Ask Lemmy

Pineapples and pizza. Yeah I said it.

Make your a salami sandwich with the following steps.

1. Toast the bread.
2. pan fry the salami slices til their a little crispy on the edges.
3. spread hummus on the bread once it’s toasted.
4. add the crispy salami, some lettuce, and seasoned tomato to your sandwich and enjoy.

People look at me sideways for using hummus as a sandwich spread, but it’s delicious.

Strawberries and black pepper. You’re welcome.

I have a 200 item list of grazing board foods that I've personally mixed and sampled every single 2 and 3 item combination and curated every item to be acceptable to delicious in 3 part combos.

By far the two strangest combos to any guest are the spicy salami and the dark chocolate on baguette bread or the rum dates and stone stone-ground mustard on butter cracker.

The sweet and bitter of the chocolate mixes so well with the oilly spice of the meat, and the baguette bridges the textures to provide a comfortable mouthfeel by soaking it in.

For the second, the vinegar and tang of the mustard heighten the rum without taking away the sweet paste of the dates and the cracker provides enough texture to not feel like you're eating sauce and enough salt to soften the vinegar and alcohol bite.

Honestly, it's my favorite dinner even because it's so much fun to watch people look at you in horror when you suggest they try something, then try it and see that horror melt away into absolute wonder.

Half pure orange juice and half cola.

Blue cheese and Dr Pepper. The Dr Pepper brings out the sweetness of the cheese and the tanginess of the cheese complements the sour of the soda.

Dr Pepper is the blue cheese of soda, after all.

As a kid I remember jam (probably strawberry) and cheese (Cheddar or red Leicester) sandwiches being pretty awesome. For manifold reasons, peanut butter was not something made available to me back then, so that would be the closest our house ever got to that.

Chicago corn (cheddar popcorn mixed with caramel corn). Sounds weird - is awesome.

Chocolate and anything spicy.

Popcorn and pickles. Worked with a pregnant lady who had a craving for these together and, well, she wasn’t wrong.

Kalimotxo. It’s red wine and cola in roughly equal parts, to taste. It’s a great way to salvage old wine that’s a day or two past drinkable, especially on a hot day.

I described it once on reddit in the before times, and someone called it a “shit red wine spritzer” and I think that’s kinda apt.

A fried egg on top of just about anything

Both of these are established dishes, so I don't know if I could call them unexpected, but:

• Jalapeno chocolate fudge cake, tried on a whim at a restaurant. Thought it might be a disaster, but hot stuff and sweet (and fatty) stuff works surprisingly well together. I suppose that it's kind of closer to how the Mesoamericans used to originally eat cocoa, which could be with chilis:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztec_cuisine#Cacao

  Chocolate could be prepared in a huge variety of ways and most of them involved mixing hot or tepid water with toasted and ground cacao beans, maize and any number of flavorers such as chili, honey, vanilla and a wide variety of spices.[31]

  The ingredients were mixed and beaten with a beating stick or aerated by pouring the chocolate from one vessel to another. If the cacao was of high quality, this produced a rich head of foam. The head could be set aside, the drink further aerated to produce another head, which was also set aside and then placed on top of the drink along with the rest of the foam before serving.

• Five Guys does a milkshake with bacon sprinkles that I thought sounded like it could be pretty gross, but crunchy salty apparently works with sweet fatty as well. Goes somewhat downhill as the bacon looses its crispness, though. Be interesting if there's some sort of waterproof coating that one could put on it. ("chocolate-coated bacon bits?")

Macaroni and cheese and pretty much anything.

Tuna Mac: Tuna?

Tuna and any grilled vegetables?

Poverty Mac: Pork and beans?

Pork and beans AND chopped up hotdogs?

Spaghetti Mac: Leftover spaghetti sauce?

Taco Mac: Leftover taco meat?

Get the velveeta Mac and cheese for extra luxury.

PB & J, I mean yeah, tried and true, but it's odd that peanuts and berries go well together when both are squished 😅

Whiskey and black licorice.

Roasted cauliflower and chocolate. I like to dust coco powder in the last 3 min.

Raisins and anchovies.

Mushrooms and coffee.

Garlic, chocolate, and coffee.

Wendy's French fries dipped in their frosty. It was at least a good combination twenty years ago ...

Hummus and pesto. Just dump some pesto in your hummus and thank me later. You can buy both, obviously, but you can also easily make both from scratch so it can be super cheap once you have the core ingredients. It’s basically no harder than making a smoothie.

Bonus: basil grows whether you want it to or not, at least in most climates. If you have a spice garden, you kind of have to keep basil from dominating. But it also makes an excellent, cheap gift. When I was younger, I had a basil plant that lived for a few years and got huge and I just brought clippings instead of wine (or whatever) to parties. I saved tons of money and no one has ever been like, “Get the fuck out of here with that fresh basil.”

My friend worked at Subway for a few years and after a while you try weird stuff just to see if it's good, and one of the best things is an oatmeal raisin cookie wrapped in pepper jack cheese.

Also sharp cheddar on apple pie is a Yankee tradition and really good.

Salmon + roasted Brussels sprouts

Vanilla ice cream with good quality evoo and kosher salt.

Salt on watermelon, and salt on pineapple.

Also, cayenne pepper on anything chocolate - brownies, ice cream, etc.

Cooked Eggs (preferably poached) On toast with....

Vegemite.

You can thank me later.

Might not be that weird, but brie and pepperoni go together like they were made for each other.

Kraft Dinner with Dill

Coffee and bananas