One summer night when I was seventeen, a friend and I built a fire out in his back yard, got an old cast iron skillet and put it on the fire with some butter and scrambled a couple of dozen eggs. When the eggs were almost done, we threw in more butter to make the flavor a little more rich, a little pinch of garlic and some salt and pepper... and that was all. We sat on the ground by the fire, eating the egss off paper plates with plastic forks, drinking beer and telling stories. When we were done we smoked cigarettes, drank more beer and told more stories and talked about women and fishing and our families and school, but we didn't talk about where we *were* in life; at that cruel line between being a kid and an adult, that line that you step over... that line that once you do cross it, is, you realize, one way; there's no going back. 30 years later, I still remember the smell of the wood smoke, the buttery taste of the eggs, the fire casting giant shadows of us behind us on the trees at our backs, the feeling of being seventeen again.

Since then, I have made many wonderful meals. I make a hell of a manicotti, pizza my ancestors would love, a wonderful banana carmel torte when I'm feeling ambitious, my own chocolate carmel turtles that are a huge hit at my workplace... recipes I spent a lot of time developing. But I have never since made a meal that I have remembered as vividly as that one. When I think about it, I still taste the butter and the eggs and the garlic and I smell the wood-smoke and I still see the giant shadows on the trees, bearing down on us, looming, dark and scary like the future.

That was a meal well cooked.