"Fish. Not afraid to dive." - Bonnie Pink, Fish
Prompt 11: Best Meal
What is the best meal or best food that you have eaten all year? Did you make it? Did you get it at a restaurant? Do your best to describe the food and the experience with us.
Cibubur is a suburb of Jakarta known for it's shrimping. At least that's what we were told by our hosts as we arrived for a post-wedding meal with our new family in Indonesia.
I've had more elegant meals this year. The tasting menu at Rivera in February. Nearly every meal we had in New Orleans in May. Our many excursions to Sushi Yuzu. Nothing, however, was as delightful and visceral an experience as this feast of fish and shrimp and awesome.
We sat in a hut with our shoes off and low to the ground. I say ground, but actually, we were over a koi pond flush with orange and white and yellow finned friends. As rain showers unsettled the surface, we joined in, tossing in feed of our own. Serving the fish before they fed us.
The wait staff brought out plate after plate of freshly fried and grilled fish, head on, caught just that day, and wonderful. We ate with our hands, taking a bit of the sticky rice into our palm, ripped off a piece of fish and then shoveled int our mouths.
After the first bite, I let out a moan of delight. My eyes got big and then I began to dig in rapidly. And the plates kept coming. Grilled shrimp, whole and on skewers; king crab cooked to perfection; vegetables that we mostly ignored.
It was the best meal because it was the most memorable. I had traveled further than I ever had to a culture I knew so little about only to find the company of new friends and family who love what I love about food -- how it brings people together, how it reveals so much about who we are and what we care about.
How a single bite of food can be a revelation: I'm in heaven. I'm home.
Soundtrack to this post
- More Fish by Raekwon and Ghostface Killah
- Fish by Bonnie Pink
- Weird Fishes/Arpeggi by Radiohead
- Superfast Jellyfish by Gorillaz
- Fish (w/ Cappadonna & Raekwon) by Ghostface Killah
- Edure 2 Fish (remix) by Oddisee
- Fish Head by Slim & The Soulful Saints
- With the Fishes by French Kicks
- Otha Fish by The Pharcyde
- Jellyfish by Ghostface Killah