Bon Appegeek

Life is a list, not a box of chocolates. You never know which item you’ll cross off last. Despite that, I love lists. That might be why I love cooking so much. New dishes means reading over lists of ingredients, making shopping lists, and adding to the list of recipes to make next. I maintain a list of the volumes of every baking pan I own, a list of my herbs and spices, a list of my legumes, grains, and flours, and much more. That reminds me, I need to make a master list of my lists to keep track of all these lists.

When Vanessa at What Geeks Eat tagged me geek to geek for the Five Things meme, I couldn’t resist the list-making potential. For obvious reasons, I chose mostly food-related items, but there is one bonus personal item that will either make you feel close to me or gross you out. I also included here a picture of a tuna steak braised with chickpeas, rosemary, garlic, red pepper flakes, lemon juice, and extra virgin olive oil. Why? It’s there. That’s also why I make lists of things: they’re there.

Five Things Most People Don’t Know About Me

1. Goat milk: ew. It’s the one food that I always wanted to taste and the one food that let me down when I did. Johanna Spyri’s Heidi had led me to believe that goat milk tasted like a creamy sweet rich ambrosia laced with nutmeg and exotic spice. Johanna Spyri lied. Goat milk tastes like milk that has been squeezed from a goat. It tastes like a goat smells. Let’s call it an “acquired taste” most easily acquired by Swiss mountain girls drinking the milk straight from her goats and leave it at that. (I do love goat cheeses.)

2. Kimchi: um. I didn’t like it much until my teens. Put down the stones! It’s not that I hated it, I think it just struck me as excessive, an apt description for many Korean dishes. Eventually that changed. I’m glad, because my family might have been forced to place me in foster care if I didn’t come around. Now I’m just as snotty as other Koreans about the kimchi I eat. My aunt makes the best. (Obligation of hyperbolic loyalty to family cooking now fulfilled.)

3. Holy mackerel: yum. My favorite food—the food I would pick for my last meal or that meal I can order when I’m stranded on that generously stocked desert island—is grilled mackerel, especially with rice. Whenever butter prices go up or I drop an egg on the floor, I just remember that I have a stash of this vacuum-packed frozen oily stinky fish in the freezer and I practically twirl my skirt and burst into song, just like Maria on the mountains in The Sound of Music. (There seems to be an Alps theme on Bon Appegeek today. That wasn’t planned. I can go for years without once thinking about the Alps and then in one day I mention them thrice. See below.)

4. Chocolate-covered pretzels: no. Despite my weight struggles, I have not banned any food in my house except chocolate-covered pretzels. Even if they aren’t very good chocolate-covered pretzels, something about the salty sweetness, addictive crunch, and cute little shape force me to eat them all at once whether I’m hungry or not. If I were Superman, kryptonite might trigger drowsiness but chocolate-covered pretzel-shaped kryptonite would trigger spontaneous combustion. There you have it, Lex. Come and get me. You can find me at the Fortress of Solitude, recently moved to the Alps.

5. Bloggers who sayyy…”knee”! I didn’t shave my knees until recently. This past summer, while driving, the sunlight hit my legs in such a way that my knee hair cast dark shadows on what I thought were smooth, hairless legs. If you think driving while talking on a cell phone is dangerous, imagine driving and discovering a crucial 20-year hygiene oversight in the middle of moving traffic. Don’t make my mistake, ladies and cross-dressers. Check the knees, please.

I won’t tag anyone in particular, so if you have a blog, consider yourself tagged. I’d love to hear what other bloggers love to eat, hate to eat, forgot to shave, or recently started shaving. Now is your chance to spill it (shaving disclosures not required).

This entry was posted on Monday, February 19th, 2007 at 6:06 pm and is filed under Event, Photos. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.