• While I forgot about Ajvar, there was some widely sold brand of crackers, the smell of which I remember strongly – I smelled it half a dozen times since, always brought craving.
  
• A taste I caught on without being local food was peanut butter. The first time I ate it it was brought as a present from the Netherlands, for which reason I keep calling it pindakaas.
  
• A bread-like dish that originated in Germanic areas and became the universal garnish called knedlík in Czech also got established all across Slovakia in Czechoslovakian times, where I got hooked.
  
• When I was in West Germany, tastes I missed were ground red paprika (produced in Hungary's lowlands and put into a lot of prepared food), fresh yellow paprika (in Frankfurt most paprika sold was Californian paprika grown in greenhouses and with no taste) and so-called winter salami (made by the company Pick).
  
• One thing I missed returning from West Germany was Milchschnitte (picture). Fortunately, it appeared in the shops here a decade later or so, and it's a regular choice of mine around tea-time or so.

when you say capsicum, do you mean the big (red. green an/or yellow) peppers the americans call 'bell' peppers? the sweet ones, or the smaller superfiery types?

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

My personal addictions revolve around intense flavors and intense literature. And flight.

I have a copy of John Crowley's magnum opus, "Little Big", that I bought for the girls, to replace my worn-out copy. They are yet too young, and the new copy is now worn out anyway. As a stylist, he is unequaled. Open it most anywhere, and read.

Crystal Hot Sauce is a rather ordinary tomato-based hot sauce, A La Louisianna Hot Sauce, but better flavor, and the pork rinds that carry it so well are indispensable to life- but probably fatal in the end.

There is a smoked pepper called a Chipotle. Its flavor has been hijacked by the commercial food companies, and reproduced in caricature form. Yuk.
In San Anhel, a neighborhood of Mexico City, there is a market where one of the stalls sells only peppers. By stall I mean a "shotgun store" about twenty feet wide, and 80 feet deep. Literally THOUSANDS of different peppers, in paste, powder, strings, preservers, pickled, dried -
Real Chipotles. Necessary for life.

I also build things that fly- full size things and little ones. Not as a last refuge in my drooling dotage, but because flight possesses a powerful aesthetic all it's own, and I am utterly addicted to it. It's one of humanity's greatest melding of technology and art, and it has been my good fortune to participate in a small way in both parts.

Music was my life for two decades. It is now the flavor of my day. But like VBO I find myself moved more to tears these days than to joy, and I find it hard to imagine that one could be deaf to the songs of the day- exultant, murderous anger, desperation approaching panic, hope rendered to cynicism, that are the dominant themes in my country these days.
Maybe OWS will help.

Capitalism searches out the darkest corners of human potential, and mainlines them.

That was a better version of the idea then a game a friend of mine is addicted to. Have to show this to her.

The hand-eye-click-faster cathegory has a hypnotic quality. For me it occupies the active mind so much that it becomes relaxing.

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