It was a strawberry to remember. It was an occasion to remember. It was a night to remember.

		Cooking Tip If you are out of buttermilk, pour 1 tablespoon white or apple cider into a 1-cup glass measure. Add skim or 2 percent milk until it comes to the 1-cup mark. Let sit for 10 minutes. You have created sour milk, which may be used in place of buttermilk. PG Tested Recipes Easy Corn Pudding, Chocolate Pan Cake

First, the best berry: On the restaurant plate was a single strawberry, stem and all. Lightly coated with vanilla sugar, it attacked the senses in a way only a local berry could. It goes without saying that it wasn't one of those huge, hoary bicoastal berries whose redness is only skin deep. It was unforgettable, and later there was chocolate.

The occasion was the belated birthday of my husband, Ace, and my mother. Their birthdays are a day and nearly 30 years apart. We all loved the simple berry. Was it a palate cleanser? An it-takes-the-cake B'Day surprise? A wonderful gesture from executive chef Greg Alauzen?

All three, we presumed, and certainly a night to remember at Eleven, the new restaurant in the Strip. Beautiful, fresh food, wonderful, cheery service and a magnificent setting for it all. It's worth a trip just to see the woodworking on the inlaid tables.

Greg had thoughtfully moved us to the chef's table, so we could get a food editor's view of the kitchen and wink at the chefs and crew as the night went along, Bill Fuller, executive chef of the big Burrito Restaurant Group, was like a proud parent, checking to make sure no detail was overlooked. Of course, in his penchant to please, he apologized for some missing tiles in the corner of our booth (Eleven had been open hardly a week) that we hadn't even noticed.

Ace (grease my palm and I'll tell you how old he is) ordered the meatiest of spaghetti dishes. Mom -- 85 and proud of it -- ordered Amish chicken. I stayed with my perennial favorite, Copper River salmon. Stupendous, all.

"What was your favorite dish?" I asked Mom later.

The asparagus we had shared, it turned out. Pencil-thin with just the tiniest of bite. Good choice, Mom, though I would have been hard-pressed not to list the two great desserts, one with white chocolate, the other a berry cobbler. And then there was that wonderful little good-bye chocolate.

As I said, a night to remember.

Last weekend, as we made our way home from the family farm in Michigan, I was thinking of what made our evening out so special. It was one of those weekends where it seemed as though we had left the auto only to eat.

"What time will you arrive, and what will you want to eat?" my mother had asked when I told her we would be coming by for the night. The second part of her question is always most important.

"Just something light," I say, adding we would be taking our daughter, Jessica, and her roommate, Melody, to dinner the night before and perhaps breakfast, which in Napoleon, Mich., where they work, are anything but light. So, we headed out on an omelette and pancakes atop a wonderful Mexican meal in Jackson from the night before. That, and a strawberry cake for Jessica's 25th birthday. (How many Geminis does it take to finish a birthday cake? In our family, very few.)

"Something light" for supper to my mother included: sirloin roast, mashed potatoes and gravy, asparagus casserole (it could be made ahead, a big plus for my organized mother), tossed salad and dressing (my brother's stepson had to make a run next door for a dressing he and his mother liked), homegrown corn frozen from last year's crop, strawberry shortcake with -- (I guess I'll just say it) -- chemicals. In this case, the chemicals were in the whipped topping, served in lieu of whipped cream, because my brother just had heart surgery.

I always joke that when we are buried in volcano ash a la Pompeii and are eventually dug up, the CoolWhip will still be intact. It appears indestructible, though I once dug a tub out of the back of our downstairs freezer and opened it at a holiday dessert tasting, only to discover it had dehydrated drastically into a tiny, coal-like white lump. If I hadn't seen it, I wouldn't have believed it.

In deference to my late, great dairy cow Fancy, I like to buy the "extra creamy" whipped topping, which appears to have had an udder's squirt of dairy in it. Skim milk is first in the ingredient list, followed by its many chemicals. (Light cream comes in a distant sixth.) Have I told you I've always hated chemistry?

What's odd is that when we were growing up and our cows were mooing for their twice-a-day milkings, we never had whipped cream on our shortcake. Much later, Mom must have bowed to commercial pressure and succumbed to whipped topping, even if the one purchased for my brother's health was rent with Foods Not Found in Nature.

And that's the funny thing -- farm food is close to great restaurant food because at its best it has the purity of that fabulous strawberry. Minimally processed, eaten fresh-picked from the row, presented with a flourish. And eaten, always, with people we love. Mom is good at that, too.