Culinary Bliss

Sitting here, watching the Food Network show, The Best Thing I Ever Ate and thinking.

I posed the question to my mother:  What is the best thing you ever ate?

Her answer? with very little thought, "hands down the candied bacon from the cane-sugar and bacon iced cupcakes at John Besh's The American Sector."  

I had to give it a bit more thought, wondering exactly what qualifies something as the best thing I ever ate.  After dismissing all my favorite homemade treats, and seriously salivating while considering the fresh lobster in Maine, I came to the conclusion that the best thing I ever ate was the afterthought potato on my plate at dinner at the pub in Healesville.  It was fantastic, soft, rich, creamy and wonderful as all good potatoes are, but with all the flavor of the best bits dregs of French Onion soup.  It is the one thing I would willingly crawl over broken glass to get, the one thing I could happily eat everyday.  I am torn between wanting to take up residence in Healesville so I can have that potato everyday and never going back so that the perfect potato remains unsullied in my memory.  That potato is the stuff of which culinary dreams are made.

The bland looking lump in the bottom right of this plate is potato bliss -- the best thing I ever ate.