Pub grub. Quinn's. (take two).

C. calls me from work. She's done for the day, and it's time for dinner. I throw on a jacket and head off towards Quinn's Pub, five blocks away through the biting cold. (Yesterday's snow is completely gone, only a memory). It is early, and there are few diners at the bar and the downstairs tables; upstairs is nearly empty. The mezzanine dining area has the same high-backed bench running along the wall, the same tables and chairs of dark wood, the same low, warm lighting that casts a dim, golden glow over everything. As I look around I think about that newspaper article a few weeks ago, describing how a local interior designer had her students play around with their own ideas for the 100-year-old space. I try to envision it any other way, but I cannot. Besides, I'm hungry, and I want to think about the menu.

The menu offers meatball sliders and fish-and-chips and gnocchi with oxtail and pâté and steak frites and the wild boar sloppy joe I had last time and salads and cheesy gougére. There are beers on tap and by the bottle and whiskeys and wines. I want to try everything I see. But all I really want is a cheeseburger, and when C. arrives that is what we both order, one medium-rare, one medium-well. I sit back and wonder if they will be like the steak frites at another restaurant, which has always arrived rare, no matter how it was ordered. Then again, it is so dark in here it would be hard to tell. Perhaps I should bring a flashlight next time. (As we leave, I tell our waiter, "I don't mind not being able to read my menu. But not being able to see my food is a bit ridiculous.").

The smell of toasted buns and grilled beef signals the arrival of our dinner. The burgers are topped with bacon and cheddar, the beef melting against the crisp, almost charred interiors of the bun. There is a small dish of ketchup on the side of my plate, nearly hidden by a vast mountain of french fries, but the burger needs nothing, no ketchup, no lettuce or tomato or onion or mustard to distract from the sweet-salty-soft-crisp contrasts of beef-bun-cheese-bacon. There is the wonderful caramelized taste of meat and bread when it is almost to the point of being burnt, but not quite. The fries are fries - I have never met a fry I didn't like - but this burger is something else. I have not yet finished my dinner before, as usual, I am already plotting the next one.

Reluctant to go back out into the cold, we order dessert, an apple tart that comes hot from the oven. It has a crumbly-textured crust shot through with bits of Cheddar, and the sweetness of the fruit against the crisp savoriness of the crust (is there anything better than cheese that has melted and then browned to a crunchy, salty brittleness that melts on the tongue like a snowflake?) is one of life's great pleasures. Outside it is cold and dark; a week of work and cleaning up my apartment for an upcoming party (another story) lies ahead. But for now we are warm and well fed and happy.

Eating out. Steelhead Diner.

I thought I'd walk down to the Pike Place Market for lunch today. But where should I go? Café Campagne for quiche? Etta's for the tuna sashimi salad? Maxmilien's for the moules marinières? Or perhaps I should go to the Steelhead Diner. Which is where I wind up, walking down Pike Street, across downtown, past shops and restaurants and throngs of holiday shoppers. The market smells of fried dough and roasting meats as I make my way past tiny cafés and souvenir shops and something called the Falafel King. I can't quite remember where the Steelhead Diner is, but the neon sign of a fish signaled that I had found my destination, up the hill from the market proper.

It is early for lunch, and things are quiet. The waiter tucks me into a small table at the far end of the restaurant, an L-shaped space with a counter that looks into the open kitchen, another long counter down the middle of one leg of the room, and another long bar facing that. There are booths and tables along the other leg of the room, some facing the windows that look over the market and the water beyond. I have my back to the wall, looking over the rest of room, a small window into the kitchen giving a glimpse of white-hatted chefs. I sit back and count the fishing flies that decorate the stretch of booths facing me and think about my lunch.

There are so many things to choose from - should I have the crab cake, which we had last time, or a sandwich? Fried chicken or grilled fish or salad or the caviar pie? At last I settle for the razor clam chowder and the petrale sole; the chowder is light and creamy and rich with the scent of bacon. The bread is the same as last time, something studded with all sorts of grains and seeds, and another bread swirled with cheese and herbs, and I still don't like either. I suppose the past decade of crusty rustic loaves has spoiled me for any other kind of bread.

The fish is simply cooked with lemon and capers, piccata-style, the fish lightly floured and fried before being sprinkled with pine nuts and the lemony sauce. I drink my pomegranate lemonade - sweet and tart and a clear ruby in color - and eat my fish and watch a stream of diners flow in. (It is now closer to the time that normal people eat lunch). It is all extremely tasty, and before I know it the plate is empty. And then I order dessert. (I did walk all the way here, and will be walking all the way back. Uphill). Should it be cake? Or a tart? Or the brownie sundae?

I have the pumpkin crême brulée. It comes with with a piece of praline, the sugar crust a deep gold. The custard is like pumpkin pie filling, only lighter in taste and texture, sweet and spicy against the almost-bitter burnt sugar. I walk out into the cold as if I were floating on air. And then, as I head homewards, it begins to snow, giant flakes the size of a fingernail drifting swiftly down until everything is dusted with white. Including me. I walk in the front door completely covered in snow - I had left three hours earlier wearing all black, and return frosted white - and my doorman laughs at the sight of me.

Eating out. fondue.

I remember going to a fondue restaurant in Taipei in the 80's, but since everyone looks at me as if I had completely lost my mind I wonder if I imagined it all. I have a vague memory of bread dipped in cheese, a cozy atmosphere, but that was all some twenty years ago and it is possible that it never happened at all. The restaurant in my memory was called something like Swiss Chalet, or Chalet Suisse, something vaguely European but not quite. I suppose the food was vaguely European, but not quite, as well. That was my first experience of fondue. The next experience was at the age of 11, in some small Swiss town where we had stopped after dropping my grandfather off in Geneva (or perhaps it was Lucerne, I can't remember). We stumbled upon a small fondue restaurant with outdoor tables and had a dinner of steak fondue cooked in a pot of bubbling oil; it came with a round platter covered with small dishes of sauces and pickles and other savory little nibbles. (I don't think any fondue has tasted as good since; it belongs to that time and place and can never be duplicated.

People from my parents' generation were into fondue. Like crêpe pans and avocado-green kitchen appliances, fondue pots were one of those things people gave as wedding gifts in the 70's. Or so I have heard. (Some people were given bongs, but that is another story. I know my parents never received one. Perhaps they had the wrong friends). Now fondue is popular again; you can buy fondue sets made of sleek stainless steel or colorful enameled cast-iron that come with color-coordinated skewers and stands that hold the pot over a can of sterno. Or you can go to a restaurant that serves fondue. The Melting Pot is one of these, a chain of restaurants in practically every state coast-to-coast. I have always wanted to try it, and when my mother's friend E. calls me to invite me to dinner there, I leap at the chance.

We head out to the Melting Pot in lower Queen Anne, just south of the Seattle Center. Its proximity to the nearby theaters means that when we arrive at 7 the earlier diners are heading off to see the Nutcracker. (Later, as we are leaving, we see people leaving the ballet, little girls in velvet dresses with frills. I guess nothing has changed since I was eight). We choose the Big Night Out, which promises three kinds of fondue: cheese, to start with, meat and seafood, and - finally - chocolate. A stainless-steel pot sits on a burner in the middle of the table, and presently our server comes by and begins pouring things into the pot: White wine, a mix of gruyère and fontina, shallots, dates, and white truffle oil which is spritzed over the melting cheese with one of those spray cans that people who like to play with their food use for cooking oils or salad dressings. There are chunks of bread and fresh vegetables and crisp Granny Smith apples, perfect with the molten, wine-and-truffle-infused cheese. The main course arrives, a neatly arranged platter of lobster tail (dusted with paprika), chicken (marinated with garlic), pork (in some citrus marinade), and beef (marinated in balsamic). There are all sorts of sauces, creamy and spicy and buttery, and before I know it I have eaten everything on my plate. And it is time for dessert.

At last the chocolate fondue arrives, a raspberry purée swirled in. There are strawberries and banana slices and tiny brownie squares and rice krispy treats and marshmallows. The talk swirls around the table as we muse aloud over how the Swiss fondue is like the Chinese hot pot or Japanese Shabu-shabu. As always we eat our meal while talking about past meals, or dinners yet to come. And I think about perhaps I will come back here again.

Pub grub. Quinn's.

It was a dark and stormy night...No, perhaps I should go back a little in my story. For several years now I have been walking by a restaurant called Zöe in Belltown, on the rare occasions I find myself in that trendy neighborhood north of the Pike Place market. There's a Patagonia there, and the Macrina Bakery, and Lampreia, one of our favored restaurants for the past decade. But I hate to find find parking, and there's only street parking or the occasional grungy pay lot, so I avoid Belltown unless I really need another fleece jacket. Occasionally I would peer in the windows of Zöe, glance at the menu posted by the door, but somehow I never quite made it there. (J., foodie extraordinaire, tells me that it is very good). And now I live within walking distance of all kinds of restaurants - Lark and Café Presse and La Spiga and Via Tribunali - and have no need to eat at places which require street parking, my bête noire. Capitol Hill has become gentrified, or worse, yuppified, anchored by a Trader Joe's where Capitol Hill begins to slide down towards Madison Valley, sprawling down the bustling Pike/Pine corridor in a tangle of clubs and pubs and coffee shops as it flows westwards towards Downtown, and then on to the water.

I digress. Some months ago, I began to hear rumblings of a new gastropub - ghastly word, that - to be opened by the husband/wife owners of Zöe. Zöe is named for their daughter; this new pub would be called Quinn's, after their son. Having no sense of direction, I couldn't figure out where it was going to be just by the address. Thank the lord for the internet. I was in Taipei when Quinn's pub opened, and it wasn't until last week that I figured out the Mexican place halfway between home and work had become a sleek new pub. I hadn't noticed it because I had been taking a shortcut to work that took me around the former La Puerta; I had seen the beginning of the renovations and had assumed that it would be another yoga studio or housewares shop. But early reviews were good, and I had only to read the words "wild boar sloppy joe" before my feet were itching to head over there.

When I left work it was already dark and pouring rain. I walk as quickly as possible down the three or four blocks that stand between me and my ultimate goal: Dinner. The bright Mexican restaurant has become a softly lit pub, all dark wood and high windows, with a scattering of small tables and a long bar on the main floor, overlooked by a mezzanine level with more tables upstairs. It is modern and slightly rustic, all at the same time. I ask for a beer and the wild boar sloppy joe, and a side of sautéed spinach. The sloppy joe is dark and savory, spilling from the sesame-seed bun; there is the sharp contrast of some crisply fried sage leaves and onion and one deep-fried hot pepper. The spinach hides the crunch of pine nuts and the sweetness of raisins, perfect against the mineral tang of the leaves, so dark they almost look black in the candlelight. I eat my dinner - I wish the sloppy joe filling was hotter; it seems strangely cold, but tasty nonetheless - and drink my beer and watch the cars outside illuminate the falling rain with their headlights.

I am almost full, but not quite, and I want something else, but not dessert, so I ask for some cheese. There are three kinds of cheese - a sort of Cheddar, a medium-soft cheese whose name I can't remember, and a wedge of softer Chimay. At one side is a scoop of apricot mostarda; another plate holds a heap of Melba toasts. And by Melba toasts, I mean thin golden slices of baguette that have been fried in olive oil (or brushed in oil and toasted, I'm not sure). For some reason my waiter has given me a fork with the cheeses, although perhaps a knife would be more appropriate. Still, the cheese is wonderful - I love the Chimay best of all - with the crisp toasts and the sweet apricot preserves, and I contemplate coming back again just for the cheese. Perhaps with a salad. But there are so many other things to try, and I will have to come back again.

Sunday lazy Sunday.

I woke up this morning with sunlight slipping through the cracks around the blinds. It is a beautiful day, and a mad idea comes to me. I have an errand to run in Belltown; why not walk there and have something to eat beforehand? It's only about a mile and a half (famous last words), and I could use the exercise. With an eye to the cool autumn air I slip on a vest and wrap a scarf around my neck, sling my backpack on, and head out. And it is a perfect day for a long walk, cool but sunny, without anything more than the slightest of breezes. But the Macrina Bakery is farther than I remember, and as I zig-zag across downtown and cut towards Belltown I begin to feel as though I will never get there, and the closer I get, the farther away it seems. But at last I am there, and it is jam-packed as usual, and I write my name and number in my party (1) on the clipboard, and wait my turn. (There are only about twenty-five seats, and it seems like your best bet is to come with a friend, instead of solo or as a group of three or four, or god forbid, five).

There are five stools at the counter, and two couples are seated ahead of me. One lone man is tucking away at his meal, and I resist the urge to tell him to hurry up. (He's very cute, with tousled dark hair and glasses, and when he stands up at last I see he is wearing a turtleneck sweater under a corduroy blazer, and carrying an army-green canvas bag with a red star, probably a souvenir from some Communist country. But right now he is the only thing standing between me and my brunch). It's hard to stand here waiting for a seat whilst all around you people are eating their omelets and smoked salmon-and-scrambled-egg-bialys. The waiter decides not to even attempt to pronounce my name, and as I am standing right there, merely points to my name and asks, "is this you?" (For the record, my name is pronounced Kai - like "hi" - ru - like the "roo" in "kangaroo." It's not that hard. But if you're drunk, you can get away with calling me Kangaroo, like my friend J. used to).

At least when you have to wait for a seat, you have time to peruse the menu and decide on what you want. The wait is only about ten or fifteen minutes, a record for the Macrina (usually it's half an hour), and I have mentally shuffled between the toasted bialy with scrambled eggs and smoked salmon, or the waffles, or the french toast, or...ooh! Eggs scrambled with bacon, topped with cheese and served with toast, herb-roasted potatoes, and salad. I order a cappuccino and the egg scramble and settle in with a James Bond novel found at the thrift store. In short order a laden plate slides into view, followed by a small fruit salad. I eat my meal - this is probably one of the best places in Seattle for brunch - and watch the sole chef move around the kitchen, pouring beaten eggs into pans and turning waffles onto plates.

And then it is time for the long walk home.

Thanksgiving days.

All week people have been telling me their Thanksgiving plans, and most people seem to be dreading them. One friend has to drive some four hours in the dark the night before to spend it with an aunt. Another has to fly home and cope with a sister and a fiancé that his parents hate. Someone else tells me how grateful they are that the much-hated daughter-in-law will not be there. Various people have in-laws and siblings and nephews and nieces descending like plagues of locusts. It all reminds me of Sartre's assertion that hell is other people. I wonder why Thanksgiving is so much more difficult - or at least it seems that way to me - than other holidays, and I realize that because all you have to focus on is each other, and the food. Christmas brings the added stress - and distraction - of presents. The Fourth of July means barbecuing outside and splashing around in the pool and, after night falls, fireworks. At Thanksgiving there's just you, your family, and that damn bird.

Yet I think it is my favorite holiday. How can it not be? It is all about the food, and moreover, all about the food I never eat the rest of the year: roast turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy - the gravy is the most important of all - and stuffing. Pie is immaterial, because we never had pie when I was growing up. (Although homemade pumpkin pie is the food of the gods). I wonder if I am more nostalgic about the past, if I imbue it with a warmth and happiness that didn't actually exist, because my own family is an ocean away and I can choose to join friends who have invited me, for a dinner I didn't have to cook. Perhaps things were harder when I had to plan a meal and run to Whole Foods at 9 pm the night before and to the Pike Place Market at rush hour and more stressful when I had to produce dinner in a kitchen shared with my mother who got mad if I talked to her when she was cooking.

D. has invited me, as usual. It is the quietest and smallest holiday dinner I have ever had at her house, thirteen or fourteen people. (The loudest members of the family are traveling in Hong Kong, and when they are here the decibel level is much higher). For the first time everyone is seated at one table (actually, two put together) in the kitchen instead of the usual grownups in the kitchen, kids in the dining room. In the absence of her older sister J. makes the mashed potatoes, standing on a stool to wield the masher (she is eleven). The boys - there are four of them - prefer prime rib to turkey, so we have both. R. brings a vast pan of stuffing; I have made a creamy spinach gratin that T. finishes in her own kitchen two houses away and brings back to the table, the cheesy crust crisp and dark gold against the green-and-white of the spinach and béchamel. The table is quiet - relatively speaking - as everyone makes their way (so to speak) from one end of the table to the other, passing plates back and forth. I thought I had restrained myself rather well. But then it was time for dessert.

T. is bustling around making berry shortcakes. From somewhere pies appear, pumpkin and apple and one very small pecan pie that are all slipped into the oven to warm. I have a warm berry shortcake, a small piece of pumpkin pie, and an even smaller piece of pecan pie. That last bite of pecan pie just about kills me, and I stagger upstairs to collapse on the futon before I can make it to my car and drive home. Another year gone, another Thanksgiving past.

Eating out. Lark.

As always, after a Saturday at work, I head off to Lark as soon as I am done for the day. The bright spot in a long day. (But having to work is not so bad; it is raining outside, and in the lab it is warm and there are snacks. And overtime). It is unspeakably early for dinner, and the room is almost empty. I am settling in and the hostess is just asking me if I have eaten there before when K. (one of the owners, she manages the restaurant with that kind of perfect ease that some people just have) glides up and says "of course she's been here before!" My server for the evening swings by; she remembers me too. Of course, I am young and female and Chinese, and I have eaten here several times, alone, which some people might consider unusual.

The menu has some old favorites and new items, but I wait to hear the specials before I decide. I am momentarily swayed by sautéed Alaska spot prawns (with roe), but as soon as I hear the words "veal cheek" my choice is made. Choosing something to go with it is harder; I flip through the menu before at last zeroing in on the gnudi. I've never had them before, and imagine them to be something like gnocchi. Bread arrives, along with more diners who sit to my left and farther down to my right. There are two kinds of bread: one tangy and dark, with a thick, almost blackened crust, and some slices of the most perfect baguette, the crisp crust yielding to a soft interior that is almost sweet. I prefer the baguette, and wonder if it is from the Columbia City bakery.

The gnudi are ricotta dumplings, a bit like gnocchi, tossed with wilted shreds of dark green chard. There is the gently astringent bite of olives and the sweetness of grapes; it is a perfectly balanced dish with the rich greens against the melting softness of the gnudi. As I eat the dumplings - they are like clouds - I listen to the couple next to me discussing what they should have for dinner. (They have never eaten here before, and it is always interesting to listen to people who have never been here before mull over their choices aloud). I wish there was more gnudi, but I have another course coming. The veal cheek is so tender it falls apart beneath my fork; I set my knife aside because I don't need it. There is a piece of grilled porcini mushroom, a sweet cipollini, some crisp-soft baby carrots. The sauce is so good I mop it up with the remainder of my baguette. I tell K. that if the room hadn't been so full of people I would have licked the bowl, and she laughs.

I usually get the tarte tatin, whichever one is in season, but tonight I have the pear crisp, with finely chopped pecans tossed with the chunks of fruit beneath the crumbly topping, sweet and buttery and warm against the cool vanilla ice cream. Around me people are trying to decide on their orders, or eating their first courses. A table of chic Japanese women chatters away as the last of their group - each more beautiful, more elegant, although all of them are beautiful and elegant - sweeps in, high heels clicking against the floor. It is dinner as theater, and every time I come away enchanted all over again.

Taipei, day 15.

My mother's godmother invites us to dinner, and we meet at a restaurant in the basement of Breeze Center, where we've gone grocery shopping earlier during this trip and where I now remember browsing around with my cousins and trying (unsuccessfully) to talk J. out of horrendous Prada shirt that he insisted on buying, before going off to eat xiao lung bao in one of the basement restaurants. My father's mother died when he was six; I only met my mother's mother once, and she died when I was eight. So Grandma H. is the closest thing I have to a grandmother, along with C., another close family friend who lives on the East coast. (That's a story for another time). Grandpa H. had a bad fall not too long ago, and he looks frailer, but otherwise the same as I remember. They both look as they always will in my memory, as they did in my childhood photographs that I flipped through earlier this afternoon. I am leaving tomorrow, and this is my last dinner in Taipei, my last chance to see them until I come back to Taipei again.

My trip ends the way it began, with a bowl of tangled yellow noodles in a clear pork broth. Taiwanese food. There are pig's feet braised with peanuts and red-cooked pork belly with bamboo shoots and a sort of omelet with pickled radishes, a round golden sun. (In the past two weeks I have eaten enough pig's feet and pork belly to decimate a litter of pigs, enough bamboo shoots to populate a small forest). There is three-cup chicken, so-called because the classic recipe calls for one cup each soy sauce, vinegar, and sugar, with ginger to add depth to the sweet-salty-sour richness of the sauce. A bowl is filled with tiny fried fish with peanuts and a few slices of hot peppers. There are vegetable marrows, tiny ones, cooked simply until soft and melting. It is the kind of cooking common to roadside stands, only served in a coolly modern restaurant in the lower floor of an upscale shopping mall. Fruit arrives, a plate laden with guava and starfruit and honeydew melon and that magenta-skinned fruit with the black-seeded white flesh whose name I can't remember, and the sweetest pale pineapple, but I resist the pudding or sweet taro soup or deep-fried bean-paste-filled dumplings.

Soon I will be home again, and I will think about all the things I ate on this trip, and wonder how I can change the way I eat and cook half a world away. I will buy tofu from that shop in Chinatown and ask K. where she gets that dark reddish brown wild rice and stir-fry my leafy green vegetables with shreds of ginger. And I will try to eat more green vegetables and less meat and more fish and try to braise pork belly in soy sauce with wine and ginger and that yellow rock sugar that melts and thickens the sauce until it is almost like syrup. More likely I will go back to macaroni-and-cheese and croque monsieur and steak and roast chicken, with vegetables as an afterthought. But maybe not.

Taipei, day 14.

For some time now - years, perhaps - my parents have been talking about a small Japanese restaurant they often go to. It started out as a roadside stand kind of place, with an open kitchen and low tables and stools, or so I assume. Usually these places are cheap but this one has restaurant prices. And when you become known to the management they are more willing to serve you things that are weird or rare or expensive, or all of the above. Eventually the roadside stand became a proper restaurant, but I have not been here until tonight. I have been waiting to eat here, and when I heard my mother make plans with A. to have dinner here three days after I return to Seattle, there was no choice except to protest. Loudly. And here we are.

We're late, and my father has already arrived, seated in a bamboo-screened room at the rear of the restaurant. I walk past the tables and the long sushi bar; there cups of hot tea and little dishes of pickled vegetables, and the waiter, who knows my parents well, goes over what he has in mind for tonight's meal. Something light, not too much food, my mom says. The waiter brings chilled saké, and it goes down as easily as cool spring water, without a hint of burn, only a faint lingering warmth. The sashimi arrives, and I am rearranging my chopsticks when W. suddenly yelps and grabs my arm. I turn to look and jump about a foot in the air. The shrimp antennae are still moving, the heads freshly severed from the peeled bodies. And this is just the sashimi platter. There is salad of vegetables - sweet onions, corn (which in Taipei tends to show up in weird places, like on pizza), asparagus, slices of giant prawn. The chu-toro is slightly frozen, and not as good as what I have at home, the only jarring note. The toro in Taipei is never as good as what I find at home, but there is so much other good food that this is a mere quibble.

Three pieces of nigiri are placed in front of me: one piece of flounder, barely singed with a blowtorch, the sweetest uni I have ever tasted, and a slice of raw beef so meltingly tender it is almost like toro, or even foie gras. A custardy white blob, wrapped in a shiso leaf, dipped in a tempura batter, and fried turns out to be some kind of fish bladder. It is the best thing in the entire meal, and it is one of the best meals of the entire trip. There is a chicken wing, deboned and stuffed with fish roe. The abalone is less interesting. A fresh carp, like a giant goldfish, is split open and grilled, needing nothing more than a squeeze of lime, not even a touch of the seasoned salt on the corner of the plate. Tiny green cabbages - like miniature Napa cabbages - are sautéed with dried shrimp the length of my smallest fingernail. We end with a soup of clams and garlic, smelling of the sea, tasting of the sea.

At last dessert arrives, a slice of ripe papaya, some pickled apples and giant Japanese beans over ice. I need nothing more, and I want nothing more.

Taipei, day 13.

E. invites us to lunch, and I find myself at the appointed hour in a bright, airy teppanyaki restaurant. The main room has two teppanyaki griddles, each seating eleven or twelve customers. We take our seats and E. suggests the beef set lunch, and the eating begins. Most of the time, I don't know what I am eating, and some of it is weird, beginning with the tea, which tastes of preserved plums. The chef chatters away, and I have trouble understanding him less because my Chinese is inadequate and more because of the surgical mask he wears, muffling his words. So I am not sure where the salt he is grating (from a large rock) onto our plates comes from - I think from Peru - but as I understand it, it comes from a mine up in some mountains instead of the sea. Ok.

Three large grapes - I think they are grapes - go onto a bamboo-mat-covered dish, which is then covered with a huge metal dome. When I say the grapes were large, I mean roughly the size of a small egg. A Cadbury's creme egg, perhaps. Each grape sprouts a delicate white flower which I cannot identify. But that mystery will have to wait, as we eat our soup, which is sweet with fruit - I think there is pineapple juice, and I may or may not have eaten a piece of what tastes suspiciously like pear - and fragrant with mushrooms, perhaps those white Enoki ones that come vacumn-sealed in plastic back home. There is a piece of toast made of some weird bread; glasses of warm beet juice are poured. That giant grape is soft and warm and infused with the fragrance of that white flower, which tastes like it smells, almost like honeysuckle.

There are some other dishes - a sort of salad, if you could call it that, and the most recognizable item of the day, a single, griddle-steamed white mushroom - and if my own food perplexes me, E's vegetarian lunch is even stranger looking. A lull in the strange foods parade produces some tender white fish and giant prawns. The beef, when it comes, is not steak, but rather, sliced thin, as for sukiyaki or hot-pot. Each slice is briefly cooked on the hot griddle and rolled around a different filling - some kind of cheese on top of a slice of what appears to be seaweed, a shiso leaf spread with what tastes like mustard, a piece of dried mullet roe. (I cannot assume that any identifications I made are correct. Most likely I am wrong).

At last there is fried rice, made with onions and garlic and eggs and bright green scallions, instead of fruit, which is what E. has. The rice is savory and tasty and I would have eaten more, except I am full and there is dessert to come, fruit and black-sesame popcorn (cooked right on the griddle, popped underneath that same gleaming stainless steel dome that covered everything else cooked in front of us) and some kind of sweet soup. E. offers me some of her soup, which has that same ruffly white fungus-mushroom that Taiwanese people like to make sweet soup with, and I barely escape having to eat it.

Like most of the meals I've had over the course of this trip, much has been unrecognizable, some has been just plain weird, but on the whole everything has been incredibly good.

Taipei, days 9-11.

On Sunday we headed down to Alishan, or A-Li mountain, part of a mountain range about six hours southwest of Taipei (by car). There is a national park at the heart of the mountains, and we spent two nights at a hotel inside the park. You had to park in a public lot and take a shuttle bus into the park itself. I fell asleep in the car, and kept waking up to see more winding roads and endless green hillsides, until lunchtime, when we stopped at a roadside restaurant where everything was made simple of wood and bamboo and people were sitting around watching the World Series on a small tv. Outside the restaurant, sausages and slabs of what looked like pork belly were grilling on a barbecue; inside was quiet (except for the tv). The view was glorious, looking over hills and fields, with the mountains in the distance. Those fields were lined with rows and rows of tea-bushes, a neatly clipped, deep green. Like the vineyards of Italy, only with Camellia sinensis instead of grape vines. We would see these tea-fields all the way to our destination and back again.

We ordered lunch, slices of the grilled pork belly and crisp-skinned sausages, which are rich and chewy and addictive. There is sticky rice stuffed into hollow bamboo stems and steamed (I think), vegetables, and soup with bamboo shoots. It is all very simple, but very good, and everything else we eat for the next few days will have that same simplicity to it. I fell asleep again after lunch, and woke to find the world shrouded in mist. A shuttle bus took us to the hotel, all wood paneling and expansive views. Old and new blend together; the new entrance is flanked by gift shops selling local teas and crafts and leads to an elevator that sweeps you up to the front desk that is, strangely, on the fifth floor. Hot tea is brought to us in tiny paper cups as the concierge offers to wake us at 4 am the next morning so we can watch the sunrise. Alishan is famous for its sunrises, but I have no desire to crawl out of a warm bed at an ungodly hour to watch the sun rise over the mountains in the company of hundreds of noisy tourists.

Dinner is in the hotel restaurant, very pink, with dripping chandeliers and windows along one long wall. The food is good - cold tofu dabbed with the locally grown wasabi and a little soy sauce, braised game, and a lethally hot soup with bamboo shoots that burns my mother's face as she unsuspectingly bites into a bamboo shoot and is assaulted by a jet of boiling soup. Much commotion involving an earpiece-wearing restaurant manager, ice cubes, and burn cream ensue. (The triangular burn will disappear over the next few days). The next night's dinner is less dramatic, and not as interesting, culinarily speaking, but I am too busy thinking about the photographs I took earlier from the terrace on the hotel's sixth (and top) floor. The setting sun had turned bright orange; the sky was streaked pink behind the trees, and I climbed over the potted herbs placed around the terrace to get a better shot. I can still smell the lavender and rosemary on my skin.

Taipei day 6.

In Taipei my parents have a few select restaurants where they often go for dinner, either by themselves, or with friends or business acquaintances. They have become the kind of people who have a place to go where they are known by the management, who will arrange a private room or a special menu. Tonight we are at the basement restaurant of the Hotel Landis, where the chef once came up with a menu entirely free of garlic to accomodate one guest's allergies. For this dinner my mother had asked for something simple and not too heavy, going over menus with one of the managers and changing various dishes, vetoing shark's-fin soup in favor of something less fancy, requesting noodles (it is J.'s birthday dinner) for one course. Phone calls and faxes have been flying back and forth, and I am looking forward to the final result.

We arrive and are ushered into a large private room, the kind usually used for wedding banquets and business functions; our table for ten people looks small at the end of the room. (The neon "longevity peach" sign on the wall - this is a birthday celebration, after all - makes us all laugh). Uniformed staff members rush around with chairs and lidded cups of tea as we wait for the other guests. At last everyone is together, and we sit down to eat.

Small plates of cold dishes are laid out - drunken chicken, cold seaweed, a sort of shredded beef jerky, tomatoes marinated in a syrupy dried-plum juice, all sorts of things I can't remember and certainly can't describe. I try everything, and then return for more, but am distracted by the first course. The first course is a dish of endive leaves filled with tiny sweet peas and some sort of vegetarian meat. Gently cooked shrimp are sweet and tender. A softly braised...something I can't identify is dark and savory. I think it is a sea cucumber, but I am not sure. There are braised vegetable marrows, pale green. Then comes a piece of fish in a creamy, golden-orange sauce, with a hidden surprise of grated mountain potato crunching against the softness of the fish. It might be cod, but then again, it could be anything. More recognizable is a bowl of noodles in a dark broth with pigs' feet.

Dessert is a steamed bun filled with sweet bean paste, shaped like a peach. For long life - it is traditional for birthdays. An enormous blushing-pink peach-shaped bun is presented, then lifted away to reveal a pile of smaller peach-shaped buns, each of which is placed before us. There is a plate of fruit - grapes and star-fruit and something I don't know how to describe, and at last, a sweet soup flavored with rice wine and tiny seed-shaped...things, with a single ball of sticky-rice paste filled with black sesame paste. Everything is familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, like Taipei itself, old memories clashing and melding with the present, new and different.

Taipei, day 5.

For lunch we head out to Yangmingshan, the mountain that overlooks Taipei. My father's family has a burial plot somewhere on the mountain, a terraced piece of land that looks across misty green hills and the city in the distance. There are waving plumes of wild grasses and neatly clipped camellia bushes, and it is beautiful there. But today I am with my mother, and we have another destination, lunch at an intimate restaurant housed in a series of low buildings set amongst rocky gardens and winding paths. You need a reservation, and on weekends they are hard to come by. But today things are quiet, and we follow a headset-wearing, clipboard-wielding woman towards the main building, taking our shoes off at the entrance and walking along the tatami-floored room to a low table in the corner.

We sit at that low table, my mother and F. and her mother and I, an electric kettle in the corner boiling away for the tea that we drink throughout the meal. There is no menu, only a waiter - there are a few of them, all young and good-looking and tall in their jeans under long aprons - asking if anyone is vegetarian or has any allergies. I like this kind of eating, when the menu is chosen for me and all I have to do is eat. And it begins, a blur of beautiful plates, course after course, hot and cold and crisp and soft and sweet and savory. In all there are fifteen courses, including two different kinds of fruit vinegars drunk as palate cleansers, one pineapple, one mulberry, and tea and fruit and a little ice cream to end. There used to be only ten courses, the waiter tells us, but some people complained that it was not enough.

Everything was clean and refined and precisely flavored, even the carefully formed mounds of savory sticky rice that came near the end, just large enough for the taste to fill the senses but not weigh down the stomach. This is fortunate because four hours later, it is time for dinner. We go whizzing off into the night in my mother's little car - it is as different from the sedans and SUVs she drove in Seattle as her Taipei life is different from her Seattle one, and I find it just a little disconcerting - and wind up at a quiet little restaurant where we are the last of our party to arrive.

Again, the meal has already been ordered and I sit and sip my sour-plum tea as the food begins to arrive, red-braised pork and pale-green vegetables and tofu and some kind of fish, sweet and clear-tasting in its simplicity. Even the fatty pork tastes light, somehow. There are tureens of soup and little dishes of dried preserved tomatoes and bowls of plain noodles. Dish after dish, and I am full, yet not so stuffed I can't move, which reminds me again how Taiwanese cooking is different from Western cooking. Later my mother will tell me it was all health food, as was the meal we had eaten at lunch, and it does not surprise me, even though it did not taste like health food. (Of course I am not sure what health food is supposed to taste like, since I avoid it assiduously). It was all extremely good, and I look forward to more of it.

Taipei days 3-4.

Yesterday we went to the basement supermarket in the Breeze Center, which, like every other high-end mall in this city has expensive shops upstairs and a supermarket downstairs. By supermarket, I mean SUPER market. Taiwanese supermarkets like this one make Whole Foods look like a 7-Eleven. Or a mini-mart in some dodgy neighborhood, the kind that has a metal grill over the front window which slides over the front door so it can be locked at night and the proprietor looks at you as if you were some shop-lifting young teenage punk trying to score a pack of cigarettes and a beer. Or something. This is something else, a dazzling array of foods of every kind, gleaming and sparkling beneath the bright lights. A bakery lined in honey-blond wood has tray after tray of pastries and breads of all kinds; cakes are arranged like jewels behind the glass counter. You take a plastic tray and a pair of tongs and go around helping yourself to croissants and hazelnut-topped swirls and mini-loaves of bread with nuts or olives or raisins or - how can you bear it? - plain bread.

To the left, dangerously, is a branch of Dean and DeLuca, all coolly black-and-white, advertising set lunches and exotic coffees. But we need groceries, so we sweep onwards, into the produce section. There are plastic-wrapped bunches of greens, all kinds of leafy things that I can't get back home, packets of bamboo shoots and finely shredded ginger and lily bulbs and goodness knows what else. The meat department has row after row of every cut imaginable, finely sliced pork and beef so richly marbled that it will practically melt in your mouth as you eat it. There are trays of whole fish, of fillets and heads and tails and collars and steaks and everything in between. Sashimi is arranged on real shiso leaves - no fake plastic decorations here - and piles of shredded daikon radish, to absorb moisture. The dairy aisle is filled with bottles of milk, plain and whole and lowfat and apple flavored and papaya flavored, and yogurt drinks of all kinds. And I haven't even made it through the cookies and candies and noodles and sachets of instant soups and bottles of sauces before I am whisked through the checkout line and on my way back to the car.

Today we make it to Ding Tai Fong, where I come at least once every trip. On a weekday, early, there is no line, and in no time at all, it seems, I am eating xiao lung bao from a bamboo steamer, dipping each bun into a saucer of dark vinegar and eating it cautiously from my spoon, with a few shreds of ginger. They are just as I remember them, the translucent skins revealing the blush of the ground pork filling, hot broth dripping out into the safety of the spoon with each bite. There are also steamed vegetarian jiao zi, and hot-and-sour soup, but it is the xiao lung bao that I have come for. When I am far away I dream of Ding Tai Fong the way a dog dreams in winter of the bones he buried in summer, waiting for the time to come again when he can once again run out and find them. I dream of eating xiao lung bao, and regret the three years that have passed since that last time and this one. And then I eat another one, and the regret fades away.

Taipei, day 2.

For lunch we head out to a vegetarian restaurant to meet a friend. For all its cosmopolitan sprawl Taipei is a small town, and as soon as we step inside the coolly modern restaurant my mother runs into people she knows. J. is already eating her lunch, an intriguing tangle of noodles and vegetables and probably some form of tofu. The menu lists noodle dishes and rice dishes and hot-pots of various...vegetarian things, and I am baffled. There are dishes with truffle oil and dishes that promise "Italian-style" noodles and set menus that begin with health drinks and end with dessert (which appears to be the sweet soup made with white wood ears - that ruffly, translucent fungus mushroom that was my bête noire as a child. F. arrives, and we order. I think I have ordered some kind of fried rice, but I am not sure.

I am not a vegetarian and never will be - I am too fervently an omnivore for that. But I have been slowly reducing the amount and frequency that I have been consuming meat, particularly red meat, and I am constantly amazed at how easy it is to eat well without it. My fried rice arrives, steaming invitingly, and it is delicious. Made with brown rice - or perhaps it is some kind of wild rice - it is a study, as all great dishes are, in contrasting tastes and textures, with the chewy, nutty rice and crisp-sweet slices of red and yellow peppers and the dark strips of shiitake mushrooms, along with soft shreds of tofu skins and green lettuce. It is intensely savory and incredibly filling, and if I weren't so full I would want more. This is vegetarian cooking at its best, hearty and refined at the same time.

Dinner time, and I move around the long expanse of my mother's kitchen for the first time. It is unlike the airy kitchen of my childhood, with its pale beige-painted cupboards and dark marble backsplashes, or my own narrow galley kitchen in my apartment, with its white counters and gray cabinets and early 80's appliances. The living, dining, and kitchen areas are one single, open space with the kitchen running along one wall, a single counter that extends into a pantry at the far end. There is a single gas burner next to a glass flat-top, and it is with a sense of excitement I ignite the gas burner, hearing that click-click-click-fwoosh for the first time since moving into my own home last year. It is a strange feeling; the oil and salt and pepper and soy sauce are the same; the pans are different, the utensils are different, the food is different.

Too tired to even consider watching three pans at once, I make each dish, one at a time, not even bothering to wash the pan in between. Pale green cabbage leaves are sautéed until limp, swirled with soy sauce; I have a moment of doubt when I wonder if I added too much. I squeeze the water from the reconstituted dried matsutake mushrooms, more intense and yet less fragrant than the fresh ones, stir-fry them with slices of pink marbled pork, more richly marbled with fat than anything I have at home. Then comes eggs scrambled with tiny white fish, each smaller than a bean sprout; they seem to wiggle in my fingers as I drain the water from their soft bodies. Everything is different; the apartment which I had not seen until my arrival a few nights ago, everything a reminder that my parents have a different life now, on a distant shore. The table is not the same (a long, minimalist slab of wood, so long it had to be hauled up the outside of the building, all sixteen floors, because it could not fit into the elevator), the dishes are not the same (the plates are smaller), the food is not the same. (Except for the cabbage, because, well, how different can soy-sauce-cooked cabbage be?). Only we are the same.

Taipei days. Day 1.

Generally when I am in Taipei, I try to eat mostly a) Taiwanese food or b) Japanese food. It is only the first day, and I have already succeeded in doing both.

At lunchtime we hopefully swing by Ding Tai Fong, the dumpling place where I go at least once every trip, but there is a fifteen-minute wait. It is not even 11:30 yet, and the place already packed. I will have to wait until another day for xiao lung bao, those steamed pork dumplings that burst with hot broth as you eat them, but never mind that. Something else is around the corner. We go to a small restaurant that has been around forever, it seems, with a chef sitting low to the ground behind a vat of boiling broth just inside the door. Noodles - yellow egg noodles and translucent bean-thread noodles - are piled next to baskets of vegetables and bowls of other ingredients. We order broiled fish and slices of pork and fried cuttle-fish balls (or perhaps they are made of squid) and battered squash and, of course, noodles.

The noodles come in a light broth, probably pork, and are topped with ground pork, savory and intense and incredibly garlicky - I feel like I am moving around in a haze of garlic for the rest of the day - and it reminds me that I am back in Taipei, more than the sights and sounds of the city, more than the fog of jet-lag. But even through the jet-lag the taste of everything is clear and true, the flavors sharp and pronounced, somehow different from anything I might find at home. It is reassuring and exhilarating all at once, strange and yet familiar, and I remember again why I come back now and again, for reasons aside from family. For food.

By dinnertime I am ready to curl up and fall asleep, but there is family to see and dinner to eat, and we are at a Japanese restaurant inside a sort of mall. (Here there are a lot of good restaurants in malls or department stores, and most of these malls and department stores have food courts and supermarkets and bakeries in the basement). I have not seen my cousins and my aunt for three years, but they have not changed. We are a generation apart, because my father is a generation younger than their late father, his oldest brother, and in some ways to them I am still five years old. (Again they tell me the story of how I valiantly ate my way through a banquet meal in order to attain a piece of candy, only to be vanquished by the final course, a sweet soup made with a translucent white mushroom that is all slippery texture but no taste).

Dinner is a blur of sushi and sashimi, but again it is different from what I might find at home. Even the wasabi is different, sweeter and less pungent. The shrimp comes with its head still on, the brains eaten raw along with the body; at home they deep-fry the heads until crisp. There are sesame-crusted scallops, slices of perfectly seared foie gras, noodles that are actually threads of what they call mountain potato. There are elaborate sushi rolls like sliced kaleidescopes of colors against white rice, black nori. Tender squares of steak are arranged in a perfect grid. And at last, that sweet soup of white...to put it bluntly, fungus, that vanquished me more than twenty years ago. But it holds no terrors for me now, although I finish it before I move onto a plate of starfruit and an orange neatly sliced and replaced in the green shell of its skin.

Eating in flight.

I always associate the first time I ate caviar with the first time I ever flew first-class. It was Christmas break and R. had invited me to London for a week, and as she was then a flight attendant she got free (or perhaps incredibly cheap, I forget which) seats. Immediately upon boarding we were offered juice, water, or champagne, and for dinner, caviar or shrimp cocktail to begin. I remember how the caviar gleamed black against the white plate, how it was served with finely chopped onion and hard-boiled egg and perhaps a smear of sour cream, on blandly crisp squares of melba toast. That was the last time I flew first-class, at least internationally, and my last pleasurable memory of airplane food.

Airplane food is the crowning indignity of the inconvenience and agony of air travel, beginning with the line to check in. Then there is the line to pass through security, as they make you take off your shoes and watches and belts, followed by the line to board the airplane, row by row. At last you reach the narrow seats with the nonexistent leg-room that makes you feel as though you were travelling upright in your own coffin, immobilized for the next three or four or ten interminable hours, relieved only by the silent battle with your neighbor for the armrest or getting up to wait in line, yet again, for the bathroom. And then you are forced to watch some terrible movie which you never had any intention of seeing on the ground. Yet all of this pales in comparison to the plastic-encased food which arrives, unevenly heated under its foil wrapper, all rubbery chicken and mushy rice, soggy noodles and metallic-tasting tomato sauce blanketed with tasteless cheese. (Umberto Eco wrote elegantly and eloquently on the subject of eating in flight, but unfortunately my copy of How to Travel with a Salmon is on the other side of the Pacific).

Through a series of events involving my mother, ankle surgery, many, many frequent-flyer miles, and several days' worth of phone calls to the airline, I found myself ensconced in a so-called first-class "suite," with work-stations and storage cubbies and a goose-neck reading-lamp and an armrest bristling with controls, the most important of which being the button that reclines the seat completely flat so you can pull the quilted blanket over your head and sleep for the entire flight. But how can you sleep when there is a small porcelain cup of warmed mixed nuts (seriously!) and those puffy dinner rolls that I have not seen in a restaurant since at least 1993 or after rosemary foccaccia and crusty pain au levain became ubiquitous on dinner tables, whichever came first.

The appetizer is a disappointment, a sad-looking scallop languishing under a tangle of roasted red peppers, next to a squishy sort of duck-and-wild-mushroom torte, which I cannot identify as such until I look at the menu. The veal medallions are tough and chewy, which was to be expected, but the mashed potatoes are excellent and the dark green chard is quite tasty. I feel sad until I remember that I did not pay anything for any of this, but I wonder if any of my fellow passengers paid for their seats (a first-class ticket from Seattle to Taipei, with a stop in Tokyo, comes dangerously close to the $10,000 mark) and, if so, what they thought of their meal. (And then I pull my eye-mask over my head and fall asleep). I regret the second roll, because I have no room for ice cream. But there is, after all, my return flight in two weeks.

(The above was mostly written in the First-Class lounge at Tokyo's Narita Airport, en route to Taipei. In the lounge I ate sushi that was at least as good, if not better, than any found in an American supermarket, and steamed pork dumplings that were slightly better than those found in Chinese restaurants around Seattle).

New acquisitions. thrift-store books.

A few weeks ago I found myself with an hour to kill while waiting for my mother, as she had an appointment in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle. It was almost mid-afternoon - too late for lunch, too early for a snack. I don't know Ballard very well; one of my favorite restaurants, Volterra, is here, but otherwise I never come to this part of town. I could buy a drink and sit in the car reading like a bored chauffeur, or I could walk around and explore. I wandered through a little Norwegian deli/grocery, the last reminder that this neighborhood was once an immigrant community before they died out and the yuppies moved in, and into a small store that sold twee little greeting cards and local souvenirs. Then I discovered two things: a) Ballard has a lot of thrift stores, and b) thrift stores sell books, a fact that has somehow escaped me until now.

I drifted through three different thrift stores before I suddenly find myself in possession of three cookbooks that I could not resist because they cost about a dollar each, even though I find it highly unlikely I will ever try any fondue recipes from a cookbook published in 1969, or cook something from The Frugal Gourmet Cooks With Wine, and I most definitely will not be making anything from Turkey: The Bird For All Seasons, which was published in 1984. Judging from the author's inscription inside, this whimsically illustrated (with pen-and-ink cartoons of turkeys) book was only available at craft fairs and community fundraisers. Page after page of every dish imaginable, all featuring turkey - leftover roast turkey, fresh turkey that you separate into breasts and thighs and legs and cutlets, or pieces bought as you would buy chicken.

That first thrift-shop experience was a revelation. The books were even cheaper than used-bookstore books, 99 cents or $1.50, $1.99 at most, making it impossible to resist even a 1962 paperback copy of The Red Badge of Courage. (It's possible I have a problem). I found another thrift store on my way home from work; I had passed by almost every day for over a year, and it was not until yesterday that I went in. Neighborhood shoppers browsed amongst the clothes and assorted furnishings, flipped through what looked like hundreds of old records in their battered sleeves. But I struck gold in a cache of cookbooks, those Time-Life Foods of the World books that were published in the 70's. These books - everyone seems to have the full set thirty years ago - are filled with (by now somewhat dated) information about the regions they cover, with glorious photographs of regional dishes with that patina that vintage photographs seem to have. They cost between $2.50 (after some mysterious discount that I still don't understand) and 50 cents (again, after discount), and there were over a dozen of them. I had to go back the next day for more, because I couldn't carry them all.

I think I need a new bookcase.

postscript (for J.): I found a copy of A Year in Provence amongst the unsorted, randomly shelved books. I can't wait to read it, but I'm saving it for a trip later this month. I know I'll love it as I do the other Peter Mayle books.

Eating out. Steelhead Diner. And other adventures.

My friend M. arrives just as it begins to rain. At the airport I hear her voice on the phone for the first time since she graduated college a year ahead of me, six years ago, and leap from the car to find her on the sidewalk outside the luggage concourse. It surprises me that even from a distance I recognize her immediately, that she looks the same. But then how many hours did we spend together all those years ago, listening to techno and Russian pop music, how many meals did we share in dining halls and cafés and various off-campus apartments, how many cups of tea or coffee or icy shots of vodka did we drink together? The people you know well are always the same, from across a hundred feet or six fleeting years.

M. has never been to Seattle before, and I want her to see all the things I love, beginning with the view of the city from the freeway as we drive towards her hotel. I have thought this out in advance - perhaps a stroll through the sculpture park, a visit to the newly expanded art museum, and a walk around the Pike Place Market before dinner. One out of three is not bad. The visit to the sculpture park is scrapped due to a) the rain and b) I am confused by the one-way streets and cannot get to the parking garage due to traffic. Our visit to the museum is curtailed by the need for a snack, more specifically a cabbage-and-onion piroshky from the tiny Russian bakery in the market (we were, after all, brought together by an interest in Russia - in my case due in part to someone I will refer to only as the White Russian). By the time we have eaten our piroshkys - warm, brioche-like dough wrapped around a filling of sautéed cabbage and onions and baked until golden - and walked to the museum, it is ten minutes to closing, leaving us just enough time to run into the museum for some little trinkets.

Our wanderings take us down to the water and the piers with their shops and fast-food stands. I haven't been here in years, and the last time I was at the Ye Olde Curiosity Shop I was probably about four feet tall. At the end of the day, most of the tourists have gone; it's just the two of us and a few stragglers. It is exciting to see my city through someone else's eyes, to watch them experience a place you have loved all your life. I am glad to see M. in my hometown, glad to find that the parts of us that we show to the world may have changed - at least I feel mine have - but that we are the same people to each other, and that I might have just seen her yesterday instead of before I was old enough to legally drink in this country. But night is falling, the stores are closing, and we head back up towards the market to the Steelhead Diner.

Inside is part old-fashioned-diner and part trendy-modern restaurant, with a menu to match. Our minds are made up quickly - two appetizers, and an entrée to share. There is a perfect crab cake, all fat lumps of crabmeat, heaped with a pile of crispy fried parsley, floating in a pool of sauce Louis. I have no idea what sauce Louis is, but it was creamy and smooth and slightly tangy. Then there is a slice of caviar pie, a base of cream cheese beaten with what seems like sour cream and mixed with hardboiled egg and onion, the white surface hidden beneath a bright rainbow of caviar, dark grey, orange, golden, red, surrounded with more bits of onion and egg and capers, ready to spread on the accompanying toast. Next comes perfectly battered fish and chips, with homemade tartar sauce fragrant with - what is it? - dill.

It seems impossible that we can eat more, but I have just enough room for a golden lemon cake that looks like a small castle, hidden beneath a swirl of intense lemon curd and a cap of soft whipped cream. I steal a bite of M's dark pound cake, a slice of poached pear heady with red wine. There is hot mint tea, and more conversation; I drink my tea and think of how Mary Cantwell wrote that when you ate alone, it left you free to concentrate on your food, and I think of how when you are with other people, your attention is divided between each bite of the food before you, and your companion. And a shared past.

Cooking for others.

I came home last night after a brief post-work binge at Trader Joe's to find my mother and E. in the dining room, table spread with papers in every direction. (I have no idea what they are doing, and asking would only involve long, complicated answers that I would not understand). Are you going to cook for us? comes the question. Of course. From the bags littering the cold marble of my kitchen floor (at some point some former inhabitant laid the hallway, kitchen, and guest bathroom with marble tiles of a rather bilious pattern of red and gray streaked with cream) I gather packages of zucchinis and cucumbers and bright bell peppers and a couple of onions. There are frozen quiches and an enticing box of mushroom-filled pastries (intended for lunch at work), and stashed away in the fridge is some leftover braised beef (a not entirely successful concoction of short ribs and onions and tomatoes) and a bowl of rice. Surely I can conjure up something to feed us without having to resort to delivered pizza or lukewarm takeout. And then my mother tells me E. is a vegetarian. (Fortunately the helpfully lacto-ovo kind).

The zucchinis are washed and trimmed and quartered with a few swift strokes of my knife. How I love my new roasting pan, I think, as I toss the slim lengths of zucchini (why the British call them courgettes is something I will never understand, as well as why eggplants are called aubergines; given the mutual contempt between the British and the French it has always seemed odd to me) with olive oil and grains of coarse pink sea salt, the salt I spent a ridiculously long time searching for at Whole Foods at the behest of the aforementioned mother. The heavy pan will sear the vegetables perfectly; I can slide the pan into the oven and forget about it while I turn my attention to other dishes. The tricky part is cleaning the bell peppers, flinging seeds far and wide as I pull out the cores and strip away the white ribs, slicing the bright flesh, red and yellow and orange. Some olive oil goes into my favorite pan, a deep skillet with a rounded bottom and a glass lid. On another burner the braised beef heats gently as I slide the quiches and mushroom turnovers into the ridiculously large toaster oven D. gave me last year.

I throw the peppers into the hot oil, tossing them before sloshing in a little water and then covering the pan so they steam. I'm in the groove now, that golden moment where you know that everything's going to work out, that you've timed it all just right, that you've made something so many times before you don't even need to taste it to know you've done it right (but you taste anyway, for the pleasure of it). I add soy sauce to the peppers, give the roasting zucchini a stir. Sneak a few of the mushroom turnovers as a pre-dinner snack. An amuse-bouche, if you will. The zucchini is ready, the jade-skinned spears browned in spots. A bowl of rice goes in the microwave; I sprinkle some sugar over the peppers, and they will be soft and melting, the soy sauce and sugar and a little olive oil forming a salty-sweet glaze. The quiche is hot in its flaky crust, and the beef has just come to a simmer. The papers come off the dining-room table as plates are laid, napkins and chopsticks at each place. It's time to eat.