Sometimes it's not About the Food

Grilled Croaker
The whole fish, and nothing but the fish.

Some days, it’s about the process. The First Reader and I had a very nice lunch-fest yesterday at Yung’s Café in Fairborn, our favorite Korean restaurant. I ordered the grilled croaker, which was a thing of beauty. Normally we chat while we are eating, but this was a remarkably silent meal for us, because I was concentrating on deconstructing a whole fish with chopsticks only, and avoiding most of the bones. It was delicious, but a process.

Yung's Cafe
The feast, which is surprisingly affordable for being copious and beautiful food.

Eating the fish reminded me of another fishy meal, one that was a whole day in the making. It started with lunchtime at the creek, eating hotdogs and marshmallows over a campfire, and ended with a fish-fry in a big cast-iron skillet. Some meals aren’t about the food, they are about the process, and the memories, and knowing that it happened once, and will never happen again. A singularity of a meal.

campfire cooking
Hotdog on a stick, over an open fire. Ambrosia!
campfire cooking
sticks: man’s first cooking utensils.
outdoor food
Marshmallows! Toasty goodness.
fishing
The fisherman!
Fishing
Perch, trout, pickerel, all pretty and slimy.
fish fry
Fish fry up! For scale, that’s a 14 inch cast iron skillet.
kids fishing
Fishie!

Comments

One response to “Sometimes it's not About the Food”

  1.  Avatar
    Anonymous

    Some of my most memorable childhood memories are fishing with my parents and my younger brother, roasting weiners and marshmallows in the back yard, or just sitting around talking with my many, many cousins that lived nearby. That’s one of several reasons we allow Timmy to visit his biological grandparents every other weekend.