A Most Memorable Meal

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?