A chef's favorite foods and a few food peeves

Shifting topics for a moment...

A question I get a lot when people find out what I do for a living is often "What is your favorite food?," or "What is your favorite thing to cook?" 

I can't speak for all us pros out there, but for me, its a complicated answer unless you significantly narrow the question.  If you're really asking "What is my favorite thing to eat?," that's pretty easy:  something simple, especially if made by someone's mom.  After 20 years in professional kitchens and many tours through fine dining spots, I'm not really that impressed by haute cuisine anymore, with a few exceptions.  Here are a few of my favorite things to eat prepared by someone else...

• A couple years ago our next door neighbor absolutely blew me and the wife's minds with homemade nacatamales for Christmas (Honduran style tamales).  They are bigger than "Mexican" hot tamales (themselves a Tex-Mex variation on the authentic), and concentrate more on savory than spicy.  The meat can be anything from chicken to rib tips still on the bone and the masa can be loaded with capers, olives, vegetables, and mushrooms.  Properly employed they will leave you full, happy, and knocked stupid by a food coma.
• My ex used to do this dish that was like a gorgonzola and spinach lasagna rollatine. Great stuff.
• My maternal grandmother's cornbread.  I've been trying to replicate it for 15 years and still haven't got it right.  Flour, Hoover's corn meal, salt, and baking powder...and a professional chef cant pull it off like she could. 
• Anything that comes off my friend Jeff's smoker.  The man is equal parts meat lunatic and meat genius.  One of his next experiments is to attempt home cured bacon.  I'll happily sign up as a guinea pig.
• The mussels at Slice Pizzeria.  Strangely enough, with all the fine dining in New Orleans, a low cost pizza joint has the best mussels I've had in the city.  Simply prepared with oil and garlic, pinot grigio, and basil. 
• A good hot sausage po-boy.  

As far as fine dining goes, it's such a subjective thing, and the best haute cuisine teaches you something totally new about food so I find it counterproductive to say "This is my favorite.  I will order it all the time."   I like to constantly try new and different and when places do seasonal degustation menus so you can try mutliple courses of the freshest and newest stuff.  For me, it is easier to talk about the things that turn me off in the world of art food.

• Pointless special effects.   If you need an edible fork and gold sparklers to impress your audience, you're doing it wrong.  Food is a language.  The best food tells you a story simply and cleanly.  Stupid, overblown garniture and gimmick ingredients are like that asshole in the public square gibbering incoherently through a bullhorn.
• Truffle flavored everything.  A real shaved truffle is an amazing accent.  Rancid nasty fake truffle oil and canned Chinese truffles are disgusting.  Chinese truffles are not even the same species as black and white European truffles.  Put down your crutches and find some other flavors.  Chefs:  read your labels.  If it says "truffle aroma" it's a synthetic chemical and it takes like nasty feet dipped in sweaty armpit.  Have some self respect.
• Dishonest menus.  Kobe beef is illegal for import to the United States, please don't tell your servers to tell people your beef came from Japan.  Everyone who has ever had the real thing can tell the difference between Parmigiano Reggiano and Romano or Argentine.  Those of us that cook or have been a purchaser know you are saving $11 a pound by using the cheap shit and calling it Reggiano.
• Bad fusion and/or aping a culinary culture that you know next to nothing about.  If you don't really understand the technique and you don't have the proper ingredients, you aren't in a position to riff on a regional or ethnic specialty.  It's disrespectful and 9 out of 10 times tastes like crap.

Just as a bonus, the following are a few of my favorite cookbooks:  The French Laundry Cookbook by Thomas Keller.  Read it like the bible of haute cuisine.  Frank Stitt's Southern Table is a damn good regional cookbook and contains the second best pimento cheese recipe I've ever tasted.  I also have gotten a lot of mileage out of one I found on the bargain shelf called Cooking with Four Ingredients.  The nice thing about is the recipes are simple enough that when you're in a rut you can use them as inspiration and twist them any way you want depending on what's in your pantry.  For a good theory read, check out Molecular Gastronomy by Herve This.  Lastly, I recommend two by James Petersen:  The Essentials of Cooking (literally the first cookbook I ever bought, and thank you for the recommendation Chef Louis Gomez), and Sauces:  Classical and Contemporary Sauce Making.