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     I have a mental list of foods I have to try before I die.  I make additions to it while reading books about food, watching shows about food, researching ingredients.  I call it my culinary bucket list, and I won't consider mine a life well lived unless I can check them off.

     Truffles.  The fungus, not the candy.  So many of my favorite chefs and authors wax rhapsodic when they talk about truffles that there must be something to it.  And I'm a big mushroom lover anyway.  Just look at The Man....he's a real fungi.  Hahahahaha hahaha haha ha.  Sorry.

     Kobe beef.  Just as with truffles, it's a price thing, but I sure would love to try it.  Cows that are pampered and fattened up and fed the best food available, just so that their meat is tender and well marbled.  That kind of attention to the raising of animals for food always comes through in the flavor.

     Foie gras.  I know that there is controversy about the methods of fattening the goose for this delicacy, but I'll be careful where mine comes from.  Anthony Bourdain said that the geese actually come eagerly up to the farmer when it's time to be fed, which made me feel better, but I'll still be careful.  I just love liver, so I've got to do it.

     Fugu, the poisonous pufferfish from Japan.  That the chefs have to undergo years of training to be certain they don't kill anyone when they serve it excites me.  It probably just tastes like any other sashimi, but the thrill factor makes me want it.

     There are also dishes I've had but want to have again, now that I would really appreciate them.  A lot of them were in Japan: the ramen from the little noodle shop next to the college, the yakisoba and okonomiyaki eaten right off the hibachi in Hiroshima, the Korean barbecue place just down the street from our apartment.  I won't be truly happy until I can take The Man there and give him the real versions of the stuff I've been trying to duplicate - with varying degrees of success - at home for years.

     Rocky mountain oysters from somewhere in Denver.  I don't know where Dad got them, but I remember him tricking me into eating them.  They were fabulous.  The pizza from Abby's in Junction City, Oregon.  Best thing ever.  Canadian bacon and mushrooms....real, fresh mushrooms.  Mmmmmm.  Dungeness crab cocktail at some hotel on the Oregon coast.  I wish I could remember the name of the place, but I'd know it if I saw it.  That one I think was mostly atmosphere.  Sipping a glass of wine and eating dungeness crab while watching the sun set over the Pacific is something unforgettable.

     In all, I've been lucky to have lived and travelled and eaten where I have, but I'm getting that wanderer's itch in my feet again.  I hope I always continue to go and experience new things.  If I ever stop adding to this list of things I love and things I want to try, please, check my pulse.  I always want to find the aaaahhhhh in life.