Over at the Crunchy Con blog, Rod Dreher describes his perfect Valentine’s Day dinner:

On the menu: to start, a dozen briny raw oysters, slurped from the shell and washed down with cold Chablis. Then a bottle of Veuve Clicquot La Grande Dame. A simple salad with warm, crusted goat cheese. Halibut in an herbaceous cream sauce. Lightly steamed broccoli dressed only with salt and lemon juice. And to finish, tarte Tatin with whipped cream. With strong black coffee, then a fine grappa, followed by a long, long walk through the cold night fog.

I suppose I would enjoy that meal if I actually had it, apart from the oysters, but the only things on that list that really turn me on are the coffee and the walk. Maybe there was a time when I might have learned to enjoy sophisticated food and wine, but it’s well past; I’m really not even interested now.

I don’t want to sound like some sort of reverse snob, but when I think of food that I really love, the first things that come to mind are low-class stuff like barbecue and catfish. Thinking about that after reading Rod’s post, I discovered that my favorite restaurant has a web site.

I grew up about a quarter of a mile away from the building in that picture. My family owns the land it sits on. If you could see through the leftmost corner of the building as it’s pictured there, you could see our house. I don’t know why they chose to use a picture taken on a dull, grey winter day, but the sight of it fills me with nostalgia. It’s funny what the fact that a place is home can do for it; a wider view of that area would show huge expanses of flat bare red-dirt fields and winter-brown pastures but it’s beautiful to me. I wish I were about fifteen years old again, wandering around in the pastures and fields and woods with a .22 or a shotgun, pretending to hunt but really just enjoying the walk, with a chance to start my life over again and not make so many mistakes.

I live about 300 miles south of there now. Time to make a trip up north and have some barbecue and hushpuppies—as far as I’m concerned there are no other hushpuppies.

By the way, here’s the thread I mentioned at Crunchy Con.