Memorable meals of your life ............................food snobbery and one upmanship strongly encouraged. No nugget and twizzler talk here please ladies!

[moondog]

God I'm a greedy cow and there is a dearth of good food talk at present.

For moi they are as follows...

Mumus in the South Pacific where I grew up.
A big pit is dug and meanwhile stones heated in a fire. Meanwhile pork,chicken,fish, taro and sweet potatoes are placed in banana leaf parcels,usually with coconut cream.Then they are put in the pit,covered with stones and left to steam for hours.
This was special celebratory food and utterly divine.

A picnic in a pine forest en route from Perigord to the Alps to see my sister.
It was only bread,pate and red wine but never have these tasted so good.

A shashlik (bbq) in the orchard of a Russian dacha with the family of a university student I taught.
A warm spring day after a very long cold winter.
Pork kebabs,marinated in oil,vinegar,bay and juniper,tomatoes,rye bread and vodka,followed by a sauna in which we wore funny little woolen hats to encourage the sweating and beat each other with birch branches.

blimey - can't compete with those !

halfpounder from wimpy eaten on margate beach

ooh I do like these evocative threads - I'll have a trawl through my gastronomic travel and post later

Tone is already lowered by the..coarser elements amongst us!

oh but the wimpy is divine:o

The Fat Duck, this January. Lots of very very strange but lovely food. (foie gras ice cream. beetroot jelly. parsnip cereal. I have the menu somewhere.)

Really good Argentinian food, in Iceland. Big big big meat.

Fresh blueberries eaten from the bushes, in Eastern Canada. Lots of crab there, too.

Lovely frenchish food at a restaurant in Montreal where they have no fridge. Lots of foie gras there, too.

I'm sure there are more, I can't remember right now.

Ooooh NQC
The Fat Duck!!
Am very envious!!!

Bibendum about 10 years ago, I can't remember what we ate but it was divine, I know

Champagne and lobster eaten on a balcony overlooking the sea at The Hope Cove Hotel in Devon, with a boyfriend, sometime in the nineties

Cambozola and Champagne in bed an hour after dd was born in it

Gosh, Champagne features a lot so far, must think of one that doesn't...

Oh, I know, 1996, a McDonald's sausage and egg McMuffin while watching the sun rise in Singapore after spending all night drinking, dancing and flirting. In my defence nowhere else was open yet and we were starving.

I knew you'd post about the Fat Duck NQC! Wot no snail porridge?

My memorable meals include

a Japanese barbecue in a walled college garden in spring

Giant platter of fruits de mer (including limpets ) in the gayest restaurant in La Rochelle

Wild boar roasted on herbs on an open fire in a rambling old restaurant in Corsica

The carnage that was ds' first encounter with dim sum in Chinatown

Wonderful ciabatta sandwiches in Valvona and Crolla in Edinburgh with friends

Oh, weren't you around then? I had big threads re: what do I wear, where am I going etc etc. I was pretty sure it was Fat Duck, and was very happy to be right. Well, big threads for me, anyway.

It really really was incredible. It seemed wrong to eat other stuff afterwards, profaning my digestive system after having such incredible food.

Lamb on the spit

Friend's 21st in Cape Town (many moons ago) - they dug a pit in the ground and started the fire off in the morning and slow roasted the lamb on the spit all day

it practically melted in my mouth when I ate it - will never forget that meal!

Another vote for Fat Duck here. Amazing food and the whole experience was such good FUN!

Had an amazing meal at Gordon Ramsey's restaurant a couple of years back too.

Freshly caught fish cooked with tons of garlic on a BBQ on a beach in India whilst watching the sunset...

On the flip side - had a shite meal at Le Gavroche recently. Tad embarassing as a member of my extended family is a chef there. Doh!

Oh, yes, Japan! I went for waki-waki or something, with swishing thin bits of meat through water then dipping them in things, and then drinking the water at the end. Oh, and lovely lovely yakitori. And gyoza.

I've had some good food at Club Gascon and Bleeding Heart in London. Oh, and a great meal at some place out near Banbury, called the something Goose.

Oh I am liking these offering very much,although of course talk of symple fayre in hymble syrrundynges is also absolutely fine as long as occasion memorable.
No NQC,I would certainly have remembered such a thread had I been around.

Ah WWW,I sent dh out for soft cheese,rare roast beef and Champagne mere hours after dd's birth.
Seem to recall hogging the entire bottle too.

One I recall vividly was when dh and I were on honeymoon. Our entire honeymoon was one huge splurge on all the finest luxuries in life - sickening to think what we could do with all that money now.

Anyway, I digress. We were on an exclusive island on the Great Barrier Reef for one week. One night, as a honeymoon couple, we were invited to dine in the moonlight at the end of the jetty, away from all the other diners and waited on hand and foot by our own exclusive waiter.

One of the delicacies brought to our table were oysters. Now dh and I are not keen on this particular delicacy, but didn't like to send them back to the kitchen untouched. So when the waiter was on his way back down the jetty to fetch the next dish, we released all the oysters back into the sea by dropping them between the planks at our feet!

One honeymoon/culinary memory I will never forget!

nice thread..I shall look forward to catching up with it tomorrow

Had a fabulous banquet in a bedhouin (?sp) tent in Oman (many years ago) when I lived out there, similar sort of thing as already mentioned -slow cooked meat couscous fresh dates lovely.

Had delicious BBQ trout caught and cooked over a fire by dh and myself when we were on holiday in Mull - soo fresh.

Thick wedges of wholemeal bread with lots of butter and marmite on a boat on the thames whilst stoned. And for afters, mountains of chocolate from the 24 hour garage nearby

But they were sans shells eh DG??
They would have died.
What a tragic waste...

Oh God,there's nothing like that stoned hunger is there??
It's primal.

aww lonelymum, that's a lovely memory

just remembered another - one of my ex boyf taught me to dive (well snorkel) for crayfish. We spent one very hot afternoon swimming in the sea for hours trying to catch enough to feed all our mates. We eventually came out with about 12 crayf and some perlemoen (abalone) and cooked them on the braai - we split the crayf and cooked them with herbs and lemon. There's something amazingly satisfying about catching the food yourself and then cooking it.

They had to be sans shells Moondog! We had to make it look like we had eaten the buggers! Yes I know it was a waste. Later on the same holiday, flying on Concorde (well you said oneupmanship was encouraged) I turned down ludicrously expensive caviar as well - it did become very tedious after goodness knows how many times of being served it!

lol @ this thread moondog, my dad is the king of reminiscing about good meals!

Have had loads of fab meals, so among the more recent outstanding ones would be fresh simply grilled lobster in a little restaurant in Cornwall (but where exactly? can't remember )
Delicious fritos mixtos at Panier Fleuri in San Sebastian, amazing pizza and spaghetti alle vongole in Venice, and many oysters in Bordeaux (Chez Brunet). Also some great meals in another place in Bordeaux (the name of which escapes me), where the sommelier was v friendly and gave us loads to taste afterwards (hic)
Most of my favourite meals have been in all sorts of restaurants in the Basque country, some really simple and reasonably cheap places, others, really beautiful and expensive, I just love it

Ooh talking of crayfish, same holiday, same island, had a fantastic barbecue provided by resort with prawns the size of jumbo sausages being cooked before our eyes. And other shell fish but it was the size and flaour of the prawns I remember best.