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New Number One

Eating is always a source of amusement for me. Somehow, my attitudes and experiences when it comes to food find a way to make me laugh. Sometimes, the ingredients themselves cause a few laughs. I've even had the amount of food I eat make me and the Mild Wife laugh. Of course, no discussion of my relationship to food is complete without the "come y calla" story, and that's usually good for a laugh or two if you've never heard it before.

Now, of all of the foods that I eat, dessert seems to occupy a special category in the amusement scale. For starters, I don't really eat much dessert. I'm not sure that I ever get sugar cravings, so if there's an entire course geared towards increasing sugar intake, I'm not particularly interested. Sure, I will eat some if presented with dessert, but I almost never ask for that course myself. It certainly doesn't help that my body reacts with some very strange dreams if I have dessert too close to bed time.

Over the years, however, I have found three dishes that I tend to fall back on when dessert becomes a part of the meal: brownies, creme brulee, and apple pie. All three have sugar in them, but they don't generally taste all that sweet. In fact, if one of them happens to be served in a way that is very sweet (say, the apple pie has extra sugar in it or is served with ice cream on top), I tend to like it a bit less.

It also helps that the brownies and apple pie usually have a bit of heft to them. In many ways, I picked the most savory or savory-like items I could find on the dessert menu. Given my approach to food in general, this doesn't seem like too much of a surprise.

However, I think all of that is a thing of the past. The Mild Wife and I had dinner with my folks a while back, and I discovered something called "kanafeh" (I actually saw it on a menu as "kunefe," but it was the same dish). The Wikipedia article doesn't quite do it justice, in my opinion. Imagine a light, fluffy pastry that has cheese inside. Then make it just a tad sweet, enough so that it makes sense to serve as a dessert, but not enough to make the whole thing overpowering. That's roughly what I had at the end of that meal.

The Mild Wife and I were talking about this dish, and I was trying to find ways to describe it. The first two descriptions that came to mind were "a sweet Hot Pocket" and "something like ravioli, but sweet." Neither of those two descriptions does the dish justice, but the fact that I even attempted it was the source of much laughter.

Now, given why I liked my original three dessert picks, it should come as no surprise that I also appreciated the kanafeh quite a bit. In fact, I liked it so much that I dubbed it my new favorite dessert. Yup, the Tasty Trio is dead, and it has been replaced by the Kanafeh King.

Of course, I can't imagine that I'll get to eat my new-found favorite all that frequently. The Mild Wife and I enjoy all sorts of food, but we don't have a go-to Greek, Egyptian, or Turkish restaurant nearby. As a result, it really will be a treat to get kanafeh for dessert. What are the odds? I find a new favorite dessert, and it happens to be a dish that I'm almost certainly not going to get to eat often.

At this point, I've decided that everything about my sweet tooth, whether it be its seeming non-existence or the way it actually manifests itself, is out to mess with me. Dessert sure does make things amusing.

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