Date Nights

One of my goals for the year (actually one of Brandon’s goals but he transferred it to me) was to do a date night each week. We’ve been using the opportunity to do new things like try new restaurants or do something nontraditional for date night.

The first date night we went to a sushi restaurant that recently opened up in the Union Market district, O-Ku. This was such a fun date night! If you come in as a duo you’re likely to be seated at the sushi bar so you can watch your sushi being made. We were lucky enough to be seated right in front of the robata grill so we also got to watch these amazing chefs cook steak and chicken and lobster directly on a fire. Everything we ate was incredible but our seating seriously made the entire night so much more fun–getting to talk to the chefs and ask questions about what they were cooking and watch the way they cooked steak on a skewer to make it tender enough you could cut it with your chopsticks. Needless to say, the first date night was a wild success.

Since we’ve been trading off who has to plan date night, the next week was my turn. I was inspired by a story my friends Amara and Ziv had told me about their nights doing Chopped. (If you haven’t seen this Food Network show you should–it’s one of my absolute favorites. Contestants are given baskets of four random ingredients that they have to figure out how to make those mismatched ingredients into one meal.) So we went to Trader Joe’s and I picked out three ingredients for Brandon to make into dinner that night. It was fun to walk through the store and find new ingredients that I hadn’t cooked with before and then even more fun to watch Brandon in the kitchen trying to figure out how to put these together into dinner.

Another date night that I planned was a fort night. I grabbed a picnic from the grocery store of cheese and meat and fruit and chocolate and wine and turned the living room into a blanket fort. Honestly, building a blanket fort was much more difficult than I remember it being when I was a kid. I don’t know if this is because the fort has to be bigger to fit two adults inside or if I have the wrong type of furniture for it or just because I have a bad memory, but it was kind of s struggle to make a suitable fort. I covered the floor with blankets and pillows to make it more cozy and brought in a bunch of twinkle lights for light. It was super fun to huddle inside the fort and have a picnic and listen to music.

Since we’ve been doing the date nights most weeks this year, we’ve definitely done more dates than just these, but these are the most memorable because they were different and fun. It’s been a stretch (in a good way) to come up with new ideas for date nights that aren’t the usual dinner dates, so please let me know what your favorite dates have been so I can get some more ideas and beat Brandon for the most creative date ideas.

xoxo,
J