As Valentine’s Day rings toward couples, the recipe for a successful date seems easy on the surface anyway: find something different.

Too often in the rush of life, Cupid’s wings beat signals of frustration and a last-minute tumble into the same-old routine. Dinner. Flowers. A card. A movie.
The secret, though, lies just a bit deeper.

Though separated spatially, each couple at Easely Amused brushed and hued toward the night’s culminant moment: when they turned around their completed portraits for the other to adore.

Or to gather in with a sidelong squint an arched, do-I-really-look-like-that-to-you eyebrow.

In John’s case, the portrait fit him like a $100 pair of blue jeans. And in a bigger sense as judged by his satisfied smile, the date night hit just right.

John practices law by day but plays guitar in an indie Southern rock band by night. Katherine put it all on canvas.

“There’s guitar strings running through here,” Katherine said, drawing her finger down the portrait face, “piano keys here, an eighth note for your ear and, what’s that called, a treble clef for a nose.”

His painting captured his wife in a fittingly abstract sense: blonde hair, bright eyes and a curlicue nose.

Regardless of how each portrait turn out, and for the same reason the Scanlons counted the date night a success, they spent time together creatively.

“I gave (the date) to my wife as a night out, something to be away, to be creative and to have fun,” John said. “We’re a little more in our element here than at home making bottles and changing diapers.”

Valentine’s Day is a bench along a sidewalk, beaconing hurried couples to stop, breathe in their surrounding blessings and enjoy life for a moment. It’s those minutes spent in mindfulness together that remind couples why they liked each other, why they dated and why they forged a life together.

And if dinner and a show can’t be stripped from Valentine’s Day, Vicki Willoughby, public relations and marketing manager at Viking Cooking School, offers date nights.

Greenwood-based Viking Range Corp. opened a Cooking School in Ridgeland last summer, its 14th nationally. While Viking holds many of its classes in audience-and-chef format, date nights let couples get their hands into the mix.

The cost runs about $100 a couple, depending on the menu. Considering the education participants get to take back to their home kitchens, use of professional tools, the palate-tempting dinner and the fact others clean up your mess, the package makes for a fine evening out.

Though Valentine’s Day classes are booked, there’s always next year. Better though are other upcoming date nights. Those include the “Dinner to Remember” offering instruction and dining on jumbo lump breadless crabcake with avocado salsa, sliced beef tenderloin with champagne aioli and classic crème brûlée, among other recipes.

The Feb. 19 date night takes couples to Sicily with roasted red pepper bruschetta with homemade fresh mozzarella, spaghetti alla Norma, grilled radicchio and endive salad with balsimico and shaved pecorino.

“These classes are hands-on with up to 16 people per class. You work in teams of four then you sit down with your team and eat what you’ve prepared. It’s interactive as opposed to demonstration classes,” Willoughby said.

Cooking, whether as a couple or family, puts people in close quarters and requires of them an unchoreographed performance. They must produce taste. Eating again joins people within a defined space and with an activity that’s at once independent and personal while communal in its totality.

“We’re just drawing them to an activity where everybody can have a job,” Willoughby said of Cooking School. “Everybody can have a measure in it. The kitchen is the heart of the home, and everybody gets to sit down together and enjoy it.”

That explains the inseparable link of romance and dinner; it pairs admirers with a goal and makes them spend time together.

“Date nights brings couples together, concentrating, focusing, learning yet relaxing. In the end, just enjoying each other and time together,” Willoughby said.

Date night at home can be a living room picnic. Spread a blanket and a European-style dinner of cheeses, prosciutto, grapes, olives, a baguette and Netflix.

Or it can be a back-porch barbeque by candlelight, honey-almond carrots and an apple pie, a meal prepared together and a Brahms concerto backdrop.

Back at Easely Amused, another couple proved they long ago learned the importance of togetherness. At paintbrushes-down time, John Rowe’s portrait of his wife showed his grasp of contrasting colors but it lacked eyes, ears, a mouth and other accoutrements.

Sheri Rowe, a frequent customer, or repeat offender as she calls herself, walked around the table and happily picked up her husband’s brush.

“It shows you how good an artist I am when she has to finish her own portrait,” John Rowe said, with a big grin. “I can’t paint.”

The reason why he came to date night despite his artistic shortcomings?

“I did it so we could come together and she could paint.”

Happy dating.