Have you ever had a good meal if you didn’t make out with it?

For lunch today, I ate the beginnings of a moan. Like the good part that slowly starts building up before you finish.

I saw a brief highlight reel of my life—I always imagined I’d see it before I plummet from a cliff into the unknown, evaluating everything that led up to that point.

The culprit?

Just cooked fat green beans that still had a bite to them, floating in a cold soup of grated tomatoes, feta and extra virgin olive oil.

For a split second, I pictured my life if I moved here to Athens. I strongly considered bathing myself in this broth. I couldn’t get enough out of just drizzling it over the beans.

The finish was baked chickpeas straight out of the oven, shimmying with sumac as I laid them onto every crisp bite of sourdough bread.

And listen, I know chickpeas. Every Punjabi knows chickpeas. The scent of them being cooked every Sunday morning for breakfast or standing in front of a crowded stall as we sweat in anything but silence anticipating what we were about to experience with our palettes as we had that first, and then many mouthfuls of chhole.

But this tasted different. Familiar and yet simpler, a touch more intimate. Like something your partner would cook for you as you curled up on the couch with a blanket on a rainy winter evening.

As I swallowed that moan, it felt like the chickpeas themselves had travelled through a similar experience as me before they reached my plate.

They too had almost died, probably met god, stayed for a bit as they pondered their life’s decisions in the heat of the oven and decided to meet me for lunch.