Eating Snails: A Romantic Valentine's Day Dinner

If I were a different sort of person, I'd try to fool readers into believing that this year I had a romantic Valentine's Day dinner with my husband-- complete with escargot-- to remind ourselves of our honeymoon in Paris.

Escargot To-Go, Feb. 14, 2011.

The truth is that my husband and I decided that it wasn't worth the effort to try to find a babysitter on Valentine's Day.  But we're always up for amusing and horrifying the children, so we decided to eat escargot on The Big Day of Love.

We were too lazy to even get take-out on what we knew would be a busy day for all our favorite restaurants.  Instead, we purchased our Valentine's Day meal from our local French cheese shop.   The best part about our meal was the dessert-- handmade chocolate truffles and chocolate-covered candied orange peel.  This part of the dinner DID remind me of our honeymoon in Paris.  I still dream of visiting Fouchon with my husband of 24 hours and the way Fouchon's mouth-watering slivers of chocolate-covered orange peel cured me of a nasty case jet-lag and general post-wedding overwhelm.  (My husband still credits Fouchon with saving our marriage... and our honeymoon.)  I hope to replive the experience (at least the eating part) by making candied orange peel at home using oranges growing in our own backyard sometime soon.  But I digress.

The cheese and fresh baguette were also delicious, although in all the excitement about the snails forgot to eat them on Valentine's Day and actually had to have a Valentine's Day "do-over" the next day.  I can't remember what we ate for our main course-- it was something previously frozen and not that great.  We should have known better, but we did all get a good laugh out of it.  And our daughters ended up with a great shell collection once we washed out the "escargot" shells.