This Week's Specials

September 7, 2016

Yesterday, I made a list of all the foods I want to eat before I leave.

They range from my favorite Korean dishes to meals at restaurants frequented by my family to things that my mom can make better than anyone (one entry was just “Mom’s bread—all”). I had to sift back through countless culinary memories, narrowing down every course consumed to the top twenty or twenty-five that eventually made the list. With such a task came a flood of sensory experiences, a catalogue of the twists and turns in the twelve years I have lived in North Carolina, familiarizing myself with home cooking, the fare of various quirky Chapel Hill-Carrboro-Durham restaurants, Southern food. The list (scrawled on a piece of notebook paper that my mom has since thrown away—so much for keepsakes) represents the development of my appetite, the whims of my palate (throwback to when I thought I didn’t like butter), the firsts that have since become cherished (first taste of sweet tea, first scoop of Maple View Farms ice cream, first hushpuppy). It is one of my more honest manifestations, because you can never really lie about your favorite foods. They are or they aren’t. And this list embodies everything that is, and some that have been for a while.

I went to Maple View Farms (the store out in Hillsborough) for the first time the summer I moved to NC. It was a hotspot for families with young children, the place where I actually met a girl who remains one of my closest and oldest friends to this day. But back then, shy at six and new to the town, I clung to my mom and ordered a scoop of mint chocolate chip, a flavor that would later change my life. (Okay, maybe not that dramatic.) Still, it would become an essential, bringing with it the nostalgia of childhood, of roving the field and trees beside Maple View, pretending to be princesses or explorers or fairies. Whenever a North Carolina summer drenches the town, or even if I’m just sad and need some comfort food and The Notebook to cheer me up, I crack open a carton. It never fails.

I have discovered other treasures, buried in the depths of cafes, restaurants, my own home. Acme in Carrboro serves homemade donuts every week for Sunday brunch. Ever since my family learned this, it has become a consistent favorite for birthday meals or post-workout rewards. Dame’s Chicken and Waffles is just one of the most brilliant concepts invented by mankind. Melo Trattoria carries some of the best Italian cuisine and tiramisu (second only to my mom’s) that I have ever eaten.

I’m obsessed with food. Maybe that’s why it is so central to many of the most important parts of my life. The bread and tapas and meat of Spain. The Korean barbecue that we sometimes cook at the table, using a small portable stove. (There is a Korean barbecue restaurant in DC that is so good that the Kim family has been known to make weekend trips there, just to eat its food. It’s happened once. Maybe twice. Okay, maybe more than twice.) The first peanut butter and jelly sandwich I ever tried, my junior year of high school, after completing an eight-mile, miserably cold, unequivocally awesome mountain run with some equally insane kids from my cross-country team. The Vermonster (twenty scoops of Ben and Jerry’s) consumed one summer evening after weight training—the three guys who ended up eating the majority of the ice cream spent that night curled around their stomachs, aching from the ordeal of shoveling nearly fifteen scoops down their throats long after they wanted to stop. The s’mores passed around the bonfires with friends, music and embers and our voices spiraling up towards the stars, the entire universe unfolding above our heads. Each and every family meal, where we linger after we are done eating, talking about our days, our pet peeves, our lives.

My favorite memories come from the post-run team dinners when we push tables together and gather in a jumble of laughter and jokes and loud conversation. They are made in the countless lunches spent on an English-classroom floor or the concrete block in the center of our high school quad, legs and smiles and words overlapping into a youthful mess. They wrap themselves in the smell of a Toledo bakery, where we bought three pastries for the price of two and devoured them in the corner, all the while marveling at their deliciousness; they remain as vibrant as the taste of my mom’s homemade bread on my tongue, pulling apart in my hands, so readily dissected yet so unwillingly forgotten.

My list includes Acme, Dame’s, Maple View. I have added Korean barbecue, fresh green onions tossed in a spicy red chili sauce, eggplant lasagna, salad with seared tuna, tostadas topped with avocado and lettuce and cilantro and mangoes. But each entry is layered, like the cake my mom carefully frosted with Korean whipped cream for Father’s Day; underneath lay the hours she poured into it, the whirring of her Kitchen Aid mixer—her most beloved possession—as she heated eggs and sugar and added melted butter, the gentle way in which she coaxed each flavor into existence. An exquisite final product. The time it took to get there.

Food has been the source of many goodbyes. Over brunches and desserts and last suppers, I have watched each of my friends leave for college, readying themselves for another adventure beyond this one. With just a week left, I, too, am beginning to let go.

I have collected eighteen years of layered cakes, of potlucks, of family and friend gatherings, of picnics. In seven days, I am trying to relive them all.

It’s like walking into a new restaurant and ordering something you’ve never tried before. Nerve-racking. Exciting. And when the food arrives, there is no anticipation like what you feel before you take the first bite.

It might be awful. I might hate it. I might push the plate away and vow never to return, ever.

Then again, it might become my new favorite meal.