958. Smoked cod, white sauce, crispy fatty bacon, boiled potatoes.



(This entry reinforces that this list truly is in random order, since a straight, proper countdown would place this meal somewhere in the single digits. It's one of the best possible things I've ever tasted).

(The cod and white sauce are based on finnan haddie, I suppose, and everytime it's been cooked for me, it's been called "finnan haddie," even though it's always been made with smoked cod instead of smoked haddock).

(And I eventually found out that the white sauce could be called Bechamel, although I never heard it referred to as anything else but "white sauce" and I still prefer that title).

When you're a kid, mastering the roux and thinning and thickening is a very important experience. Every step of it is wonderful and challenging: the smell of the foaming, darkening butter and the careful balance as you whisk with your right hand (vigorous but not vigorous enough to knock the pan off the flame) and sprinkle flour with your left hand. Then, another balancing act as the milk is added, making sure it's a little too thin, because in a moment it will rapidly, in a millisecond, slow down and thicken.

Long before the sauce begins, the cod is boiled in a shallow pan, from which the water is poured out and replaced a few time, to defeat the saltiness. Beside the poaching fish, the potatoes are going. They must be peeled and reduced to large cubes, then boiled until a fork into one will split it in half and the general texture is oversoft. And beside the potatoes, there should be bacon crisping in a pan. My dad always used side pork, extra fatty, delicious meat from up around the ribs. I use regular old streaky bacon, or, today, slices of leftover pork belly from the fridge, fried until crispy.

The pale yellow, poached cod goes down on each plate, followed by a scoop of watery, soggy potatoes. Then the sauce, snowblindness white, tongueblistering hot because it prefers not to cool, goes down over both. I hate to see a plate with less than an inch of white sauce covering the fish and potato. The sauce is rich and delicious and equally as important as the fish and more important than the potato. When everything is in place, slip the slices of bacon onto the side of the plate. (A lot of people, when the plate comes down in front of them, immediately set about shuffling all the items together, including the bacon. They are left with a perfect mash of cod and potato and bacon. This is a good method! Personally, I leave everything intact).

The taste is. I can't even begin. I'm bound to fail here. That cod has an indescribable richness to it, slightly fishy, a lot salty, all wrapped up in the sauce, creamy, heavy, five pounds per forkful. Potato and bacon hanging in the background, providing starchy comfort and pork fat richness, respectively.

959. Pork belly, brined and roasted, with lima beans.



The butcher at Gellinger's remarks that not many people come in for pork belly anymore, people from the country, a bit, but mostly a Chinese place, Jade Treasure (terrible name), who don't even list it on the menu but sell enough of it to old Chinese folks that know the secret codeword. This begins a brief, mild tirade about dealing with the local pork plant, who, he says, only sell to his competitors and ship the rest to Taiwan. To get pigs, he has to deal with a farmer near Caron, just up the Trans-Canada, and a large butcher out of Regina, just up the Trans-Canada again, but in the opposite direction. But he knows the pigs, he says, and knows the farmer, and he knows the guy that slaughters them.

He carries a broad slab of pork out and lifts it up over the counter to show to me, "That look good to ya?" "Yep." He wraps it in pink butcher paper.

The brine and the roasting is from Fergus Henderson, after looking through every Chinese cookbook available and not finding anything just right. The slab of pork belly gets chopped up and submerged. Day one, the brine is crystal clear, bay leaves floating on top. Day fourteen, a week or so after having completely forgotten about it in a corner of the kitchen, the brine is dark, the color of duck stock. It smells like peppery Earl Grey tea, when I slosh the liquid around in the tub and flip the sections of belly over.

It needs to be rinsed quite thoroughly, if left that long in the brine. Treat it like a piece of salt cod, let it sit in a pan of water in the sink and constantly recycle the water with a trickle of cool water from the tap. The first batch I took out of the brine was oversalty because I was scared to rinse it, thinking that for some reason it would reverse the brining process and my belly would become engorged with fresh clean water after weeks of sitting in salt and sugar-- but I don't think that's a major concern. After it's rinsed, dry it off really well: I let it sit in a big towel on my lap for a while, then fired a blowdryer at it.

I took three big onions, white ones, from the Hutterites that set up in front of Peavey Mart to sell their chickens and vegetables, really potent, really sulphurous, chopped them up, made a bed in a deep pan, and laid my belly down on it. In the oven, the top layer of fat turns a beautiful dark brown, crispy and dry, while the lower layers render their fat and gelatin out into the onions.

After it came out, while the belly was relaxing on the counter, a few big spoonfuls of fat (not too much, because the lima beans need to be unsalty for everything to work) and a good amount of roasted onions and some shallots dropped into a pan with some drained lima beans that were being kept warm in their pot by the heat venting from the oven. The beans spill their starch and soften. The pork fat lubricates and the gelatin binds: perfect.

It's beautiful to eat, all the fat brined and roasted into thin sticky layers between sweet pink meat. The top layer is tough and crispy and salty and the meat underneath is moist and stringy. I tear apart the pork belly with my left hand, using a fork in the right to cut pieces free, pop them in my mouth. With the fork, I scoop up a load of lima beans and have them in my mouth before more than a single chew of the meat takes place. The pork belly is fatty and rich and salty and is the perfect match for those starchy, slightly slightly bitter lima beans and the sweet roasted onions.

960. Large beef donair from Samir's Donair, Medicine Hat.



Western Canada created its own strain of Chinese food last century, Chinese immigrants that built the transcontinental railway and those that followed them stayed in the prairies and set up every small town's little restaurant/corner store. We invented ginger beef and perfected greasy chow mein. The donair joint's Western Canadian spread is the closest modern equivalent. Within walking distance of the Medicine Hat Greyhound depot, I have the choice of five donair makers (I only choose Samir's because there's a Samir's in Moose Jaw). Basic donair: giant mound of shredded watery lettuce, soft steamed pita, a huge shot of extra sour tzatziki, beef shaved off a tall pillar with a buzzing electric trimmer, uncrispy due to large turnover. I eat it off my lap, back on the Greyhound, mostly pulling the meat out, dipping it into tzatziki spilled inside the tinfoil, still burping donair flavor in Swift Current (gross).

961. Som tum.



Grated green papaya, grated carrot, roast and ground peanuts, fish sauce, chiles, tomato, lime. I order it out of respect for the restaurant. And it's a good yardstick, a dish with not too many variations-- but it can be horrible and soggy and bland or it can be beautiful and crisp and overpowering. It's a matter of balance and care. Must specify "very hot," so there is no holding back on the part of the cook. "Very hot means that" all the flavors get turned way up to compensate for the laser beam heat. It becomes very hot, very sour, very salty/fishy, very sweet. All the flavors are on full blast, with none really causing itself to stand out. The moisture flicked from a slurped mouthful onto the outskirts of the lips becomes an experience, that hot/sour/salty/fishy/sweet teardrop of som tum juice having more flavor than your last three meals combined.

962. Carrot, ginger, coconut, lobster soup from Mediterranean Bistro, Regina.



I go for long stretches forgetting that I don't like coconut. Sometimes I can forgetfully eat it and sort of enjoy it. I'll buy a coconut macaroon from a bakery and never realize that I definitely don't enjoy coconut. Then I'll order a green curry on the recommendation of the waitress in a Thai restaurant and get totally grossed out by the overpowering coconutness of it and be unable to eat another spoonful. This was a coconut macaroon situation. The first nine tenths of the bowl, I am in love with the sweetness, that bright orange carrot flavor playing with ginger and soft lobster meat and... something I can't place. I ask my mom, "What does this taste like?" "Carrot." Then I hear the waitress at another table, introducing the soup of the day, mentioning the coconut, and all of a sudden all I can place the taste: coconut flavor scented suntan lotion, coconut macaroons, those Dare Coconut Creme cookies, green curry, red curry.

963. Carrot cake with cream cheese icing.



While cheesecake needs almost unsweetened cream cheese, extra sour and cheesy, cream cheese icing should be at least half sugar. Second rule, it should be at least an inch thick. Third, make a ring-shaped cake, so you can have icing on three surfaces instead of two (or one). Fourth, the cake should be moist but not too moist and a lot ginger-y and nutmeg-y, but it shouldn't steal the show from the cream cheese icing. I eat a third of a cake at a time, licking the icing off the plate, washing it all down with cold 1% milk.

964. Prawn curry from Glory of India, Calgary.



The red and the shrimp was decent, just a bit spicy and just a bit sour, tasting mainly of cilantro. The prawns were cooked perfect, just a bit chewy. But it was all setting up for the amazing rice, which came out a minute later, waiting for the red and shrimp to be laid over it. Long grains, slightly off-white. Near transparent onion spread throughout. On top, soft enough to soak up the red. In the middle, firm and moist. On the bottom, cooked until crispy and browned, tasting like roasted almond like the rice stuck to the bottom of a hotpot in a Korean restaurant.

965. Buttercream icing licked off a beater thing.



For the whole time she spends at our house, she is with me in the kitchen, amazed by simple things like red onions and bamboo steamers. She uses a TV-taught garlic smashing method, throwing coarse salt under her knife and mashing it up, and she runs to get tinfoil for meat coming out of the oven to rest in. I give her her first tastes of: ginger, roe, fish sauce, cilantro, duck, blue cheese, passionfruit, black eyed peas, spinach, lychee.... She's never tasted anything, just seen it on TV. When we make buttercream icing, I sit on the counter and direct, not touching anything. She does everything, creams butter and sugar and whole milk, slicing open a vanilla pod and scraping it out. At the end, we both get a beater.

967. Pho tai from Pebble Street Pho.



This is my breakfast each morning I am in Calgary. Pebble Street sounds maybe like the name of an upscale souvenir shop or a retirement complex, but inside, it's a grimy, pretty noodle place, usually empty when my mom and I come in for breakfast around nine. We get an apology for "no English" and a sheet of paper to check off our choices. My mom gets a coffee, and a glass of condensed milk and ice. I re-read the pho list until I am told the pho tai is what I need to get, "very good!"

The broth is just clear enough for me, a good sheen of beef fat pearls floating on the surface but not fatty enough to fill your mouth with suet for the rest of the morning. Hidden in the middle of the bowl is a handful-sized rice noodle ball, which unfurls into the broth with a few jabs of the chopsticks. Just above it, the rafts of raw pink beef are just beginning to darken and submerge, soaking up the broth. After the preliminary steps, the greens go in, Thai basil and rau ram and a bit of cilantro, then a few chopstick loads of bean sprouts. I battle the noodles and grab the meat with chopsticks in my right hand and a spoon in my left, twirling and slurping, taking my time. A pregnant woman in a pink sundress comes in, orders a large pho tai fifteen minutes after me, eats while talking on her cellphone, finishes while I am still messily drinking the cold broth out of the bowl.

968. Smoked cod, straight up.



Almost the best way to eat smoked cod, right out of the package, cold and unrinsed and never cooked. The texture is uncooked fish, like salmon sashimi but a little chewier. It's fantastically salty, almost too salty to handle, and fantastically fishy, like a teaspoon of fish sauce drizzled on your tongue. But the salt/fish is why it's being eaten straight, with no water to clean the salt off or accompanying elements to soak up the fishiness. The vaguely butter, rich flavor, unique to the fish, which you'll get when it's used elsewhere is protected by that shell of salt/fish. Like a sour candy, persevering through the malic acid coating to the high fructose corn syrup center.

969. Fourme d'Ambert.



Thick, brown shell, with a reptile scale pattern. Before the wedge is sliced into, the outer layer's veins have turned a sickly grey and become moist. I like it sliced as thin as its crumbly texture allows, then laying each slice on my tongue, letting it melt a sec, then letting it break up as it's moved around my mouth. The first flavor is a blank milkiness, which gives to sweet cream, which in turn surrenders to pungent wet dog/marijuana/foot odor and an aftertaste like bitter green walnut.

970. Blueberry ice cream.



Not on the menu, but suggested because it's a first batch and they'd like a few people to try it out. We get two dishes, one with a lump of pale red tomato sorbet and one with a lump of blueberry ice cream. The tomato sorbet is okay but the blueberry is crazy. I get three more scoops of it in a deep glass dish, a mint leaf dropped on top. It's dark blue, without a hint of outside sweetness. And all the ice cream mechanics check out with a perfect melt speed on tongue and in dish. Blueberry hide sticks to the fronts of my teeth and I feel the occasional sharp stem just as it leaves the back of my tongue and jumps into the throat.

971. Duck and kale soup.



A duck, meat torn off, carcass roasted, made into a stock with onion and various vegetable odds and ends, clarified. Dark red duck meat chopped and simmered for a while with carrots and whatnot. Then, ladled into a bowl, kale and breadcrumbs from a three day old loaf tossed on top. While you wait for the soup to cool, it is still working: softening up the kale and turning it from a dusty light green into deep dark green and thickening itself with the crumbs and crusts. Inside the soup, the bitter kale is making the richness of the stock honest and finding a kindred spirit in the thick flavor of the duck meat. The crumbs soak up the pearls of duck fat and make every mouthful just right.

972. Oysters.



At an Edmonton Trail restaurant, early 90s BMWs and Ducatti bikes parked in the back, discerning funloving yuppies eating seared tombo tuna with questionable wasabi yogurt sauce. A 20something Japanese kid and his girlfriend both drink forty dollar a pour scotch, eating oysters out of the shells with forks. The oysters, six or so breeds, representing a couple oceans, are swimming behind the bar in dishes set in a a rough wood stand. We order them in sets of four, coming out on ice, with a shell of lemon granita and a homemade tomato sauce. Tip your head back, slide them toward your throat: the liquor tastes like the ocean, cold fishy breeze and unfamiliarly tinted salts. One bisecting bites comes down through the oyster's grey skin and the innards spill over your tongue with a taste like a low twang on a guitar, heard from another room, barely audible. And then the whole wet mass is sliding down your esophagus.