Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

Delicious! I've only recently learned to love bread pudding, and this has all of the right elements: Pumpkin Brioche Bread Pudding.

I had to look it up because, like many other above, I'm not familiar with the names, but Lucque olive are quite tasty.

I'm torn between pumpkin ice cream and pumpkin ravioli (with brown butter and sage). Oh, and the afghan kaddo borawni. Make it pumpkin meal? Appetizer, main course and dessert!

My mom would make Indian food, as her parents were enamored with India and had traveled there frequently, but it never quite got it right. I think the first eye-opening meal I had was in London with my friend whose family came from the Kerala region. So fragrant.. so many more flavors than I was accustomed to tasting in the Indian restaurants I'd been in before.

Of course the time my mom kept insisting she wanted to go to, as we heard it, a topless bar stands out, but my favorite memory is, years later, preparing tapas for hours on end with my mother for a party. They were a huge hit, and delightfully varied.

I've been going to the Sunday farmer's market under the overpass in Baltimore since I was a child. Back then, my favorite was a chocolate croissant from Rudy's Bakery. These days, I am enamored with this old lady who proudly declares that she had a stroke, and keeps her mind sharp by calculating totals as we add on more and more fruits and greens to our purchase. Her farm has great stuff!

My parents came to visit when I was living in Serbia. I met up with them in Vienna and we traveled to Slovenia then Croatia then Montenegro back to Serbia, watching the cultures blend into one another and the presence of cigarette smoke increase along the route. What seemed charming to them initially developed into less and less charming, culminating in a cramped van ride along the entire coast of Montenegro that would somehow manage to pack in more people each time it came to a stop. The busdriver refused to let us open the windows, yet he billowed cigarette smoke and loud music. Watching my parents take in the beauty of the country (including gnarled olive trees) from between folds of people was priceless.

As nearly everyone else has said, simple is divine! (And ALWAYS fresh). But it depends on the seafood in question. I do so love shucked oysters, with a little lemon or without. Pan-seared scallops. Roasted whole fish. Fried fresh anchovies. But given the choice, I'd take steamed crabs, seasoned with Old Bay. There's something about the messy experience, finding every last bit of meat hidden away, that improves upon the experience of its cousin experience: a well-made (broiled) crab cake.