It’s the Fourth Friday Challenge for February. My friend Paul and I, both posting daily in 2011, decided to challenge each other once a month to keep things spicy. In his words, “we want to push ourselves to do something more interesting than we might otherwise.” I will put his challenge to me at the bottom of this post — it’s your choice to read the challenge first or not.

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When I was 25, I went to Southeast Asia. For the first few weeks, through Singapore and western Indonesia, I traveled with my friend Tracy; for the last few weeks, I traveled alone through the eastern Indonesian islands. I was lonely and uncomfortable on my own, but in Candidasa, Bali, a beautiful beach town, I encountered two San Franciscans, with whom I spent a few blissful days.

We agreed to go to dinner one evening, and met on the beach in front of my hotel. The low sun made the ocean gold and shimmering. A local man herded his geese along the water’s edge. My new friends and I were awestruck by the beauty, the smells, the other-worldliness of this place. After a day of sun and sea, we moved languidly, in a dream-like state.

A couple of fishermen brought their small boat onto shore, right next to us. They were hauled in a heavy-looking bucket. As they passed, we asked to look to see what they had. In the bucket were two huge, fierce-looking live tunas. We asked what they were going to do with them. They indicated they were going to sell the fish to a nearby restaurant.

My friends and I were not stupid. We followed the fishermen to the restaurant, marched in, sat down, and ordered tuna.

It came to us, steamed with rice inside banana leaves — very simply and quickly cooked, with a splash of coconut milk and a bit of salt. It was intensely, deeply delicious. Flaky, rich, full of the flavor of the ocean, of life. I felt like I had never understood seafood before, until this moment.

It was a beautiful meal on many levels (it also happened to be my birthday, and I’ll tell you more about that another time) and very poignant, as well — not too long after that trip, I started developing an allergy to shellfish, then seafood. I haven’t eaten fish for years, so the memory of that tuna — the freshest food I’ve ever eaten — is so sweet, and and so, so piquant.

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This post was in response to Paul’s Fourth Friday Challenge to me, February 2011:

Write about a food you love. I should be able to taste it through the monitor.

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Read Paul’s response to my challenge