Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

As much as I love LA's food trucks (and I do love them), the Navajo taco suggestion up there just reminded me that I haven't had fry bread in YEARS. The carnivals that came to my hometown every year always sold fry bread along with the cotton candy. (Not funnel cakes, though. I'd never heard of funnel cake until I married a Midwesterner.)

Squash and sweet potatoes - I know they're available in the summer too (and I live in Southern California, so it's not like there's a huge difference anyway), but there's just something about the sweetness and heft that's most satisfying when the days are short.

A couple of years ago, I made a white bean/sweet potato/walnut pesto soup that was one of the best things I've ever tasted. And somehow, I've never gotten around to making it again.

Resolute JC - some of them are filled, though stuffed sopaipillas are even harder to find outside of the sopaipilla zone than unfilled ones. (The sopaipilla zone, as I know it, is New Mexico, Colorado, Texas, Wyoming (where I grew up - and where I have to have my stuffed sopaipilla fix whenever I go back to visit) and parts of Utah. Plus a few other places people from the southwest have settled - there's supposed to be a great food cart in Portland with green chile and sopaipillas, fer instance.)

Just because there's a bacon chocolate bar in there - the first time I had chocolate covered bacon. I thought it would be disgusting. It wasn't. And it wasn't disgusting the next time either, even though I was sober the next time.

Sweet potato pudding, hands down.

I can tell you about my very first tapas experience - it was at a TuTu Tango, a restaurant at Universal City Walk in LA, which had art for sale on the walls and really cool placemats for kids (which my husband would often charm a waitress into letting him have, too). Sadly, it's no longer there.

My recent forays into Italian cooking (beyond pasta with red sauce) have made me curious about other cuisines which share some of the same cultural roots - Spanish, Portuguese, and even Northern African.

Every Christmas and summer, we'd go to Texas to visit my mother's parents, and every summer, my grandfather would make me as many Coke floats as I wanted.

I've got a lemon tree in the backyard that JUST WON'T QUIT. I've got several recipes for preserved lemons (which I haven't gotten around to making yet), but I'm always open to other ideas for them. (Curds? Marmalades?) I'd also love to do something with the neighbors apricots - the few the birds don't get disintegrate so quickly.