Believe me when I say I’ve had some bad Valentine’s Days.

I’m talking in a black dress and pumps, makeup and hair done up right, drinking wine from the bottle, walking around a grocery store at 8pm on February 14th to buy myself chocolate and flowers while crying kind of bad. And that was while I was in a relationship. 

The bar is set pretty low, which may be why 2018 marked my first good Valentine’s day even though I ruined my gift to my partner: a home cooked meal.

See, I hardly ever cook anymore.

Not only am I straight-up bad at it, but I somehow tricked a guy who likes to cook into living with me. He’s so good at cooking a part of me is convinced someone is paying him to be my boyfriend. Because I. Love. Eating. Gluttony is definitely gonna be the sin that gets me into hell.

Since Nathan cooks all the time, I decided my Valentine’s Day gift to him would be giving him a night off. Sure, I could have taken him to a restaurant, but I wanted to impress him with more than my ability to spend money. I wanted the meal to feel like a real gift.

Thanks to the internet, I found a recipe that fit my zero waste shopping needs and his vegan diet: Eggplant quinoa boats. The Buzzfeed video made it look super easy and they do this really convenient thing where they put the recipe in the YouTube video description. Some other perks:

• I’d cooked with quinoa AND eggplant before
• I even made an eggplant Parmesan that turned out really good that one time
• There were only 5 (?) ingredients
• One of the ingredients was marinara, which is one of the few from-scratch recipes I used to make on a weekly basis before I met my current boyfriend

I even had Valentine’s Day off this year, so I had plenty of time to buy fresh ingredients and prepare the meal before Nathan got home. Real 1950s style. I was following Buzzfeed’s recipe in the video description to a T when I noticed about two thirds of the way through that I had all this scooped-out eggplant still sitting suspiciously on the kitchen counter. Wasn’t I supposed to incorporate that at some point…?

That’s when I realized: the recipe in the video description was wrong. They’d left out the whole step of frying the eggplant with oil and diced onions before adding the quinoa. But I was already halfway through the boiling the quinoa part! In a panic, I threw the eggplant innards into the pot…and immediately realized I’d made a terrible mistake.

“Welp, looks like we’re getting Taco Bell for dinner,” I texted Nathan. I’d managed to make a dish that was somehow grainy yet rubbery with no flavor to speak of. I was not going to subject my partner to that on Valentine’s Day.

Superhero that he is, Nathan came home and used the remaining eggplant to make some excellent pasta.

I made sure we had plenty of wine and cupcakes to make up for it.

The moral of the story?

Cooking without meat or dairy is hard.

Pre-zero-waste me would have taken that rubbery grainy mess, fried it in butter, smothered it with cheese, and called it a day. It wouldn’t have been perfect, but at least it would have been palatable. Unfortunately, animal products, with the exception of eggs, are sold in disposable packaging 99.9% of the time. So even if you’re zero waste but not a vegan, you tend to cut back on meat and dairy in your day-to-day life.

Suddenly, you don’t have fat and grease to fall back on. Suddenly, you have to learn how to cook. You have to figure out which spices to use. What order to cook things in. How long to cook things for.

Obviously, these things still matter if you’re cooking with meat and dairy (especially how long to cook things if you want to prevent food poisoning), but in my experience, it’s easier to fix mistakes with an omnivore diet.

That said, it is possible to make delicious meals without animal products.

Once you know what you’re doing, that is. My advice is to ease into it. Give yourself one lesson a week (or a month, or every two months) to build up a vegan cooking tool belt. Or find you a man who can cook.

Seriously though: practice, practice, practice.

• Ask the people in your life to teach you to cook their favorite meal
• Watch cooking shows on YouTube
• Take a cooking class
• Read recipe books
• When in doubt, watch “Nailed It!” on Netflix (you’ll definitely feel better about yourself)

My current agreement with Nathan is that I cook dinner once a week.

Between that and eating out once a week, he gets at least 2 nights off. I try to make my meal before we run out of his leftovers in case there’s another eggplant quinoa boat fiasco. So far it’s been working pretty well.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to make some Grilled Yucca Tortillas for dinner.