Five anecdotes about perfect meals.

The Perfect Diet Meal
Over the past few days, I've been moving from the early stage of my diet to a more restrictive intermediate stage. Diets are often difficult for me because of the whole self-denial thing. Today I discovered the perfect food, though, one that meets all my dietary requirements and one that I love. I could eat it for every meal.

In fact, if I ate it for three meals a day (and ate nothing else), here's what my dietary breakdown would be:

1275 calories
35g fat (15g sat) 28%
156g carb (48g fib) 39%
93g pro 33%

Those stats are as good as I could possibly hope to achieve at the end of a day. This one food would give me lots of fiber and protein, keep my saturated fat reasonably low, and fill me up.

(Consuming this miracle food would give me 5625mg of sodium, which is way too much, but then I'm getting 3500mg a day on average, anyhow. I'd just drink more water.)

Best of all, it's a food that I've loved since childhood.

What is it?

Nalley original chili with beans.

Yum.

I'll have to stop at Safeway on the way home. They've got it on sale for 99-cents a can. I'm gonna stock up. Maybe I can buy several cases.

The Perfect Burger
Kris and I seized the warm, clear weather yesterday as an opportunity to complete some long-neglected yard work. I mowed the lawn. I pruned plants back from the garage and workshop. I spent two hours trimming the boxwood (with the electric trimmer) and probably have two hours left to go.

When we ran out of steam at seven o'clock, I grilled hamburgers using fresh 20% lean (ha!) ground beef. I cut a huge slice of onion and placed it on the hamburger bun (along with a thick lake of ketchup). I mixed a cold gin fizz.

Holy cats!

We both agreed those burgers were fantastic, some of the best burgers we'd ever had. Our hard work and hearty appetites made them taste even better.

We usually get 7% lean ground beef when we buy fresh, and lately we've been using frozen pre-formed patties. The burgers we made yesterday kick ass on any others we've made at home. Hello, 20% lean ground beef.

The Perfect Pizza
Once long ago, when the world was young, I went Christmas shopping at Clackamas Town Center with Jeff and Paul. (This was when Clackamas Town Center was new.) We combed the mall for bargains, and after a couple of hours we found ourselves exhausted and hungry.

"Where should we eat?" I asked.

"Let's get pizza," Jeff said.

"There's a place across the street," Paul said.

And so we went across the street for pizza. We ordered a single large pepperoni pizza. It seemed to take h-o-u-r-s to arrive. When the pizza finally came, we devoured it in silence (save for snorts and grunts).

"Wow!" we said when we had finished (which didn't take us long). "Wow!"

Even now, twenty years later, each of us remembers the Best Pizza Ever.

The Perfect Restaurant Meal
Though Kris and I are foodies now, this hasn't always been the case. In 1998, when we returned to Victoria BC for our five-year wedding anniversary, we wouldn't dream of paying more than $10 or $15 each for a meal, not even a nice one. But then, we'd never really had a nice meal.

On our trip to the Butchart Gardens, neither of us felt like dining in the cafeteria. "Let's try The Dining Room," suggested Kris.

"It looks expensive," I said.

When the server brought the smoked salmon appetizer, all my worst fears were confirmed. A thin crispy bagel-like thing stood in the center of a large, white plate. A few thin strips of seemingly raw salmon were draped through the center of the thin crispy bagel-like thing. The whole was surrounded by some oniony stuff, which (at the time) looked unappealing.

Still, I'd ordered this mess, and was going to pay for it, so I took a bite.

Holy cats!

The food was a revelation. I was dumbfounded.

The rest of the dinner — the soup, the entree, the dessert — is a blur. I have dim recollections of a chowder of sorts, and of a chocolately mousse, but who knows?

All that matters is that this was the transformative restaurant experience in my life. After this, Kris and I found ourselves more willing to spend money for food.

Now, once-in-a-while, we're willing to drop $100 or more on a meal. Good restaurant food is one of the best things in life.

(Quick note: our favorite restaurant dessert remains South Park's chocolate crostata.)

The Perfect Dinner Party
Better than restaurants are dinner parties.

The food may not be quite as good as that you can obtain in a restaurant, but it's still damn good. At a dinner party, the hosts go all out, preparing their best dishes with great care. The food is fantastic. It may not quite match a fine restaurant meal, but the conversation and companionship more than compensate.

The fall/winter dinner party season is a yearly highlight: Mac and Pam's harvest meal, Craig's birthday meal, our Friend Thanksgiving, Jeremy and Jennifer's spring fling, and the other meals along the way.

I have fond memories of last year's Friend Thanksgiving, but really: each dinner party is perfect in its own way.

On this day at foldedspace.org

2003 — Absence and the Heart   It is the absence of something followed by its return that helps us to appreciate it most fully.

2002 — South Korea 1, United States 1   I'm up late watching the World Cup soccer match between the United States and South Korea.