Loving snails with garlic and more of Dinan
If there’s one French food item that I think should be easy for most Asians to really love, it’s escargot. The reason is that escargot is kind of a texture dish, which you normally don’t see in French cooking. Snails don’t taste like much, I don’t think, but they are transformed into something awesome when you add butter, garlic, and parsley in the correct proportions. Just like how a Chinese guy might order some tripe at dim sum, it’s kind of the same thing. The item simply is a sauce delivery vehicle.
And what seals the deal is that there’s no cheese in most escargot preparations. Then when there’s sauce leftover, you just schmear that sauce all over some good French bread, which is super easy to find in France because average bread here is good. So when you do the sauce + bread thing, it’s basically garlic bread, and who doesn’t like garlic bread?
We had already been to Dinan, France already during this trip to pick up a yule log, but we decided to go back because apparently in addition to the cool looking stone buildings, there’s a well-preserved medieval city wall for tourists to gawk. It was cool to see that a long long ass time ago, this thing was what kept bad guys out. And when you look down, it seems like it would have been pretty imposing.
Looking down at the historic town of Dinan from the wall, it just felt like the most picturesque thing ever. It was like living in a post card. Cobblestone streets, old buildings, and roofs that look like they came out of a movie set. I felt really lucky in that moment. Normally life is going to work five days a week on a crowded train and whine through MTA making the train go local on the weekends. However, there are small moments here and there really let me see that I won the Earth lottery to be living in the U.S, married to a wonderful French woman, and getting to see a part of the world that most people only see in books. Maybe there’s going to be suburbs in my future, but for now, it’s pretty good.
Posted by Danny on December 30, 2014 at 7:18 am
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