: writing, cooking, making lists, scheming. My much-loved non-productive times are normally measured in hours, not days. And I like my independence; tourism, public transportation, and conference attending are all about being dependent. Or at least they involve a different sort of independent.

On the train ride home, my friend commented that she doesn’t know anyone else who dreads travel as much as I do. It doesn’t matter where I’m going or how much I want to go, for days in advance, I get depressed and sluggish and cranky. It’s like there’s a dread weight pressing in on me, a dark cloud at the end of the tunnel.

My friend, on the other hand (and everyone else I know), looks forward to trips. She savors the planning and anticipation. I think she’s nuts. She thinks I’m weird.

Do I just not transition well? This could be it, I suppose. Come to think of it, I dread most things. I dread hosting and appointments and busy days. Once I’m out and about (or the guests have arrived and the event has started), I enjoy myself completely. I get a rush from the activity and love the settling-back-into-my-life tired feeling that I get at the end. The accomplishment of Having Done feels good. But I don’t look forward to events. (Unless it’s something really different, like auditioning for a play or teaching a class or going out all by myself for a morning of writing. But then again, those are creative outlets.)

What about you? Do you dread trips and events and anything that requires you to shift gears and go out? To be contented, do you require the constant pressure of creating?