Creating recipes has been one of my life-long passions. My mother has a recipe I created when I was
nine. It’s hand-written – in cursive – which tells you how old I really
am. I love to try and recreate food I’ve
had in restaurants and can while away hours reading a good cookbook.
Experimentation is my favorite way of cooking – trying new
recipes, tweaking old one, or just starting with a list of ingredients and
figuring out what to do with them. Luckily, I have lot of friends who like to eat
and who don’t care if I break that rule of “never serve anything to company
that you haven’t made before”. Usually,
it turns out okay; sometimes great; and the few times it’s awful. I’ve always had a back-up plan.
On the flip side -- because there has to be a flip side -- I’m
married to a man who calls himself a Carnivore.
Just as a Vegetarian won’t eat meat, a Carnivore won’t eat vegetables –
especially not raw ones -- or most spices – especially not hot ones – and certainly
not anything that wasn’t already in his eating repertoire by the time he was
five. Grains are good, especially when
lathered with gravy. But, the best is
meat. Unadorned, grilled meat
works. Better is crusty, fried meat or
slow cooked meat bathed in barbecue sauce.
And, bacon, for my southern Carnivore, has always been a huge hit, even before
the recent bacon craze.
I personally don’t eat bacon and I don’t like to cook
it. So, when Bill talks me into it, I
get a lot and fry it outside over a propane grill. One summer day, several years ago, I came
home from the warehouse club with five pounds of bacon. It was a beautiful day, so I figured I’d take
a magazine with me and flip through it as the bacon cooked. About midway through the first pound, Bill
showed up with our neighbor, Doug.
“I invited Doug for dinner,” he said.
“Dinner?” I thought wildly.
“I don’t have anything planned for dinner!”
“Um, what were you thinking?” I asked.
He stared at me like I’d lost my mind. “Bacon.”
Our neighbor Doug is a world-travelling gourmand. He keeps a beautiful garden, which I’m, thankfully,
invited to raid. He even has a grape
arbor that I can pick leaves from to make stuffed grape leaves. We spent a lovely afternoon together once when
I showed him how to make them. He’s been
over for dinner lots of time. But never
for just bacon.
Bill handed him a canned drink and we spent the next hour or
so hanging around the grill. They’d grab
hot pieces off the paper towel where I put them to drain after I removed them
from the grease. I think they went
through about a pound each before they called it quits.
Doug thanked us for the delightful afternoon and went home,
presumable to lie on the bed groaning from all the fat he’d inhaled. At least that’s what Bill did.
As I said, this was years ago. But, even now, when we get to talking, Doug often
tells me that afternoon scarfing bacon easily made his Top Ten List of most
memorable meals. After all the recipes I’ve
invented and all the meals I’ve served, that’s the one that made someone’s Top
Ten List. I suppose it is better than getting there because I gave everyone
food poisoning. Or because I made
something so horrible no one would eat it.
I will admit, for example, that one of my most memorable meals involved
food so bad that several of us, including my very pregnant friend, Connie, had
to sneak out to Red Robin to get some food we could eat before Connie passed
out from hunger. I don’t think the bacon
was awful. After all, they both ate a
lot. And, Doug insists the meal isn’t on his worst meals list, just his list of
most memorable ones.
I know the meal isn’t
just about the food – the ambience and the company really do matter. A pound of bacon sitting at a cluttered
kitchen table wouldn’t be the same as bacon eaten hot out of the frying pan on
a clear Colorado summer day with the foothills as the background and an eagle
flying over, hoping for a piece of his own.
Ambience and company.
That’s why people with discerning food tastes still like the greasy
spoon joints of their childhood alongside of their favorite five star
restaurants. But, when the food is
excellent, so much the better.
So, I’ll keep striving to make someone else’s most memorable
meal list, with some other meal. Hopefully one that requires just a little more
skill and finesse. Hopefully one with a
little more balance in taste and color.
Hopefully one that doesn’t send the eaters to bed in a grease overload
for the rest of the day.
Do you have a list of most memorable meals? Is bacon on that list?
