Random Positivity Thread: Happy Food Memories - awful.systems
Once I asked a friend of mine, “What was the best meal you ever had?” He thought
about it a moment and then replied, “A stick of pepperoni dipped in peanut
butter… after a day hiking the AT.” (He’d actually hiked the whole Appalachian
Trail, as I recall.) Years before that, a different friend asked me the same
question. The one item that came to mind above all others was the dessert course
at a resort my family visited when I was a child, on a snorkeling trip to the
Caribbean. I don’t think I’ve had a sopapilla that good since. And sure,
childhood taste buds and all, but that’s kind of the point: the best subjective
impression is the best subjective impression. One of the best things I’ve ever
made myself was early in the first COVID season. I was throwing together a soup
of whatnot, and I made a broth of soy sauce, mirin, gochujang, garlic and
probably a few other things. When I had a taste, it was knee-bucklingly good. I
haven’t hit the proportions just right again, or something; everything I’ve
tried in that genre has been nice, but not that nice. Dad was the sort who’d try
a new thing at a restaurant and then try and figure out how to make it at home.
He was good at it, too. I picked up that habit, a bit. My white whale is the
suanla chaoshou/suan la chow show/swans from Mary Chung’s in Cambridge, MA. For
that, I have to go by memory, since the restaurant closed years ago, and I have
to adapt it to my current diet, since I went mostly-vegan vegetarian. There’s a
dumpling-sauce recipe from 1993
[https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mjw/recipes/sauces/potsticker-dipping/potsticker-dipping-sauce-3.html]
that is perfectly serviceable, but I tried it with three different chili pastes
and it just wasn’t the same. I think it was adapted for home cooks of the early
'90s and left out doubanjiang, which a Sichuan restaurant would have had on
hand. A couple heaping teaspoons of that brought the flavor a lot closer…
Anywhoo. Do you folks have food memories that stand out? Best ever pizza?
Cookies that you’d like to find again?
