dailyprompt-2022 – Stories That Are All True

Daily writing prompt

What’s the most money you’ve ever spent on a meal? Was it worth it?

I seriously cannot remember the last time I went all out on a meal, but what I can tell you as a professional cook is that the amount of money that you spend is never the important part- it’s who you allow at your table. You will remember the conversation much more than you’ll ever attribute the success of an outing to the food or the wine.

I prefer to dine with one or two people at a time, because my auditory processing lag doesn’t really allow me to enjoy multiple people talking at once. Three is about the maximum number of people you can have at a table before two conversations emerge at once. I am not stingy- the more the merrier. All I am saying is that my personal preference is small and intimate. Everything is not always up to me.

I can think of two such outings.

The first was after my colonoscopy, I wasn’t feeling as out of it as the doctors promised. I was able to go out to dinner with my sister. We stuffed ourselves on appetizers and seafood at The Chart House, talking about anything and everything. What is always interesting about talking to my sister is that she’s so much younger than me that we remember the same events from wildly different perspectives. Neither is wrong or right, it’s just that a six-year-old’s memories are going to be different than an almost 12-year-old’s, for instance.

The second was my first outing with Josh. We went to the National Aquarium, where I had chicken tenders and he had a hamburger. It wasn’t fancy food that drew me, but a fascinating conversation that went from the national news to how we processed emotions… the kind of conversation that twists your brain and leaves you hungering for more. Josh used to be a journalist, and now he’s a therapist. Therefore, he asks you interesting questions as well as providing a lot of color commentary on the whole world. I have a feeling we will still be talking well into our eighties at this rate, because neither of us have a pull stop when it comes to caring about world events.

The Chart House is much more fancy than the cafe at the National Aquarium. Just because the food was “better” doesn’t mean that I had more fun. It was the quality of the conversation that made each experience unique.

The funniest outing will be introducing Josh to my sister, because they are both ADHD and I might not get a word in edgewise. 😉

What’s the most money you’ve ever spent on a meal? Was it worth it?

I am a cook, therefore I cannot afford to eat all the places I’d really like to go. Since my sister can afford to treat me, she does. But that’s not how I spend money on food and drinks. I lay out serious cash at the grocery store, because I can make food exciting by making a dish, then making a completely new dish out of the leftovers. I buy things at grocery stores that most people just think, “it’s too much work.” I will roll sushi at home. I will soak beans overnight so that I don’t need the convenience of cans. I will wash rice. I will do all the things it takes to be an awesome prep cook so that I’m comfortable on the line at home as a solo act.

The only thing I don’t do is buy meat at the grocery anymore. It’s fine if I’m eating out at a restaurant. I just don’t like wondering if it’s going to spoil, or the whole process it takes to thaw things without cooking them. I don’t want to leave chicken in the sink with water dripping down because my housemates will either get soap in it or try to clean it up. I have had them throw away things when I went upstairs to get my phone.

I think the most money bit comes from having the “keeping up appearances” marriage first. We ate a lot of money trying to be social with our ExxonMobil friends. We went to bars and restaurants that cost a lot, but we never really got anything substantial out of them. There’s only one thing I remember from that time in my life with clarity. It was a brewpub out in Fairfax that made banana clove beer. The combination of lightly sweet banana (not artificial) with Belgian spices made my palate sing. This was before I met Dana, before I went to her mini culinary school. The palate was there, I just wasn’t putting energy in to the right direction.

Meeting Dana brought a lot of things together. The above paragraph is why we would have had a lot of fun in DC together. The thing is, though, I had to get away from her to become a better person, and I hope she feels the same way about me- that we are both wonderful people, but we do not need to be together to know that. We’ve checked.

It would have seemed less weird to the outside world if we’d moved to DC together, but the plan was always to end up here eventually. It’s an adventure we wanted to go on together, and when we split, I still had fire in the belly to do it.

It made it look to the outside world that I was chasing a girl, and I did nothing to help myself out there, but I just didn’t care. It wasn’t worth the energy to figure out how to care about so many things that were beyond my control. Getting the girl in the end would have been nice, but it wasn’t necessary. She and DC are not synonymous in that if I’d suddenly taken off to a city I knew nothing about and the only thing other people knew is that she was there, I’d allow everyone to raise eyebrows at me. Clearly that’s insane.

But when you’re presented with a move that will solve every need including getting the girl? We’re getting somewhere. That’s because there was never any pressure on the relationship to succeed. Washington is big enough to hold both of us, even at full strength.

I stopped thinking about food a few paragraphs ago because I’m still reeling after getting an e-mail from Supergrover that I don’t know what to do with. I’m just spiraling out in my little neurodivergent head because she is bound and determined to wall off and let me know she thinks I’m not that great a writer because I paint my feelings as fact and everything is all about me.

This is my web site. I don’t project feelings onto other people unless they’re interacting with me and I am trying to explain it. No one else in her life has made any move to get to know me, so what they think is all her business and none of mine….. but it would be my business if I knew what she was talking about.

I am only an authority on me and what I perceive.

What I perceive is that prepackaged food holds no nutrition, and very few people are willing to create a dish without shortcuts.

Wash the rice. Soak the beans. Dice the mirepoix.

The most expensive ingredient in food and relationships is time.