I realized recently that there are certain foods that I will eat no matter what form they come in. So far, this list includes:

Artichokes. This is what really started the whole idea. See, these are foods that I'll automatically order off a restaurant menu. Like, if I see artichoke fritters, artichoke soup, artichoke frittatas, fried artichokes, artichokes on a pizza, artichoke pancakes... artichoke anything, I automatically want to get it. I don't have to get it, but it always jumps out at me as something I want. It's one of my go-to foods.

Mint. Mint appears in fewer things around here, but I love it. I love mint tea and mint candy and chocolate mint anything. It's a little bit less automatic for me. I can think of mint things I would not eat. Mint oatmeal, for example, would at least give me pause.

But I'd be willing to try it.

Lemon. Oh my god, anything with lemon. I used to have lemon soap that I really loved, when I was nine. It was a little bar shaped like a lemon, clear and yellow and nubbly, and it was just the right size for my hands and I loved it. I will smell anything that smells like lemon. I will rub it all over myself if given the opportunity. I have lemon oil in my living room diffuser right now, and a meyer lemon bush in the backyard. And hey: you can put mint in lemonade and combine these two! (Oddly, that is not my favorite use of either mint or lemon. Maybe it's all the sugar.)

Salmon. Artichokes are the first thing I noticed as a go-to food, but salmon is the first foodstuff that I noticed was good no matter how it was prepared. Smoked, loxed, steamed, barbecued, grilled, moussed, jerked, marinated, raw, faked with seitan - there is literally nothing you can do wrong with salmon. I guess you could rub it with garbage and then spit on it, but that's how far you need to go to make it inedible. (And even then I'd be thinking, "Maybe if you could wash that off....")

Garlic. I will do garlic anytime, anywhere. I have been planning for years to get a head of garlic tattooed on my left bicep. With just a few cloves missing. And then the cloves would be tattooed here and there on my back. I love the garlic festival, but I am always sort of disappointed that they don't have more garlicky foods. The best things I've had there were escargots (oh yum) and of course the garlic ice cream. This year I was sad because they didn't have the escargots and they didn't have whole cones of garlic ice cream - they just had tiny sample cones of garlic soft-serve. I had to have four. It was oddly grainy, but it was good anyway. And it has that hilarious trick where when you first get there it tastes very garlicky, but if you eat some later it just tastes like vanilla! That's sort of my problem with cooking, actually: for a while I put so much garlic in everything that I couldn't even notice the garlic. It was like salt; it just brought the flavor to where I needed it to be without seeming to add anything of its own.

Goat Cheese. This one is a newcomer to my list. Maybe it was the oysters with goat cheese, or the goat cheese souffles. I think the trip to the Cheese Board cemented it. All those goat cheeses to sample! Creamy, fluffy, savory, fruity, so many kinds of goat cheese! What's funny is that cheese itself failed to make the cut. What is it about goat cheese? I think it's a better alternative to cow because so few people seem to raise cows sustainably and they take up so many resources while they produce the milk for that cheese. But it's not like I don't love cheese at large. On the other hand, it is a goat cheese souffle, and then there are the lemony, cheesecake-like chocolate goat cheese truffles I used to make all the time. Soooo good.

Seaweed. I almost forgot seaweed! I will also eat seaweed anytime, anywhere. I like to get dried wakame and kombu and just eat 'em up for a snack. then there's seaweed salad and nori-wrapped sushi and seaweed in soups and... seriously, bring it on.

There are other ones that are hovering just short of being on the list, more because I haven't made a decision about them than because they don't deserve to be on here. Mushrooms should almost certainly be on my list, but I have this unreasoning fear of the "soggy and flavorless" white ones. (But they're so good with a little garlic, butter, and balsalmic vinegar!) Truffles should, but then I hesitate to put them on there because if mushrooms go on the list they're already included in that category. Pomegranate, maybe: hey, I went out of my way to buy it in jelly bean form, I used to want very much to try pomegranate chicken even when I was a vegetarian, lately I've been fantasizing about getting juice and making a pomegranate reduction... I can't think of a kind of pomegranate I wouldn't try.)

And then there are the oddball losers. Like, I think everyone I know would assume chocolate would top my list. But hilariously, no. I love it, but I don't like chocolate cake because it's often a waste of chocolate (not chocolatey enough). And I don't like most milk chocolate. Or those strong but weirdly corn-syruped dark chocolates that horrible Hershey puts out. Plus, even the good stuff leaves a funny tannic flavor in my mouth afterward. And I'll admit it: sometimes, lately, I wonder if I even like chocolate all that much. Shocking!

The funny thing is that almost all of the things on my list are Mediterranean flavors. When I was struggling with being a vegetarian but craving sashimi constantly, a friend of mine suggested that maybe it was genetic, because I'm Italian and therefore from a fish-eating coastal country. This struck me as, well, extremely fishy itself, but I liked the excuse. But now, look at this! Garlic and salmon and garlic and lemon and garlic and artichokes and garlic. All I need is tomatoes and pasta on there. (They're not going on there, by the way, at least not pasta and not now. There are too many other fantastic foods for me to rely on pasta. It is pretty deliciously filling though.....)

So what are your flavors? What are you willing to eat in virtually any form? What do you automatically order on a menu, or put in everything you make? (I like to check whether I would eat it in a dessert. I'd try an artichoke ice cream. Even salmon. I mean, it's good in cream cheese, right?)