Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

My first fish taco is a close second, but sharing fish tacos with some close friends on their first trip to California definitely wins. Where we live in the midwest, most people think tacos come from Taco Hell and must be made with ground beef. It was such a great experience to see my friends broaden their horizons to enjoy tacos made so differently.

Also, while absentmindedly watching TV and flipping through a cooking magazine, I sang out to my roommate, "I looove taaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaacos!" randomly one night. Still a source of laughter in our apartment.

I think pretty much any Italian dish I make is "with a twist." The only thing I make that I consider to be pretty traditional is my lasagna... passed down through 4 generations. :)

My first flourless chocolate cake and an Italian restaurant in Chicago when I was little. I always asked for flourless chocolate cakes for my birthday after that.

I work with someone whose last name is Bologna. Every time I type it, I have to sing the Oscar Mayer Bologna jingle.

Grilled cheese, water, and two Advil before bed. Two Advil, water, and blue box mac 'n cheese the next day. The Advil and mac 'n cheese are also my dehydration cure (it happened a lot in HS/college), so that makes sense. The only problem is that although I'm the one in need of the pre-sleep cure, I'm also the one who always makes the group grilled cheese. Even on my 21st birthday - and I should NOT have been allowed near a stove that night!

Chocolate Rum Cheesecake!

Crab dip. And I hover over it, hoping that I'll get to take the majority of it home... to eat for breakfast the next morning!

Aloe. Even though it's the middle of November, we keep it in the fridge for random sunburns - especially from football games!

The lone Kosher hot dog left from last weekend's tailgate and a sample of the Obama cookies I was making!

I tend to listen to songs I love but that I don't necessarily have to pay attention to in order to enjoy. I grew up listening to my mom's 60's and 70's rock, so there is a ton of that on my playlists. I actually have a massive multi-gigabyte playlist called "Kitchen Party Dance Mix" which has just about every upbeat song I own on it. When I'm doing Christmas baking, I must listen to the Chipmunks Christmas CD, the John Denver & the Muppets Christmas CD, and Harry Connick Jr.'s "Harry for the Holidays". That's what we always listened to during our Christmas cookie baking marathons as kids.

My brother and I went through so much cereal as kids, that we were rarely treated to name brand boxed cereal. Most of ours came in bags that were then dumped into a big air tight plastic container. When we did get "good" cereal, we loved Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Peanut Butter Cap'n Crunch. We still give my parents a hard time when we go to their house and see they have multiple boxes of name brand cereal in the cabinet. Usually with disbelief, "What? We never got Cocoa Puffs as kids! We had to eat Oat Oh's!"

Even though we coveted name brand cereals, we were smart enough to think Cookie Crisp was the most disgusting thing ever invented.

Was I the only one who thought the "balanced breakfast" that commercials always showed was incredibly large? All I needed before school was a bowl of cereal or 2 pieces of toast.

Bologna... There's no way to class that up. As kids, my brother and I would make sandwiches using the cheap store-brand white bread, one slice of American cheese between two slices of turkey bologna (it was "healthier") with potato chips or, for a treat, generic cheetos, and if my dad made the sandwich, ketchup. Thinking about it makes my stomach turn. I distinctly remember getting mad at my dad in 1st grade for putting ketchup on my bologna and cheese sandwich because it made the bread soggy and pink. After that, I made my own lunches.

Of course this came from the man who still, at nearly 50, prefers to drink Tang in the morning. No wonder my brother and I don't really like orange juice - we were being brought up to be Astronauts!

I like how eatorama thinks. When I was in college, my mom would bring me brownies every time she came down - which was every home football game since I was in the Marching Illini, and she had season tickets. Despite that, and as much as I love cookies, brownies will forever be my dessert of choice.