Top tens

Top ten meals of the decade (in chronological order):

1.  Making truffles and egg nog on New Year's with my high school boyfriend -- my first true gourmet culinary experience.  The ganache stained my favorite pair of jeans, which I continued to wear well into college and only recently threw away.  Every time I saw the stain, I thought about that night: licking chocolate off my fingers, offering sips of spiked nog to my boyfriend's tee-totaling Southern Baptist parents, then staying in his room until three in the morning.  Too, too sweet.

2.  I was meeting my college boyfriend's parents -- American diplomats working in China -- for the first time.  We went to Martinique on Magazine for lunch, and it was there that I was introduced to the glories of the warm duck confit salad.  It almost made me forget my desperate attempt to hide my eyebrow piercing and sound friendly and intelligent.   It was also the first time I ever saw anyone take a sip of the wine that had just been brought to the table... and refuse the bottle.  I didn't even know you could do that.

3.  The defunct Gaia in Ithaca, NY, where, for the first time in my life, I had a three-course, fifty-dollar meal.  I remember the dessert wine the most fondly.  It tasted like the thick, heady mysteries of adulthood.

4.  The first time I had Sonny's, a one-room barbecue shack in the middle of nowhere, Mississippi, run by a four-fingered black man named Roosevelt Nichols (RIP).  I can still smell the smoke under my fingernails and in my hair.  Every subsequent time, I ordered the half chicken, and every time, I gave up using a fork.

5.  My first crawfish boil, in a tiny trailer-park town on the Louisiana/Mississippi border.  I wore a short red miniskirt and ravenously took down a whole miniature civilization of boiled spicy crustaceans; later, some of the members of my boyfriend's family privately expressed concern that I might "break his heart."  After drinking five Bud Lites and still being sober, we went out for birthday-cake-flavored sno-balls.  Sadly, I never did get to go fishing.

6.  Senior year, oysters on the half shell at Cooter Brown's, after a day of playing hookey and wandering around the French Quarter on the arm of my beloved Southern gentleman.  I bit into one -- salty, cold, delicious -- and spit out a pearl.  The coda to my checkered college experience.

7.  Homemade Thanksgiving dinner with the lady who took me to Gaia.  I'd traveled eleven hours by bus to visit, but everything melted away after the first bite of truffled cheese and the first sip of wine.  I can still rattle off the menu from memory: sausage puffs, taleggio flatbreads, the most amazing sage stuffing, roasted root veggies (that I helped peel, in true soldierly fashion), celery root puree (godly), and goose.  It was then that I started to rethink my disdain for the bourgeois lifestyle.

8.  After being dazzled by Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo, we stumbled upon an alley dive that served skewers of things boiled in a cauldron of miso broth and then seared on an open grill.  The oyster mushrooms were my favorite -- lacy, earthy, salty, and, true to Tokyo fashion, slightly alien but incredibly delicious.

9.  On Valentine's Day, we had reservations for two at Helmand.  Unfortunately, on Valentine's Day, there was an ice storm, so I had to wait while he trudged through the wall of sleet to hail a cab.  By the time we made it to the restaurant, the roasted pumpkin was the warmest, most comforting appetizer I'd ever tasted.  I still wonder if the rumor about the place being owned by Hamid Karzai's cousin is true.

10.  Instead of buying engagement rings, we went out to a 400-dollar meal at Abacus in Dallas.  The scallops were the best main course I've ever tasted -- like biting into the culinary version of a French kiss.  We ordered dessert wine... a whole bottle.  The waiter was visibly shaken.