Soaring Through Blue

meet papa chef

I get so many requests from people wanting to know how Papa Chef and I met. You can always search the archives, but as this is a story that I imagine (shoutout to Yoko!) will never grow old and weary to my readers, I’d like to share it again, spontaneously. Just call this a love story in honour of today, which I will christen Non-Valentines Day.

“You taste like truffles,” he told me, when he came up for air after kissing me. At this point in my life, I’d had little contact with gloriously spontaneous foods like truffles, but I knew this was a compliment, him comparing me with the woodsy, ripe, slightly smelling of body odor, unexpectedly unusual fungal bounties of the ineffably spontaneous earth sought out lovingly, snufflingly, and ravenously by wild wooly pigs (ah, the bacon!).

We’d been at a wine tasting, me fumbling through the tables of free wine (how we do love free stuff, especially food!), him telling me how much he loved this site. And then he leaned over and kissed me, and I was instantly free from the shackles of failed first dates with men who wouldn’t return my calls and the shame of being unmarried and already in my late 30s amid a sea of spontaneously happy, married, procreating friends who were leaving me all behind in their wonderful, blissful joy.

Joyous spontaneous tipsiness took over and we ran across the street, holding hands, skipping in the sunlight, suddenly children together, happy and laughing, not caring one whit about those poor soulless people who gaped and couldn’t be bothered to say YES to YES and living life skippingly. We walked and giggled, walked and stared lovingly into each others eyes, walked and skipped and walked and looked and danced some more. And giggled, of course.

We went somewhere for lunch; I don’t remember the food because he kept leaning in for kisses, his slithery tongue and prickly upper lip wet and sweaty as the salty sea nearby, his spittle cold as a fish freshly plucked, flailing and gulping for air, from the dark sapphire ocean, the ravenous garlicky breath from his flaring nostrils whipping at my limpid lips like the stinging sea breezes, at the tiny table at which we sat, with his unmanicured hand on my leg, both desperately and longingly, palely and sweatily.

This was it, dear reader. Goodness golly me, the end of my struggles and lonely heartsong. I’d finally found someone who could fart in front of me and was willing to go on a second date soon, very soon, probably the very next week even. Here, I thought, was a keeper- this must be what people mean when they talk about The One. And when he promised to feed me truffles, I knew that we were in this, together, for a long time to come, forever, and even further than that, as our newfound love, that tastes of giggles and happiness and laughter, would know no bounds, boundlessly and effortlessly, ineffable.

Those of you who are regular readers may have noticed that I wasn't posting much at all during this time. Please understand. There’s a reason why. Certainly, I’ve been busy with other things- working and clattering away, hunched over rigidly, achingly, at my laptop keyboard, thinking and typing and thinking some more, shooting super special clips for the Food Network and searching endlessly for a literary agent who will return my calls. I’ve been winning lots of spontaneous and important awards, too, though I’ve been too busy to go into much detail about those.

But most importantly of all, I’m in love. And we’ve only known each other for two weeks and something like a day. I think. Something like that.

Technically, we met through an online dating service, but truly, I feel like we met through this website. Oh my goodness deary me it certainly sounds great as a future book tagline, too, doesn’t it?! I can’t mention any of that now, and I hope you'll respect my privacy here and understand why I can only talk to my family and true friends about this, but you know it’s ineffably blooming into being, my dears. In any case, I sent Papa Chef this site in a last-ditch attempt to test him. You see, too many men had read this site and been intimidated by my writing, by my passion and fierceness, by my force and spirit, by my bowler hats and suspenders, by my strict aversion to gluten and slutty summer tomatoes, by my intelligence, by my unusual-non-cookie-cutterness, by the incredible, indescribable, inequaled, indelible, ineffable length of these posts.

I expected him to flee, but this site made him fall in love with me that much quicklier. We knew it immediately. We both wanted to talk about food. I tried to steer the conversation to books, but no, we just came right back to food. It’s truly our passion, and it’s all we ever talk about, only, ever, late and night into the languid cricket chirpy gloaming, and early in the afternoon after we've gotten up, while I lounge blissfully and he prepares breakfast fluidly and non-fleetingly in the bright sunshine of our dancing kitchen, listening deeply, tenderly to each other's sense memories and caring about each other so much that we don’t have anything left for the rest of the world.

How can I not love this man? YES. YES YES, YESLY, GLUTEN-FREE YES.



















So here we are, perfectly and equally in love with each other, laughing and dazzling each other, tasting of laughter and caul fat, lots of butter and few vegetables, duck fat and sausages and the salty happy tears that tumble down our rosy cheeks as we gaze longingly and lovingly into each others eyes, making us happier than anyone else ever could be in this wide wide world. No hesitation, no jobs, no drama, no cares, no money, no worries, no gluten, no consideration of others, only mindful experiences, honesty, sense memories, and more passionate love than anyone else could ever imagine. Trust me on that last one.

And that first kiss? Let me tell you unabashedly, with laughter and love and giggles but not gluten, for I am happy and free without it: since the invention of the kiss, there have only been five kisses that were rated the most passionate, the most pure. This one left them all behind.

A thick slab of fatty organic wild free-range acorn-fed hand-massaged wooly piggy local farmer's market bacon doesn’t hurt, either, though.