I was recently asked what I’d like to eat for dinner on my birthday.
This used to be an easy question. It gets harder as you age because your own preferences change. Your sense of obligation to everybody else eating with you may change—a kid never worries about the pizza being awful at Chuck E. Cheese, but even a young adult may not think too much about everybody else if somebody else is paying for it.
Also, you get tired of some favorites because you’ve had them too often. Hopefully you try new things often enough to add some favorites to the list.
I think it changes even more if you’re a foodie and if you like to do a lot of cooking in your household. If the favored meal is happening in the home, there’s often two choices available: a thing you love to eat that you also love to cook and a thing you love to eat that you don’t love cooking or that’s too hard to cook yourself.
If it’s the thing you love to cook, you almost can’t bear to hand it over to anyone else. Especially if it’s something you haven’t cooked from a recipe for decades, that you just know backwards and forwards, such that you can’t even hand it to someone else and tell them to make it.
If it’s a thing you love to eat that’s too hard to cook, you don’t hand it to someone else unless you’re in a two (or more) cook household and it just so happens that’s the other cook’s favorite thing to make. That does sometimes happen with baking and cooking, where there’s a natural division of labor. It might occasionally happen with a family where two partners grew up in different cooking traditions and have their own lines of specialization. But mostly if it’s too hard for you, it’s too hard for everybody, and asking for it means either going out to dinner or watching someone else suffer and probably fall short.
Which leads to the next cul-de-sac, at least for me. The dishes or cuisine that fall into the “too hard for me” category tend to be ones that either have to be done really well at a restaurant or they’ll fail the “this is a favorite meal” test. At which point, that means something more than a nearby Delco restaurant. Which generally means “back to cooking here” unless it’s a weekend or we’re travelling and in a big city with a lot of great restaurants.
Picky, picky, picky—but this is the twisted maze that “I want my favorite meal” leads to for me.
In the former “let’s make it at home” pathway, I thought of chile, I thought of smoked brisket, I thought of grilled shrimp wrapped in basil leaves and prosciutto, I thought of bo ssam, I thought of chicken with forty cloves of garlic, I thought of ramen, I thought of a really great aged ribeye steak, I thought of lasagna, I thought of the black house dal from Dishoom, I thought of a poke bowl and a few other dishes. Mind you, some of these aren’t easy but they’re all things I can make without looking at a recipe and I don’t mind the labor involved.
In the latter “I want someone else to make this”, I thought of tempura, tamales, scratch buttermilk biscuits, homemade raviolis, porchetta, cassoulet, steamed pork belly buns, tandoori (because of the long marinade but also doing a proper cook on it), tangines, and judging from my recent attempt, tahdig (though I wouldn’t quite class the tahdig I’ve had in restaurants in my absolute favorite dishes). Some of those I can cook quite well but it’s a hassle to do them.
Tempura seems like the perfect storm in this regard. I love it when it’s good, but most restaurants you order it in, it’s bad. I’ve made it quite well at home, but it takes precision in making the batter and you have to get it to the plate immediately but you also can’t make enough for everybody in one batch so you’re basically serving one person at a time. Not at all relaxing or social. In terms of eating out, there’s maybe only 3 or 4 places in the Philadelphia metro area that I’d want to order it at.
On the flip side, some of the things I would like to cook as a favorite indulgence are a nuisance in some other way. Getting the tuna that I want to actually eat in a poke bowl, for example, means being really picky about it, but also getting some interesting other toppings that are very fresh. I’d rather make it when I happen to be in a place where I can get the fish I want as opposed to making the trip just to get the fish.
I ended up with the chile. It was a good batch.
Glad it's not just me, Tim. Add the increasing crapitude of many restaurants, and my determination to cook local ingredients at home, I get separation anxiety when I detach from the stove.
Happy birthday!