I’ve had kind of a shitty, stressful week. Neighbor’s dog who barks 24/7, stress with my employer, hassles with my roommates. You know the drill.
However, today, thanks to the magic of gainful employment, I was able to go get stuff for a good dinner for everyone in the house: Chateaubriand, artichoke, salad with butter lettuce & kiwifruit, pasta. Now we’re all sitting around, feeling like Haroun al Raschid in the Arabian Nights – good humoured, benevolent, expansive.
I am often amazed at the power of food in all its delightful facets and manifestations to make one feel that all is well with the world.
Tell me your stories of the awesome power of food – maybe your first meeting with your future mother-in-law was saved by some savory pilaf; maybe a date gone awry came back together almost magically over canneloni. Maybe you won someone’s heart with just the right kind of chocolate.
He toasted the kaiser roll and made garlic mayo and caramelized onions. Then he melted sharp cheddar on top of the beef. Then he added fried eggplant. HOLY COW!
I was 14 and had just spent 10 days working with my dad as a field-hand on a geological survey around Mt. Isa. We were living out of the back of a 4WD the entire time and on dried rations and cured meat for the last few days of the trip. Drinking water was limited to what we could carry in the vehicle tanks and top up from any bores we went past.
We came back into town on the way through to the main field camp at about 8am, very tired, hot, dusty, dirty (not enough water for anything but a quick wipe-down and brushing teeth) and just ready to stop everything for a while and find a shady place to sleep.
My dad pulled over on the main street and went into a bakery, then came back out with a fresh, hot loaf of bread and two bottles of ice-cold milk. We just sat on the curb next to the car and had the best breakfast of my life (rolling back into base camp was another amazing experience).
Lots of my food stories seem involve some form of camping/outdoors activity.
A few weeks ago, after getting home from work. I’d had an awful day (I hated the job I was in at the time), not a lot of sleep due to everyone else in the family having the flu, kept dropping things in the kitchen - cups, knifes, food, the lot.
I had finally got both the boys to sleep and was sitting on the bed feeling too drained to even go have a shower when my wife brought me in a cup of (decaf) coffee with a shot of Kahlua in it. My wife is awesome.
A couple weekends ago - we were having the most awful weekend ever. The dog was throwing up, we were broke, bills were due, we were arguing, I wasn’t feeling well, storms were supposed to be rolling in and we were both feeling it - just everything that could have gone wrong was going wrong.
My husand made ribs that Sunday night - with twice baked potatoes. Everything became better. It’s hard to explain - that dinner changed my entire outlook - and seriously, everything became better and somehow I could now cope when I was previously, just before dinner, about at the end of my rope.
I’d been in Moscow for a week in June and it was record-breakingly hot (Europe usually is when I go there). Two days before I left it got so hot that a transformer blew and half the city was without power for a few hours. The city released a solemn statement that “no water treatment facilities were compromised by this outage”. Which means a water treatment facility was compromised by the outage.
That night I woke up with the worst case of gastroenteritis I’ve ever had. I had to stay in my room all day and was worried about being able to make the flights home. But come the morning of my departure, I was determined to get out, so I got up and got in the taxi to Domodedeva.
It was hot there. Security took an hour to get through. The terminal was stifling. I felt too ill to eat on the flight to London. I had to literally RUN through Heathrow to make my flight–I had like 45 minutes to deplane, get through Heathrow’s Very Special Security, take a bus to another terminal, and run through several miles of corridors to my gate.
By the time I got to my seat on the plane to New York, I felt almost dead. I just laid there, comatose, as the plane took off and reached altitude.
And then they served the meal. It was a British Airways flight, and the meal was full English breakfast. And I was suddenly ravenous. I ate the whole thing and it was the most glorious meal I’ve had in my life. Hot, brown, fairytale magical the way everything from Britain is. I felt soooooo happy.
I had just learned that my roommate of only three months was movng to Ireland. Still exhausted from the last move, and recovering from a harsh 3 day flu, I dragged myself down the block to Silver Diner for a late Sat am breakfast. I asked the waitress to pelase bring me whatever might be gentle on my newly recovering stomach.
She brought back plain pancakes, a huge glass of ice water, a cup of hot tea and a bowl of sliced bananas. I walked in there sad, exhausted and ill. I walked out well and thoroughly on the mend.
