Taste

THIS IS A TIME to take stock, to ask yourself what you have accomplished in the past year. It can be a dangerous line of inquiry because the answer is often "surprisingly little." Nevertheless, I forced myself to come to grips with what I have learned in the past 12 months, at least on the food front. I learned two things. First, that cauliflower tastes much better when you sprinkle it with cinnamon. This is not a pairing I would have predicted as being successful. Yet a few months ago when I found this matchup in a recipe in Clifford A. Wright's "A Mediterranean Feast" (William Morrow, 1999)

The recent bout of warm weather got me so excited I did something impulsive. I cleaned my barbecue. Sorta.I took the innards out, got a putty knife and scraped off the crust that had formed on the insides of my cooker.I'm not sure exactly what it was I scraped off. It was dark and crusty. But it smelled pretty good.There are two schools of thought on whether you should clean your barbecue cooker. One side says yes, the other -- my side -- says no.The yes folks are not so stupid. They don't try to tell a bunch of guys who like to spit and smoke and scratch that cleanliness is next to godliness.

We had little more than a week to fulfill a recurring dream -- taste Northern California living. We decided we could absorb the most from the coast by dividing our meal into four courses.The main course would revolve around our vacation capital of San Francisco, where we planned to spend about half of our time. We would devote the remaining days to the wine country of Napa Valley, the coastal city of Carmel and Marin County, which is connected to San Francisco to the north by the fabled Golden Gate Bridge.

Message to soft-drink guzzlers: If you prefer caffeinated to caffeine-free, it's probably the kick, not the taste. That's the conclusion of a John Hopkins researcher who tested 25 cola drinkers to see if they could taste caffeine at levels present in Coke or Pepsi. A couple could - that is, two out of the 25 people. The rest, when asked in a blind taste test if they could tell the difference, would have done about as well by flipping a coin. Long under attack by nutritionists, the soft-drink industry claims that it adds caffeine to beverages to impart a subtle bitterness that people like.

Many of us know when food tastes good, but we can't isolate which herb or spice -- or combination -- produces the flavors we want.Thus, some cooks choose seasonings out of habit, rather than from a real knowledge of how herbs and spices work together. If it's Mexican, grab the chili powder; Italian, reach for the oregano.Knowing how spices taste can help you figure out what's right or wrong with a dish. And the only way to learn how things taste is to sample them.You won't learn by reading.

If your dessert choices are either vanilla or chocolate, it's time to discover the old-fashioned goodness of butterscotch. It's possible you haven't tasted its rich, deep flavor in years. Unfortunately, butterscotch isn't a trendy taste right now. But once you taste the mellow combination of butter, brown sugar and milk, butterscotch will become a favorite. You can dress butterscotch up or down. The most simple, and perhaps most comforting, dessert is plain pudding. If that's too spare, try butterscotch over a store-bought coffee cake, apple cake or pound cake.

DO POTATO CHIPS cooked in the new fat substitute, olestra, taste like good, greasy potato chips?No way! Get real! Nuh-unh! That, in various forms of local language, is the negative conclusion reached by a panel of enthusiastic potato chip eaters from Baltimore. The panel consisted of myself and seven boys, ranging in age from 10 to 15. We ate the chips the way Americans are supposed to, while we were stretched out in front of a TV.The chips and other products using the fat substitute won't be in grocery stores for several months.

FORT WORTH, Texas - Meadowbrook Elementary fifth-grader Mercedes Strawther nibbled on the salty, rectangular block of white cheese and decided she didn't like it because it was "gushy and nasty." Thumbs down, she marked on her evaluation sheet. Hugo Roman, 10, liked the charbroiled-flavor burger he tried because it "tastes like Burger King." With their taste buds on loan to the U.S. Agriculture Department, students judged - on color, smell and taste - a dozen other food items last week.

This is final Jeopardy; category, fake food:"A bland, cheese-like food, rich in protein, coagulated from an extract of soybeans and used in soups, in various cooked dishes."And the answer is: What is tofu?As I traveled to Eldersburg Thursday, my stomach was a bit uneasy. I was about to visit the LiteTrends Co. Inc.The company, opened by two Montgomery County men, was having its grand opening. Plans are to begin production of tofu products this week.With apologies to LiteTrends Chairman Edward H. Walker II and President Andrew J. Wilks, I always have shied away fromtofu -- even the word sounds horrible.

The air had a rich, dark bouquet to some people, a taste of strong drink to others. It was thick with the vapors of Maryland wines being swirled in thousands of glasses and rolled over thousands of palates.The eighth annual Maryland Wine Festival brought traffic jams, 11,800 people Saturday and 13,500 more yesterday to the Carroll County Farm Museum in Westminster.For a $10 admission charge, anyone older than 21 was entitled to 10, one-ounce tastes of Maryland wines. All 11 wineries in the state had booths staffed with pourers serving lines of budding connoisseurs.