Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

Cabbage, always cabbage... slow-braised Southern style, or raw in a great slaw. I love cabbage!

Porterhouse, charred rare please.

Manchego ... or a great Stilton.

The dark side!

Nova + onions with scrambled eggs, bialy/bagel + schmear.

Terry's Chocolate Oranges (dark, of course). Can only find them at Christmas time, and I must've eaten four already this month ...

Manchego! Lacking that, a good Gruyere.

Pecan Sandies! It's a texture and butter thing...

I'm mostly loyal to dark, but I occasionally lust in my heart for a slutty little hunk of Gianduja.

Herring in cream sauce (extra onions, please), scrambled eggs, and a buttered bialy! And then please pass the Lipitor...

Entirely depends on the application: crisp as condiment or in a BLT; slightly pliant as egg accompaniment, in order to provide some chew to contrast with eggs' smooshiness.

One of my aunts is famous for her chocolate cream pies. Every Christmas, she's expected to provide several for the family gathering, wherever it may be held.

One year when my mother was expecting a particularly large group to assemble at her house, my aunt decided to bring the prepared pie ingredents and assemble them on-site, to avoid the hazards of transporting five -- yes, five -- pies with fragile cream topping. In Mom's kitchen she lined up five baked pie shells and began work on the cream toppings. Enlisting me to help, she pointed to a gargantuan ceramic bowl of chocolate pie filling and said "You can start distributing that among the pie shells -- and make sure they're filled equally!"

As I hefted the bowl off the counter (it required both arms to lift it) and headed toward the row of pie shells on the table, I knew instantly that I had failed to notice the moisture condensation that had formed on the outside of the bowl. And before I could even scream for help the bowl was slipping down, down, down toward the tile floor.

Later, we could only speculate on the physics of just what happened. My cousin Ned, an engineer, had an explanation: the round bottom rim of the bowl must have hit the floor perfectly flat, every millimeter landing at exactly the same millisecond, to create the pressure that caused the entire bowlful of semi-liquid chocolate to explode straight up out of the bowl with enough velocity to fly in a mass SPLAT against the ceiling.

But that was later. At the time, we could only stand there, mouths agape, looking up and down, up and down -- from the bowl on the floor, unbroken and as clean as if it had been licked by a hungry dog, to the ceiling, where six quarts of thick chocolate cream pie filling was dripping back to down to earth a cupful at a time, like an upside-down bubbling tar pit.