25 Things - A Foodie List

I know some people roll their eyes at Facebook's current "25 Things About Me" meme, but I, for one, really enjoy reading them, even if I don't know the author. Sure, some of the facts are boring or creepily over-share-y or annoyingly self-aggrandizing. But others are really surprising or touching or insightful. They're like mini-memoirs, and I've always adored memoirs.

As a food-fan, I'm especially fond of food memoirs - Ruth Reichl's Tender at the Bone, Judith Jones' The Tenth Muse, Nigel Slater's Toast, Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain, anything by M.F.K. Fisher. Food is so much a part of our lives that sharing our food-related feelings and thoughts and memories says so much about who we are. So I thought I'd combine the two and try out "25 Things: A Foodie List." Here's mine - memories, factoids, favorites. I'd love to see yours!

1. As a kid, I truly believed the thing about the Bubble Yum and the spider eggs. If you came of age in the '80s, you know what I'm talking about. But I chewed it anyway!
2. Growing up Jewish in North Carolina, one of my favorite meals was hummus and stuffed grape leaves at a Lebanese cafe on Christmas morning. It was the only place that was open.
   
3. When my uncle from New York would visit, he'd always bring down stuff like kosher dills and chopped chicken liver and corned beef - all things my Yankee parents missed and couldn't get at the time in North Carolina. He'd bring cannolis for me, which I loved so much I hardly cared that they were completely soggy.

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4. I first tasted Nutella at a London B&B when I was 8. The idea that people in ate chocolate on toast for breakfast was just as magical to me as the existence of fairies.

5. I became a vegetarian when I was 10. I don't remember what the reasoning was, but my mother says it was because she wouldn't let me dye my hair purple and I wanted to assert my will in some other way. Maybe, Freud.

6. I didn't eat meat for six years, not even stuff like Skittles and Jell-O that contain meat-derived gelatin. Then one day, during my junior year of high school, a guy walked into my sixth period art history class with a box of chicken wings from BW3. I had never really liked chicken wings, but suddenly I ABSOLUTELY HAD TO HAVE SOME. So I did. And that was that.

7. When I was 17 I spent a semester as an exchange student in Argentina. I missed sharp cheddar cheese so much I had my mom mail me blocks of it encased in wax.

8. My best friend that semester was a Swiss exchange student. Her mom would mail her shoeboxes full of Swiss chocolate bars. We'd take the bus to the city where the post office was to retrieve the package, then sit on a park bench and stuff our faces.

9. My first job was working the cash register at a local pizza place when I was 16. I screwed up the orders so bad my first night that the assistant manager yelled at me until I cried. Over time, I learned to ignore him. I also learned to toss dough and make a mean blue cheese dressing.

10. My first semester of college, I was so scared of going to the dining hall alone that I often ate Pop-Tarts from the basement vending machine for dinner. You might think this would have turned me against Pop-Tarts now, but I still adore them. Especially the S'mores kind.

11. Now I travel a lot and eat alone in restaurants all the time, but I don't mind a bit.

12. During and after college I worked at a sushi restaurant. Once I accidentally spilled soy sauce on a woman who was there celebrating her birthday with a dozen friends. She was wearing a lavender silk pantsuit and she started to cry.

13. My first year out of college, when I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, I stayed up until 3 or 4 a.m. practically every night, baking. I still think the best cure for anxiety is baking a really complicated layer cake.

14. I used to volunteer as a visitor to an elderly house-bound woman. She was alone on Christmas, so I made her a traditional Southern Christmas lunch and brought it over. We ate ham, scalloped potatoes, creamed spinach and white rolls together and had a great time. She never knew I was Jewish.

15. The worst thing I've ever eaten is something called natto - Japanese fermented soybeans. It's like bits of decomposing frog suspended in a matrix of snail snot and epoxy glue. Acquired taste?


16. The worst meal I've ever had was at a government-run restaurant in Havana. We were served stale toast topped with a couple tablespoons of grayish ground beef in tomato sauce, in a nearly empty fluorescent-lit basement decorated with an enormous Cuban flag.

17. One of the best meals of my life was a Pizza Hut Meat Lover's pizza, eaten after I practically crawled out of the Grand Canyon following a 10-mile mid-July hike.

18. I once dyed my tongue blue to count my taste buds, after reading this BBC story about "supertasters." Turns out, I'm what's called a "non-taster" - someone who is insensitive to subtleties and therefore gravitates towards strong flavors.

19. That may be why I like to eat anchovy paste straight from the tube. And Vegemite, mmmm.

20. I also like to drink seltzer with a shake of cayenne pepper mixed in. I'm fully aware that this sounds horrific to others, and I can't really explain it.

21. I was rather proud of having "the world's strongest stomach" until I ate a green chile burrito in New Mexico that was so spicy it made me puke.

22. I swallowed a still-beating snake heart in Vietnam. Didn't puke.

23. Most fun cooking project: Just before moving out of North Carolina, I ordered a 60-pound piglet, rented an oil drum cooker from an old man up the street, and had myself a pig pickin' in my parents' driveway.

24. I was won over by a man who fried me chicken. Not just any chicken, Nashville-style "hot chicken."

25. I wrote a blog post about my mom's pound cake recipe, which was given to her by the second wife of her uncle. Her uncle had been a ne'er-do-well who had abandoned his children by his first wife back in the 1950s. One of those children - my mother's long-long first cousin - came upon my blog by Googling his father's name and contacted me. I put him in touch with my mom, and they've been swapping photos and family stories ever since. The power of pound cake...