About nine years ago, about on this day, I met a man.
Before you assume this is one of those love stories, let me correct you. It’s a love story to food. It’s a love story to the food he is always pushing me to try, to taste, to savor. When we met, I was vegan (ish) and very hardcore vegetarian. I would not touch anything that meat had touched, which included throwing away sauté pans my roommate had cooked hot dogs in. NO. But I met this man, and through a combination of factors that included several amazing farmers, some miscellaneous health problems, and one amazing acupuncturist, I started eating meat.
He cooked me my first steak. We were at his house and it was gray and rainy and I was in the strangely dark little kitchen making a salad and I was so nervous. And we sat on the couch and I ate the steak and we watched Battlestar Galactica and it was glorious, and I never went back. There was something momentous about that, about the moment I went back to eating meat (after nearly ten years). And this person had guided me back, and my food would never be the same.
There was this time we went to Las Vegas with my parents- not our ideal choice of vacation, but hey, why not- and we wandered about a bit and ended up at this South American (?) restaurant, eating ceviche, and wondering why in the world we were sitting in the middle of a giant desert eating ceviche. Fish had to fly hundreds of miles to be there to make ceviche- something was clearly wrong with this picture. And he got that. On our first real date (when I awkwardly invited my friends, because I felt weird) he declined tomatoes on his burger because they were out of season, and I’m pretty sure that’s the moment I fell in love.
Our lives are defined by the food we eat. At least one night a week, we discuss what’s in season, what’s in the garden, what we can make for dinner. There is never a suggestion of eating something that is out of season, or out of character for our humble kitchen. I don’t say that to brag or imply that our way of doing things is better than others, it’s just the way we live. We just bought a house together and decided not to have a garden (this season), because we wanted to take the time to prep the soil and learn where there is shade/flooding/weeds/all the things and so this is our first spring in the last seven springs without our own peas and carrots and overwintered garlic. I looked at garlic scapes at the market and thought- I can’t possibly pay money. For garlic scapes. Normally I have a zillion of them. But this year I don’t. And honestly we are floundering, trying to figure out how to eat without our own food. We’re trying to learn how to live in this new environment and so far we are relying heavily on our freezer, which fortunately still has our garden grown produce from last year.
But soon we will need to adapt, and that was the original intent of this story. On that same trip to Vegas, our first night there, we went to some kind of Asian fusion restaurant. I have no idea what I ordered, but he ordered jellyfish and octopus. I remember sitting at this restaurant, jet lagged, half asleep, on some kind of trip because of the strangely bright lighting and almost cafeteria style seating and the way it contrasted with the blown glass flowers and fish that made up the décor, looking across the table at this guy who would look at a menu and say, yeah, jellyfish sounds great. But that’s him.
He taught me to eat sushi, which I was always scared of, and which I am still fairly conservative in my ordering (basically: tuna). On our honeymoon we went to Hawaii and he ordered some kind of raw ahi (tuna) and tobiko, and I still to this day rave about it as the best bite I have ever put in my mouth. Now, did the vegan, timid, terrified version of me who basically lived on noodles ever think she would be sitting at a dark table on an island eating fish eggs and raw fish? Definitely not. But I did, and I still think there is no way to improve.
This is the man who on one notable occasion got a saw out of the garage because I had been offered some cow leg bones, which I stuck in the backseat of my car (aside: you probably shouldn’t sit in the backseat of my car), brought home, and said: let’s make some broth! The bones were too big for my stockpot, so he sawed them into smaller pieces, and lo, we made some broth. He has helped me cut up fat for lard, picked apart a pig head, pulled out the eyeballs when they grossed me out, cut up fish for stock, and cleaned up after many of my THIS IS SUCH A GREAT IDEA disasters when tomatoes/fruit/veggies have exploded all over our kitchen and made a gigantic mess. This is the man who when, on a work trip/vacation in Utah, ordered me marrow bones two nights in a row. (It’s the capers.) This is the man who tolerates all of my experiments, including many homebrewing adventures.
And he’s also the one that’s convinced me to try so many new foods. I had a debilitating fear of eating eggs- but I’m slowly coming around to the concept. I eat raw fish. In fact, I LOVE raw fish. I will eat just about anything (except eyes, they are still too weird). We love duck (rare) and anything fatty and just about anything with fish eggs (though I am still coming around to fried roe). We have eaten muskrat and he loves soft shelled crabs. We are currently obsessed with mushrooms and eat them any way we can. He understands my complete fascination with all the colors of the beans we grow every year and use for every conceivable dish. Oh yeah, and he really loves pickles.
In long and short, happy anniversary. I’m glad you convinced me to eat meat.