Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

At scout camp, we routinely mixed Dr Pepper and Sunkist orange. Whenever we did it anywhere else, we got laughed at, but it was my troop's drink.

We always host a fondue party with three courses - cheese, meat and chocolate. I generally do a broth-based beef fondue ... not sure I'm brave enough for the hot oil yet, plus we have kids around and that scares me more than the chance of burns to any adult (even with booze). Cheese is almost always some blend of Swiss/German/Dutch with white wine, and the chocolate has been a fiasco since my wife insisted we buy the cheap fountain (which, fortuitously for the next party, broke as I was cleaning it).

My wife used to chug this crap. Seriously, I'd find myself buying a quart every two weeks. Then when she was pregnant with our second, she discovered it was triggering her morning sickness. I managed to wean her to half-and-half, and she's stayed on it. Granted, it is still flavored half-and-half, but at least real dairy is better than oil and emulsifiers.

I started drinking coffee about 20 years ago, and have never since deviated from black-one-sugar as my standard order. The additions are good for dessert, but not for my regular joe. (I'm also that guy who orders a "large" at Starbucks.)

I can't believe nobody tagged the peanut butter nougat things in the orange and black wrappers, except for the one commenter who actually LIKED them. Those were awful. It was like a Bit-O-Honey made out of chalk and sadness. (But my dad liked them, so it worked out OK for him.)

Also, the one house that gave out a Bible comic book instead of candy. The first year it was like, "Cool, a comic book!" The second year, I was irritated because I'd already read it (and it was about how I was going to hell for celebrating Halloween). The third year, I saw kids coming away disappointed and advised my brother that maybe we skip that house from now on.

You know, there must be something to the "regional differences" tack. I prefer Mexican Coke (but then, I haven't gone to the rigorous testing extremes discussed here), and I liked Coke better in Japan too. Not that I could read an ingredient label in Japanese ... but it seemed less carbonated, more flavorful. In fact, that was my experience with most sodas over there. They need to sell CC Lemon all over the US.

(I also liked McDonald's better in Japan, and they say it's the same, so that was either some kind of repressed patriotic jingoism or my body's reaction to not eating so much grease all the time while I lived there.)

It's funny how the stuff with natural/real ingredients always fails your taste tests. Maybe these flavors are more ingrained than we realize. I really like Late July sandwich cookies, though I'll admit they taste nothing like Oreos.

Kenji +1. It's so much easier in a smaller town -- and one with local restaurants. We lived in Orlando near UCF for a few years, and those chain joints had such high turnover it was impossible to be recognized. Now I frequent a little place near my house for breakfast, and it took no time at all before I got friendly with the servers. It also probably doesn't hurt that I tip like 40%. Hey, if you want to be a welcomed regular, you must also do your part.

I worked the grill at a fast-casual restaurant in one of the Walt Disney World hotels. My favorite combo was to take the pastrami-onion topping from the reuben hot dogs, slather it on top of a cheeseburger, cover it in the chipotle mayonaise for the southwest chicken sandwiches, and stack it all inside rye bread from the cold sandwich station. We'd also put chicken tenders and Caesar dressing in the vegetarian tabbouleh wraps.

Does Powdered Toast Man count?

Cooking shows are great for helping me think about flavors, but not so fantastic in the way of teaching skills. Older shows tend to have the chef dumping out a bowl of already-prepped ingredients, and newer ones give you a seven-second montage of the host hacking her way through an entire vegetable garden.

I totally hate to admit this, but I learned a lot about how to prep and cook efficiently from early episodes of 30 Minute Meals. The show turned into an unsustainable race and Rachael Ray turned into Cesar Romero's Joker, but she has some reasonable knife skills (when she's not buying some bulls#!t like prechopped onions). If you keep a finger on the mute button it might be worth watching.

Whenever I've cooked green chile somewhere outside NM, I tend to go for Anaheims. The heat's all wrong, of course, but the flavor is pretty close.

Bojangles is a fried chicken chain in the American South. Like Popeye's, but less well known.

+1 on a liter of water before bed. The best next-day breakfast I've found to tamp down any further effects is beans with bacon. You can make a soup, you can stuff it into a breakfast burrito, you can eat it right out of the pan, but that's what I need to get straight.