1) My wife’s homemade crab cakes.
No doubt about it, this is number one. Because we don’t often get to spend lots of money on food, and she makes them right— ‘right’ being defined as more crab than cake, the proper amount of Old Bay, the correct amount of exquisite mustard…mmmm. Accompanied by freshly fried French Fries, maybe a nice salad and sorbet. Delicious.
Of course, it’s not the crab cakes that I love. It’s her, and the recognition that when we have crabcakes, we’re doing something special. It’s usually after the troupe has trundled off to bed, and there is time to settle down and just enjoy each other’s company.
Crab cakes are the definition of living well, for me, because they conjure her.
2) Thanksgiving dinner (Milan, Italy, 1996)
In November of 1996, I had the best meal up to that point in my life. I was a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Milan, Italy. I loved Italy. I loved Milan. I loved the Italian people, and all the other people we taught and worked with (Milan’s a very international city; we had friends from Peru, Senegal, Mauritius, Sri Lanka, Benin Republic, Ecuador…). I loved the work I did.
My mission was the first time in my life that I’d formed close friendships with other guys. The other missionaries I served with during that time of my life had an enormous effect on me– I could not have asked for better friends.
We saved our money for about two months in order to make a REAL Thanksgiving dinner. We ordered a modest turkey (it came to the market with feathers still attached); we scoured the open markets for pumpkins (we looked for a long time…) to make pumpkin pie. My good friend, Kent Roper made pumpkin pie from scratch. FROM SCRATCH. With real, freaking pumpkins! To that point, I wasn’t quite certain that pumpkin pie was actually made with pumpkins.
We had green jell-0. Now, in Mormon circles, green jello is apparently some sort of commestible staple, like rice or bread. I did not grow up in Utah, Idaho, California, Nevada, or Arizona; I grew up in Texas, where if people saw you eating green jello, they’d shoot your face off. It just wasn’t done. But this was good. It was as ugly as sin, but oh, man…so good.
We had homemade stuffing. We had homemade pie. Bannana bread, brownies, everything homemade. That we made ourselves, in our tiny kitchen, with the ridiculously tiny Italian stoves. We stayed up all night baking and making sure the turkey didn’t set the apartment on fire.
3) Christmas Dinner, circa 1982
I remember this dinner because it was the first time I had lobster.
I have a great family. My parents are normal, well-adjusted adults; my brothers are pretty fantastic, too. When I was around 8, Mom wanted to do something different for Christmas dinner. ‘Different’ meant ordering a lobster, having it delivered, and cooking it at home.
I don’t think any of us were prepared for the strangeness of having a lobster for Christmas dinner. There was only the one, and although it was big (according to an 8 year-old’s point of view), I don’t know that it was capable of feeding a family of five. In my memory, we also had spaghetti that afternoon; but maybe I’m remembering wrong.
That qualifies as a ‘best meal ever’ because it represents what I love about my family: we’re fairly normal folks, but there are occasionally these deeply weird quirks in our history that identify us; the glue that seals us together.