The Trip to Ella Part II: The best meal I've had in years.

A truly unforgettable meal is a very rare event over the course of life as I have experienced. Rarer still, is the unforgettable meal that relies simply of food to leave it's mark. We all have found memories of that one Thanksgiving when the power went out but the meal went on, or the magnificent Graduation dinners when all sides of a family come together in celebration, these are events more than meals and the food takes a back seat to the attendees and circumstances. Less common are the meals in which food is more an art than sustenance. I think immediately of my 21st birthday dinner at a world renown, 5 star restaurant. Flavors that are vivid and precise, altered through ingenious techniques that defy explanation and perfectly overwhelm the senses. It's the thin film like glaze of an ingredient laid carefully over a flavor infused piece of meat or the frozen ball of sorbet filled with the bursting taste of basil, surrounded by half a dozen different ways to prepare a tomato - each one impossible in the average kitchen of even the most dedicated gourmet. That is the type of meal that leaves you dazzled and amazed by every sensation on your tongue but lacks a the hearty satisfaction of fullness that we expect from food. Perhaps the most unforgettable of all meals is the one that delights you with flavors in the same way as was just described, but at the same time does not distract you from them through fancy preparations or artsy displays. It is one prepared with quality ingredients and perfect recipes, in an almost careless fashion but nonetheless will shock the eater with flavors that seem to come out of nowhere.

The meal in Ella was such a meal. A heap of soft rice surrounded by no less than nine curries - pumpkin, beet, dahl, caramelized eggplant, green beans, some sort of leafy greens, one that can best be described as having the look and texture of moist stuffing the day after Thanksgiving - but with an incredible flavor which I can't even begin to describe, date fruit (Not a date as we know it but more like a potato. I know, it makes no sense to me either.) and garlic. The pumpkin is phenominal, big chunks of pumpkin and enough chili to leave a sweet and fiery burn in your moulth. The beet curry is thick and sweet, the dahl - a light dish of lentils, the date fruit could fool you for a potato, the green beens - spicy and crunchy and the leafy greens are pure fire. The carmalized eggplant, known by some strange name to the Brits are at once mushy and chewy, a strange texture made overwhelmingly sweet by the sugar. To properly describe them would take more time than my attention span will allow and no matter what, come up short. They were all unique, all fantastic, all memorable, and all nothing compared to the garlic curry. Full cloves of garlic that had been cooked in a coconut milk based curry sauce until they were so soft that they melted in your moulth like butter. The cooking process also maed it possible to eat cloves of garlic by the moulth full, most of the pungent flavor had been cooked into the suace and the cloves themselves still had tons of flavor but were in no way over powering.