Okay granted. But when the criterion for cuteness is you have to be cute even when trapped in glue, I guess even kittens and babies fail.

Baby mice are adorable though.

When I think about how many of my favorite ingredients are from the America's, it's hard to imagine how people in Europe ate before those were imported. No potatoes, no peppers, no tomatoes, no peanuts, no corn. And that's just to name a few of the most common ones. Hardly a meal goes by where I don't use any new…

…not a competition? but, but…
*** drowns lost dreams of a bronze medal in Olympic Exotic Eating in obscure Lithuanian licorice-vodka ***

I did had very good and interesting food in Nepal, but I think that was mostly Tibetan in origin. These all-purpose generic fast food places where just concentrated in the main touristic streets.

And I've been to places where "green tea" specifically refers to all kinds of infusions of fresh green herbs, not containing any actual tea-leaves. Delicious, but not what I expected at first.

I am more baffled by the Australians using the word "tea" as a synonym for dinner. So the sentence "could you run to the shop and get some tea" can mean: "we're out of Liptons, can you go get teabags" or "can you decide what we should have for dinner and fetch the ingredients". I've seen this go wrong, with hungry…

I had a friend like that, but for her it wasn't chillies but a water bottle filled with white rum.

Hmm, maybe you have a very high tolerance for heat, but I have a very different experiences. I've had food in India that was very, very spicy, even at breakfast. And I'm told it gets even spicier in southern India, where I've never been.

That is true, but I'm still really interested when chili peppers came to Asia, how fast it spread and what the cultural impact was. Because they are now such an ingrained part of many Asian cuisines (like potatoes in Europe) but it has to be relatively new.

True, but when someone says 'curry powder' without any other qualifier, they usually mean the mild yellow powder, exactly as described in the article. Very different from gram massala. That can have a pretty wide range of ingredients and ratio's, but it is always much spicier, heavier on the cumin, almost always…

Me too. That is fantastic and monstrous at the same time. I can just picture her doing it with a straight face and describing the exotic flavors.

Oh I've had D- pizza. The main culprit usually is the quality and quantity of cheese.

You should be a little ashamed.

Yeah, exactly. Strangest food related travel experience I've ever had: after traveling through Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and India and eating all kinds of different foods that I never had before or since, arriving in Kathmandu where every restaurant on the main street served pizza, taco's, chow mein and hamburgers.

Okay, okay. You can also have it when you're driving to Croatia.

Yeah, I can be there within 20 hours, no matter where Sir Winston lives. Just enough time to get those beef cheeks nice and tender.

Oh, you wanna go really obscure?

Currywurst is great to eat at a German highway rest area, when you are driving through Germany just to get to Italy or Switzerland. But that is the only time and place for currywurst.

And yet, I find the word 'curry' a very good descriptor for what type of dish you are getting. The ingredients might vary wildly. It can be Indian, Thai, Malaysian, or from wherever. But in almost all cases, you know you are getting an intensely seasoned, aromatic, relatively wet dish with a chunky filling of protein…