I feel the end approaching. Quick, bring me my dessert, coffee and liqueur.”

– Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s great aunt Pierette

Buenos Aires – Paz, from The Cooking Adventures of Chef Paz, has tagged me with a new meme that’s making the rounds. Now, despite the fact that she has yet to respond to the meme I tagged her with… months ago… and for which she knows there’s a pox being held in abeyance if she doesn’t get to it soon… I’m going to play along. The starting point of the “joint project”, as she’s calling it, was Melissa of Traveler’s Lunchbox, asking food bloggers to recommend “things you’ve eaten and think that everyone should eat at least once before they die.”

The core of her guidelines, other than picking five and only five items: “You’re welcome to be as general or as pin-sharp as you like, referring to specific dishes, restaurants, ingredients, products or preparations (although I think entire cuisines are a bit too general…), but they should definitely be things you know and love and couldn’t imagine not having tasted. A sentence or two about your history with this food and why it means so much to you would also be great, and an item or two that is local to you, your cuisine or a place you have lived will help maintain a nice geographical diversity.”

1. Cook-Off – Partially because I want to make my last meal last as long as possible, and partly because I can’t imagine a better way to go (and in essence I’m recommending two things, but so be it), I want my last meal to be a cook-off degustation menu between Tetsuya Wakuda and Charlie Trotter. Easily the two most memorable, and most fascinating, and most creative meals of my life were at their eponymous restauarants.
2. Uni – Glistening fresh from the sea, ice cold, just opened, and served with just a squirt of fresh lemon juice and maybe some freshly grated wasabi, sea urchin roe, or uni, is easily my favorite raw seafood. I remember my first bite, nearly 25 years ago, of that quivering mass, looking like a straingely congealed butterscotch pudding in a seaweed cup, and being completely entranced by the lightly briny, sweet flavor.
3. Mac ‘n Cheese – Just out of the oven and piping hot, with a golden brown crust, and packed with the creamy richness of sharp cheddar, cream, and maybe a touch of mustard or chili powder. For me, this is the ultimate comfort food, and if there’s every a time one needs comfort, it’s at a last meal.
4. Pizza – I’m not even sure from where I’d want this. A thick Chicago deep dish? A New York style massive slice? A Neapolitan thin crust? An Argentine al molde? Bring ’em all on, I may as well pack on a few pounds for my last journey. And don’t stint on the anchovies.
5. BBQ – Staying in the simple comfort food range, I thought of just a simple porterhouse steak, charbroiled to medium rare, with a baked potato; I thought of buttermilk fried chicken with biscuits and gravy; but in the end, I think I want a couple or three racks of ribs, slathered with a tangy sweet barbecue sauce, freshly made coleslaw and potato salad, and washed down with an ice cold couple of liters of beer…then bring me a couple of pies – lemon meringue, pecan, and sweet potato… and you can knock me off with a “wafer thin mint” at the end…

Not that I’m whining, but basically no one paid any attention to the meme I started when I tagged them, and it barely totters on despite that I think it was a good one. So I’m not going to tag anyone. Enough folk read my blog that I merely leave it up to them if they want to participate and tag back to either here or Melissa’s original post or both.

The only post I know of relating to my Butterfly Effect meme since my round up at the end of July:

Good Glop from Amie in Texas

and, of course, there will no doubt soon be a posting from Paz…