5 Food Things -- Tagged

I just happened to be visiting the TriniGourmet blog and I got tagged to post 5 things people don't know about me. I've never been tagged before. But in an interesting twist, she decided to tag the most recent 5 readers of her blog from the MyBlogLog community. You can read her 5 items here. Although I'm not a food blog, I'm going to stay with her food theme and list 5 food things that the blogging folks don't know.

1 - I'm allergic to walnuts. It's not a severe allergy, but enough to be careful about. We discovered it when I was a kid helping my mom make banana bread. She had a Tupperware gadget to grind the walnuts that I thought was really fun to use. It's always fun until someone has an allergic reaction! It's caused me to limit nut consumption. For example, I don't eat pecans because they can look similar to a walnut when in food. As a result, I also don't care for most nuts in foods unless I'm controlling the recipe. One notable exception is cashew chicken. There's no way you can mistake a cashew for a walnut. On their own, I'm ok with peanuts, cashews, and sunflower seeds.

2 - My favorite spice is tarragon. I like the anise-like sweetness of tarragon and it really brightens up certain dishes. There's nothing like a good tarragon chicken. Tuna patties are enhanced by tarragon. Finally, souped up rice is kicked up a notch with tarragon.

3 - I'm a sucker for a cooking show. I like the cooking reality shows like Top Chef and Hell's Kitchen as well as how-to shows. It's a great way to get ideas and learn some new things. One of my favorites was Ready...Set...Cook. That show brought out the creativity of the chefs -- especially when the contestants brought a strange bag of ingredients.

4 - I really like parmesan cheese. Sometimes I'll have spaghetti with a touch of oil, a little garlic, and lots of parmesan cheese. You can put parm on anything -- mashed potatos, soups, couscous, etc. There are lots of other good cheeses, but nothing compares to the taste of parm.

5 - I eat apple pie from the inside out. I don't have pie very often, but apple is my favorite when I do. When I eat the pie, I first use the fork to scoop out and eat the apple filling. Once the bulk of the filling is gone, then I'll start to eat the crust. I like the crust when it has a thin layer of residual apple filling on it.