My Top Three Food-Bliss Moments

Food has always been a fascinating topic for me to write about because it usually has an added psychological element. My relationship with food has always been back and forth. As a child, I grew up in a poor household, and when my father died, that made it even worse. Still, I remember being proud of being able to eat an entire box of macaroni and cheese by myself. I also remember the first time I fell in love with food and experienced pure euphoria from eating something I had never had before.

Like most people, I was not an exploratory eater as a child. I used to sit at the Chinese buffet while my parents ate, and they would run through a drive-thru on the way home for me. Now, the local Chinese restaurant is one of my favorite places to eat! But it wasn't until my single mom moved us from southwestern Iowa (where cows outnumber people) to rural New Hampshire that I experienced true love in the form of food.

The place was called Village Pizza, and the dish was an artichoke calzone. I had no words back then because I was 12 years old and had not experienced my first kiss, let alone sex, but now I can tell you it was much better than that. I can't tell you what prompted me to switch from my usual pizza order to a calzone. Maybe my mother had talked about it or ordered it before and made it sound good, but I fell in love. Village Pizza's artichoke calzone is a dish that my mother and I had tried to recreate ourselves when we moved away. It is a dish that I've ordered at many other pizza places, only to be disappointed that it does not taste the same (which has to be equivalent to erectile dysfunction in the food world). Nothing compares to it, and yet, this would not be my last food-bliss moment.

Later in life, I would discover that travel allows you to experience different cultures and, yes, new foods. While I want to be more open to other food choices, my digestive system and taste buds do not agree. My digestive system has revolted against anything acidic in nature - thus, I suffer horrific pains whenever I crave and satisfy that desperate need for pizza.

Enter a food that doesn't cause me pain when I eat it but might very well lead to me getting diabetes! Picture it; you are sitting in New Orleans, there is a distant shrill of a trumpet and a saxophone playing jazz on a street corner while other buskers are fighting for your attention and money. The sweet aroma wafts towards you, and just like the voodoo you were promised but didn't find in the French Quarter, a hunger so fierce takes over and forces you to seek out where the smell originates. If you're smart, you'll end up at Cafe Du Monde, and if you're lucky, you won't have a long wait. The culprit is called a Beignets and described as "fried fritters, sometimes filled with fruit." But to leave it at that would not be worthy of being called a "Food-Bliss Moment" food. Oh no, that could describe a donut, and a donut is not a food-bliss food. A Beignet is a fluffy, crispy square piece of dough, fried and covered with powdered sugar, and depending on if you play your cards right, there might be honey and cinnamon on there too. At Cafe Du Monde, they come in orders of three, so if you don't go alone, you better place an order for everyone, or you'll be fighting each other for the odd one, and splitting it in half to share would be a sin.

My most recent food-bliss food was only a few years ago and took form in a portion of food I never thought I would try. I'm not too fond of anything cooked on a grill because I wouldn't say I like burned food. No one I know can cook meat on a grill without burning a portion of it, and that seems like such a waste. Barbeque, up until I lived in Texas, was not an ideal food for me. I cannot eat and don't like spicy things, and for some reason, BBQ sauce always tends to be spicy. Bold flavors are different, but I finally found something I could eat, thank you, Texas! It's called brisket, and it is fantastic. Texas is massive in size, but over the five years I lived there, I traveled it extensively. I always made sure whatever trip I took, a big city or small, I found some brisket.

I went with a now ex-boyfriend to Austin. We drove down from Dallas for a weekend stay, and on our first day, we did pretty much everything. We hit up the museums, spent some time with some cats at Blue Cat Cafe, and tried to see the bats, but they didn't want to come out. We did this all in one day, and I was exhausted, but somehow I convinced my ex we needed to get some food because the hotel didn't have any. My feet hurt, I was hot and cranky, and I told him, "I don't care where we eat, let's just go to the next place that isn't Subway." No offense to Subway, but I can eat that anywhere. When I travel, I want to eat food you can't find unless you are in that region, state, or city.

The next place we happened to walk into was called Cooper's for short, but it's Cooper's Old Time Pit Barbeque. It's cafeteria-style, and all I ordered was some brisket because I was kind of hungry but not hungry enough. I regret it, to this day, eating so much throughout the day. Both my ex and I experienced a food-bliss moment, which was delightful because I hadn't shared one with anyone else before. We said we would drive back down to eat the BBQ; that's how good it is. It causes otherwise sane people to be willing to travel 6 hours (three there and three back) just for brisket. The worst part? That was in May 2018, and my ex and I broke up that November, and I moved away from the following June and haven't been back. So I've been at the time of writing this, three years without the blissful brisket. But I have plans to return if nothing more than for food that brings my heart the kind of joy Marie Kondo appreciates.

If you understand what I mean by "food-bliss," give this story a heart. Better yet, please share with me. I love falling in love with new food!