Are there any special food dishes associated with Valentine's Day?

Answer 1

Traditional Valentine's Day foods are more about mood than specific dishes. Romantic is the theme and mood for the day. If you make the mood romantic with candles and flowers and low lighting, soft romantic music, or other adjustments of the ambiance, you could serve Hot Dogs (well, not really, but they are red; choose steaks instead). You can never fail if you make your sweetheart's favorite dish. The Valentine's Day meal is about them and celebrating your relationship with them.

A second theme for Valentine's Day foods is "Red". Many creative cooks try to incorporate red dishes to represent the hearts of Valentine's Day. Often this is done especially with the dessert dishes. Red Velvet cake is a good choice, see the related links for a recipe for this beautiful dark red and yummy dessert cake. Or start with a bowl of warm or cold borscht (see recipe link below), but be sure this won't be a turn off if your sweetie isn't an adventurous eater. End with a beautiful plate of chocolate dipped red strawberries (you can buy chocolate ready to use for this in the baking/cake icing aisle of many groceries). Be sure you can find big beautiful fresh strawberries to use, best are those sold for the purpose; these are big, shaped beautifully, and still have stems to make dipping and eating with your fingers easy and non-messy. Open a nice bottle of champagne to go with the chocolate dipped strawberries, a semi-sec is usually better than a dry or extra dry brut for this.*

Finally, chocolate, or dishes with chocolate in them, is third theme for Valentine's Day foods. You can be traditional, such as the heart-shaped box of chocolates tied with a bow, or again, blow them away with the chocolate-dipped strawberries mentioned above, or be very creative and serve chicken mole (pronounced "mo-LAY"), which is a Mexican dish that uses chocolate in the sauce for the meat (see link for recipe below this would be a true labor of love, since it does take time and many ingredients to make this dish).

*However, a very good sparkling wine/Champagne that is extremely well-priced today for this is CristalinoCava Brut (choose the brut not the extra dry brut). You can find this for under $8/bottle. Wine Critics say: "...from Spain, made from the grape varietals Macabeo 50%, Parellada 35% and Xarello 15%. Produced by Jaume Serra, this lovely sparkler offers a fine alternative to Champagne at less than half the price".

See links (author is in no way affiliated with this brand, just a happy oenophile).