by liberal japonicus
While one shouldn't be surprised by a regular column from Slate that is titled 'You're doing it wrong', this one does hit the spot with a recommendation of watermelon and feta cheese:
If you were trying to design the ideal ingredient to complement watermelon, you’d probably come up with something very similar to feta cheese: creamy and dense where watermelon is watery and crunchy—and also salty enough to stand up to the fruit’s intense sugariness. The combination of feta and watermelon needs literally nothing else: no salt, no pepper, no salad dressing.
So a thread for those strange combinations that work. Have at it.
Peanut butter and dill pickles.
Posted by: Ugh | September 20, 2012 at 08:13 PM
champagne and rhubarb bitters
Posted by: cleek | September 20, 2012 at 10:51 PM
Watermelon and feta is an excellent combination. Try adding some chopped mint.
Posted by: lightning bug | September 21, 2012 at 12:15 AM
Everybody likes macaroni and cheese. My recipe is wildly nonstandard. Ingredients: pasta, cheese, evaporated milk, garlic, jalapeño pepper, Kalamata olives, and olive oil.
Posted by: Steve Smith | September 21, 2012 at 12:24 AM
French fries, or pommes frites as some would have it, really are better with mayo than they are with ketchup.
Posted by: Phil | September 21, 2012 at 08:02 AM
really are better with mayo
Chili cheese gravy bacon fries, with mayo for dippin'!
Posted by: Ugh | September 21, 2012 at 08:06 AM
I prefer a simple sticky pepper sauce for the pommes frites.
Posted by: Hartmut | September 21, 2012 at 10:46 AM
cheese and crackers - I'm nuts like that.
Posted by: hairshirthedonist | September 21, 2012 at 11:09 AM
Blueberry pie with really sharp Cheddar cheese
Posted by: Tom S. | September 21, 2012 at 11:11 AM
My scrambled eggs with grape jelly seems to get a reaction. I don't think of it as unusual.
Posted by: CCDG | September 21, 2012 at 12:09 PM
Dried Fruit (preferably, Chile Spiced Mango)
Peppered Salami
Italian Truffle Cheese or Laughing Cow Garlic & Herb Cheese Spread
Posted by: someotherdude | September 21, 2012 at 12:17 PM
Oh, and wash that down with green, red and dark grapes.
Posted by: someotherdude | September 21, 2012 at 12:18 PM
Oh yeah, and I place all that stuff on salty and/or peppered Corn Tortilla Flat Bread.
Posted by: someotherdude | September 21, 2012 at 12:22 PM
I've caused a bit of a ruckus in a restaurant by ordering apple pie with cheese. (They ended up bringing me a piece of pie and a separate plate with a slice of cheese on it. It was a heated plate. Messy!)
And in college, for putting ketchup on scrambled eggs (trust me, those eggs *needed* ketchup)
Depending on where you grew up, both of those things are either totally disgusting or so mundane that you don't even think about it.
Posted by: lightning bug | September 21, 2012 at 12:31 PM
My scrambled eggs with grape jelly seems to get a reaction. I don't think of it as unusual.
My kids love that stuff. I can’t get into it.
They also, love mixing Mediterranean/Caribbean flavors (I’m Puerto Rican) with Asian flavors (My wife is Filipino). I just can’t hang with that.
Posted by: someotherdude | September 21, 2012 at 12:51 PM
When I was a kid, my grandmother would give me jello with milk. I never thought it was weird at all until I put milk on jello as dessert in the dining hall in college. Eveyone I was sitting with looked at me like I was wearing a fruit salad on my head. I still say it's just poor man's whipped cream.
Posted by: hairshirthedonist | September 21, 2012 at 01:21 PM
Toasted garlic bagels (the kind with roasted garlic bits on the outside, NOT the kind with garlic added to the dough) schmeared with peanut butter.
Also cottage cheese and salsa.
Posted by: Bill Door | September 21, 2012 at 01:32 PM
That's mixing cottage cheese with salsa, not putting them on a garlic bagel.
Posted by: Bill Door | September 21, 2012 at 01:34 PM
That's mixing cottage cheese with salsa, not putting them on a garlic bagel.
Of course, that would be weird. :-)
Posted by: Ugh | September 21, 2012 at 01:46 PM
Braunschweiger, red onion, cream cheese slathered on rye bread. With beer.
Posted by: McKinneyTexas | September 21, 2012 at 02:32 PM
Braunschweiger, red onion, cream cheese slathered on rye bread
one of my grandmother's favorites.
pungent!
Posted by: cleek | September 21, 2012 at 02:42 PM
I don't think it's that unusual, but mixing whipped cream with horseradish strikes some people as odd.
It's great with roast beef, among other things.
Posted by: byomtov | September 21, 2012 at 03:04 PM
My husband makes blackened (Cajun) shrimp with marmalade sauce. The sauce is needed to put the fire out.
Posted by: Laura Koerbeer | September 21, 2012 at 08:19 PM
When I was a kid:
• RC Cola and peanuts. Drink enough of a 20oz cola to make space and then dump in a bag of peanuts.
• Buttermilk and cornbread. Break the cornbread up into a glass of buttermilk. Then, mix and eat with a spoon. Maybe some black pepper added too.
These days, it's apples and cheddar cheese.
Posted by: CharlesWT | September 22, 2012 at 02:05 AM
I do the same thing with Coke and pretzel sticks. Wife thinks I'm nuts, but the soggy pretzels are pretty good, and Coke tastes better with some salt in it.
Posted by: Brett Bellmore | September 22, 2012 at 08:06 AM
Vanilla fudge ice cream with pretzel sticks.
Posted by: Don K | September 22, 2012 at 09:14 AM
Libyans citizens drive Ansar al-Shariah out of town.
ungrateful brutes.
Posted by: cleek | September 22, 2012 at 10:21 AM
cleek, the more one learns about the people of Libya, and their attitude towards Americans, the harder it becomes to buy the narrative that all Arabs/Muslims hate us and are automatically our enemies.
No wonder those who hold the latter point of view work so hard to conflait the anti-film protests elsewhere with the murder of our Libyan ambassador by Ansar al-Shariah. If they acknowledged the truth, they would have to find a new narrative for their current culture-war beliefs.
Posted by: wj | September 22, 2012 at 01:44 PM
A chef friend of mine, who also has met a braunschweiger lover who comments here, serves a fois gras creme brulee at his restaurant.
I like.
wj: "If they acknowledged the truth, they would have to find a new narrative for their current culture-war beliefs."
Oh, they will.
Whoops! Look, they already have (hat tip to Hullabaloo):
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2012/06/your-right-to-know-more-racy-photos-of-obamas-mother-discovered-video/
This video has been sent to undecided voters around this "country".
Before the killing starts, and it will, let me crack a few jokes.
Certain former human beings at Redruntherivers are extremely disappointed that they are NOT in the undecided camp, and thus not recipients of this video. They were hoping to sit down with their children of all ages, view the video, and have a little chinwag and conservative family masturbation session over various scenes in this documentary, as a kind of outrage training session for the future murder of ambassadors of the liberal, mixed-race persuasion in this great land of theirs, not ours.
President Obama should embrace this video and during his second term order mixed race employees of the IRS to dress provocatively (featuring cat o' nine tails) to conduct harsh audits of the tax returns of all Republican voters in this country to make sure they are complying with the new 100 percent marginal tax rate levied as of Inauguration Day on them, and only them.
Given their predilections, usually in truck-stop bathrooms, I expect they will beg, oh please, don't stop, for more.
Rush Limbaugh this week blamed "feminazis" for the reduction by 10% of penis size in the male population (the women being out of town during the study) since the early 1900s that was revealed in a recently released scientific study.
The scientists took another "look" at the data and sort of "massaged" the methodology after Limbaugh's peer review and decided that the entire incidence of observed penis-size reduction was indeed attributable to one very tiny outlier penis in the sample ..... HIS!
Limbaugh, himself skeptical, offered to re-measure all penises in the world himself and immediately grabbed his chalk and tape measure, dropped to his knees and, like a sawed-off, pot-bellied fascist tailor, began measuring the inseams of the manly men in his studio audience.
And now, whimsy dispensed with, I'm going to visit my machete collection to prepare for the next four years.
Bon Appetite! (pops the flat of his palm against his open lips and clicks his heels like whomever that actor was who appeared in sitcoms decades ago)
Posted by: Countme-In | September 22, 2012 at 02:39 PM
Who's promoting that narrative?
My personal view of the matter is that oppressive regimes encourage hatred of outsiders in order to displace hatred of themselves, and we've been convenient outsiders to assign that hatred to.
To some extent the effort has been successful, of course, but not to the extent the regimes would like.
Posted by: Brett Bellmore | September 22, 2012 at 02:41 PM
i like the implied notion that communism is a heritable trait.
Posted by: cleek | September 22, 2012 at 02:56 PM
Mainstream media objectivity in its full glory, as requested by the victims among us:
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2012/09/22/but-he-never-spoke-spanish-to-me/
Still, when the enemy brings a guy's photo-shopped mother into it, the durian stench of loser desperation is in the air.
At that point in the, um, conversation, it's time for the coldcock kick in the nuts and follow-up extreme damage to the facial bone structure.
Pass me that carbine, Pompie.
Anchovy popcorn.
Posted by: Countme-In | September 22, 2012 at 03:10 PM
In Brett's comment, I can't help but read "the FIRE sector" for "oppressive regimes", and "liberals" for "outsiders", and think he's on to something.
Posted by: JakeB | September 22, 2012 at 03:20 PM
Apple and mushroom salad.
Posted by: Nigel | September 22, 2012 at 03:27 PM
One of my favorite combos is pears with crushed rosemary. If the pears are dried, as with a dehydrator, then use a little water or olive oil to make the rosemary stick. If they're fresh, just sprinkle the rosemary sparingly on top of the slices.
Posted by: Kurt | September 22, 2012 at 03:33 PM
I found peanut butter and kimchee sandwiches to be an excellent late-night snack.
Posted by: JakeB | September 22, 2012 at 03:46 PM
i like the implied notion that communism is a heritable trait.
Well, that was the view of state-approved Soviet genetics. Unfortunately the mutated bourgeois gene blocks the necessary gene transfer, so children with at least one bourgeois parent or grandparent cannot inherit it and have to removed from the gene pool before they can poison the body politic in a proper communist state.
Western authorities of course say it is the other way around and one commie in the parent or grandparent generation irredeemably taints (one drop of red blood, so to say). An obvious point in favor of this view is of course that true aristocrats (and spiders) have blue blood and are thus not affected.
Posted by: Hartmut | September 22, 2012 at 06:01 PM
Nurture and nature. Is found everywhere. Inexpensive. Goes with anything.
Highly recommended.
Posted by: bobbyp | September 22, 2012 at 08:17 PM
"One of my favorite combos is pears with crushed rosemary."
I'll have to give that a try, rosemary is my favorite herb. Just the other day I made stewed chicken and dumplings, with finely chopped rosemary in place of the usual dried parsley. Fabulous!
Posted by: Brett Bellmore | September 22, 2012 at 08:22 PM
red wine and ginger snaps. You can dunk them.
Posted by: Bloix | September 23, 2012 at 12:28 AM
Here's a flavor combination that works spectacularly in a national diet but that many can't stomach for no good reason except that they find it yucky.
They screw up their faces and clamp their mouths shut and must be made to sit at the table until they clean their plate.
They just don't know what is good for them.
They say it's spinach, and to hell with it.
In fact, they want the two food groups separated at all times on their plates and they might eat them, but separately, not recognizing that they all go to the same place and that the body politic combines both and synthesizes precious nutrients therefrom:
http://news.yahoo.com/decades-federal-dollars-helped-fuel-141648115.html
Who knew? Well, the gourmands at Mitchell Energy knew, little as they wanted to admit it to the meat eaters at the barbecue.
Course, then the same picky eaters hate dessert, too, like when their hard-earned, but previously subsidized tax dollars are used to learn what the environmental effects of fracking might be.
Why, they purge after every meal.
It's an ideological eating disorder.
Their ideology is a ketchup, spread on everything.
Here's comes the plane, open the door, into the hanger.
Rrrerorrrrrr...... down the hatch.
Yum. See, it tasted good!
Posted by: Countme-In | September 23, 2012 at 11:35 AM
I've always believed Dorothy Parker would have been an interesting combination with blogging, but now think she was in her element serving up exquisite verbal killer hors d'oeuvres at cocktail parties.
Another completely uninteresting combination (the elevation of the quotidian in 140 characters) might have been Andy Warhol and Twitter.
The artiste of bland celebrity kvetching finds his ultimate medium.
This after coming upon an old Martin Amis review of some 800-page "journals" (previously taped) Warhol published.
Samples:
"There was a party at the Statue of Liberty, but I'd already read publicity of me going to it so I felt it was done already."
On the Achille Lauro hijacking: "everybody will be watching The Love Boat ... with my episode on it."
"I tried to watch TV but nothing was on."
Think about that one for a moment.
Also:
To a Walt Disney film crew who asks him who is favorite Disney character is: "Minnie Mouse, because she can get me close to Mickey."
Did I say uninteresting?
I didn't mean Warhol. I meant American pop culture.
Posted by: Countme-In | September 23, 2012 at 02:09 PM
Commercial Thai green curry paste on buttered toast. With beer.
Posted by: chris y | September 23, 2012 at 02:11 PM
English Bitter on a Sunday afternoon
Posted by: cleek | September 23, 2012 at 03:49 PM