Food Moods

A and I spent the night at a B&B on Friday. It was practically perfect in every way.

Compliments don't come easy to me and high praise is even harder to pry from my lips, but I will say again, our night at The Portland White House was practically perfect. We had the best room in the house with a private bath with a jacuzzi bathtub for two. The bed was a huge four poster with immense columns and a feather duvet. The entire house has an old world feel to it and our room was incredibly romantic.

Into that setting, I brought our take out dinner.

Now, take-out has the suggestion of fast food or ethnic food from southeast Asia, but I just picked food up at work, so it was northwest cuisine - chicken meatballs, potato-leek cakes, a green salad and a bottle of Tantrum from our wine tour last January. It was delicious and I had carefully selected it to make sure we didn't get overfull. I also brought Tiramisu, which we still haven't eaten. Somehow, eating this meal laying in bed in our bathrobes was more romantic, more delicious and gave me more feelings of romance and contentment than either the wedding reception dinner we had last night or our anniversary dinner out the previous night. It's certainly not all about the food, but I think the food contributed to the atmosphere as much as the atmosphere contributed to the food.

For example, for dinner, we relived our first date, so it was a very romantic restaurant with a cozy booth setting and a history of providing us with very good food. This time, we had awful service, probably the worst table in the house and a meal that neither of us really enjoyed. We had green salads, clam chowder, goat cheese torte and sauteed mushrooms. I very much enjoyed the chowder (which was more northwest style than New England as both A and I could attest after our recent travels) and the torte, the salad was passable and the mushrooms were not my style, so generally the food was good, but we weren't content and ended up coming home and removing our finery to watch a movie (that, come to think of it, also wasn't that good) and go to sleep. Last night's meal at the reception was a lot of foods that should have been really good, and I heard people claim it was, but for me, just wasn't that interesting.

To sum up and end my rambling exploration of food for the time being, the conclusions I've reached (which are not unique) are that I enjoy my food best when I am relaxed, but hungry and that I enjoy simpler foods. Contributing to that simplicity is both fewer options (less stress of choosing) and fewer flavors/kinds of foods. Silly that I had to write that much to come to those conclusions again, but I guess it never hurts to repeat the lesson.