I am so grateful for the sense of taste I get to experience in this life; so thankful I haven’t lost it to Covid or any other condition. Grateful for the bright, sweet taste of the first fresh strawberry from the baskets hanging under the deck.

Grateful for the refreshing, tangy, green flavors of yesterday’s Miradorjito: half gin gimlet (with fresh lime juice), half bubble water; ice cold, garnished with a lime wedge and Thai basil, on a hot evening in the garden. Grateful for the deep, warm taste of last night’s perfectly baked Teddy Roosevelt’s clove cake.

Grateful for the scintillating blend of flavors in today’s Boyz Lunch, beef tinaktak. I’m grateful for the experience and ingredients to improvise: I had thawed beef, and leftover coconut milk, so I looked up recipes with those, and chose from among the options that popped up this traditional dish from Guam. Grateful to have the world’s gustatory cornucopia at my fingertips! I didn’t have cherry tomatoes, but wanted to use up a small package of frozen German stripeds from a couple summers ago; no water chestnuts in the pantry, no surprise, so I sliced fresh garden radishes for similar crunch; no fresh  donne’sali peppers but a couple of tiny sparkly dried red peppers; and finally, when I opened the jar of coconut milk it was rancid! So I dug out emergency powdered coconut from the back of the fridge and zapped it in the blender with water to toss in at the end. The result, a richly layered flavor feast with salt (tamari), fat (coconut), acid (lemon), heat (peppers), umami (ground beef), and several interlocking vegetables, over plain basmati rice. Though not particularly photogenic in this incarnation, it was all about taste; so grateful for this extraordinary sensory adaptation to explore and interpret the world.

And also, this evening, grateful for a soothing, cooling drizzle outside, clouds sliding past the waxing moon.