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A little soy sauce on sauerkraut is a great idea, and don't let anyone, including your mother or your common sense, say otherwise.

There's a blogger named Martin Lersch who's an organic chemist and foodie, who's holding an ongoing series of tests (via recipes made by interested readers and himself) of potential flavor pairings based on common odorants.  That is, if they have at least one smell component in common, they're more likely to pair well.  So far he's done:

• garlic, chocolate and coffee
• banana and parsley
• strawberry and coriander
• mint and mustard
• meat and chocolate
• apple and lavender
• cauliflower and cocoa
• white chocolate and caviar
• parmesan and cocoa
• blue cheese and pineapple
• banana and clove
• apricot and chanterelle
• chocolate and caraway
• malt and soy sauce
• dark chocolate and smoked salmon
• chicken and rose
• apple and rose

Some of them work, and some do not - obviously other odorants and the tastes on the tongue might be antagonistic - but it seems like fun.  I decided to look up where he gets these pairings, and he talks about it here, mentioning a couple of different food databases.  One of them costs 1000 Euros to access - I decided to look at the next one down, Flavornet, instead.

Then I wrote a little Python script to sort out the foods which have common odorants on Flavornet.  The site has some formatting problems, so I need to do some cleanup, but here are some interesting potential pairings:

seaweed, raspberry
black currant, cat
curry, clove
camomile, celery
rose, honey, apple
rose, honey, tobacco
tomato, strawberry

I like ramen at home, and I like ordering curry soba when I'm at a plausible Japanese restaurant, so I took the step of getting some soba noodles and Japanese curry at the grocery store tonight.  I boiled the soba with the curry and some green onions and cilantro and lime juice, and tossed in a chicken fetus at the end, and it was great.

Next time, I'm going to try it with a bit of meat or meat stock, which will present a sense-memory dilemma: how will I know if it's just equally great, or significantly better?  I have to hornswoggle someone in to help me with a double-blind test if I'm really going to chase down that road.  And, you know, it's just ramen.

There's a neighborhood cat which for some reason likes my house.  Like, if he's messing around in my garden when I get home, and I open the back door, he dashes in and then proceeds to nose around the entire house until I pick him up and remove him.  This is an owned cat, BTW - his tag says "King Cotton".

Well, let's cut to the chase:
cat (control): curious, relaxed
cat + Roomba: curious, disturbed, leaves room
cat + Roomba + saucer of milk on top of Roomba: curious, disturbed, leaves room

tentative conclusion: cat not affected by milk in motion.

Some scientists claim that overweight people are only overweight because they eat too much sugar.