This is one from the archives. I prepared this dish once, years ago. It was the first course of a meal I cooked for my wife on our anniversary. It turned out to be one of the most extravagant meals I've ever eaten at home. I didn't plan it that way. For the record, the day didn't really get interesting until I got lost. I'd been driving around the same convoluted, one-way streets of one of Sydney's inner western suburbs for well over an hour in the melting, mid-summer heat. The situation was marginally bearable for me and intensely dangerous for the gigantic lobster who was flipping darkly in the cardboard box next to me. I was beginning to swear.Originally the plan had been simple. I delicious meal of one of our splash-out favorites, lobster thermador. It's a rich, baked lobster dish made with a tarragon and mustard flavored cream. I'd prepare it, I thought, using a tiny lobster, leaving room for a side salad and possibly a light dessert.What I didn't take into account was Chinese New Year. An interesting fact: Sydney has the largest Chinese New Year celebrations anywhere in the world outside of China. Another interesting fact: these celebrations often include feasts of seafood, namely lobster.Thus, as Chinese New Year is not long after my anniversary, every lobster at every vendor in the Sydney fish markets was either spoken for or roughly larger than my cat. Not to be deterred I batted my eyelashes and innocently asked for the smallest lobster available. I must have offended them. They fetched me a gargantuan creature from the tank, the only available sir, very sorry. I bought it. Nothing was stopping thermador.Cracken in tow, I set off for the warehouse of one of our restaurant's importer/suppliers where I hoped to purchase a fine balsamic to have with bread and oil. I had an address and a vague sense of the location, and a crustacean to keep me company.This, of course, led directly to me being lost. I wouldn't use the term “hopelessly,” but I might consider “pathetically.” Pathetically lost, I zigzagged through curving, narrow streets, nearly clipping several mirrors, revisiting the same intersections numerous times. An hour passed.By the time I spotted the correct address, I was fuming. My day, and with it my prep time, was slipping away. The warehouse in question was fronted by a tiny shop where customers are invited to sit and taste the various goods, hear about their manufacture, discuss their history. I, shrugging off the offered chair and glancing pointedly at my watch, hastily explained what sort of balsamic I wanted. My supplier wandered off to get me a few samples.Then, I smelled them. Drifting in from the warehouse behind the shopfront came the most heavenly aroma. Deeply earthy, mysterious, fungal, cheesy, musty, sexual.Truffles. No. Black truffles. Real, fresh, Perigord winter truffles. Not truffle oil, not truffle paste, not watery tinned truffles. Truffles.Mesmerized, I walked into the back to discover a small mountain of them, arrived fresh from France that morning. Dinner plans dissipated.“I must have one,” I droned, zombie-like. “Must have truffle.”“They are $3000 a kilo.”“Must ha... 3 what a kilo?”I therefore found myself asking for the second time in one day: “Can I have the smallest one you've got?”It must have been the truffle aroma in the confines of my car that pushed me over the edge; absolute insanity set in. Pasta. I would make fresh pasta. Sure it was late afternoon, but I could bang it out in an hour or so. I had in mind a dish I'd read about but never dreamed of eating: parpadelle pasta with butter, truffles and parmesan.The rest of the afternoon was a panic of flour. Long sheets of pasta. Truffle shavings in molten butter, infusing. Steam and sweat.And then we ate it. Perfectly thin parpadelle coated in flecks of truffle and aromatic butter. I sliced the rest of the truffle over the top with a sprinkling of parmesan. When we'd finished, we both sat silently, shaking our heads in disbelief.An entire truffle would be enough to qualify this for “most extravagant home-cooked meal ever,” but next we ate the jurassic lobster.Silly, I know.Bloated and financially destitute, we ate nothing but gruel for a week.