Lox Bagel

I have a long and complicated relationship with the lox bagel (aka nova lox bagel), a dish originated in NYC by Jewish immigrants who had to find something to eat for kosher days (similar to why Filet-o-fish sandwiches become popular at McDonald's. Filet-O-fish sandich was coincidentally an answer on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire this past week with Jamie Ding teaming up with Ben Affleck. Yes, that Jamie Ding who won 31 games on Jeopardy this season, something I would have loved to do, but Jamie represented Asian males well and had a few funny moments.) I can see why it's so popular, because the salmon fits well with the cream schmear and bagel to get a rich, salty taste where you can taste the smoked salmon part of the salmon. I love it, but I had one bad experience with the smoked salmon: it gave me diarrhea one year right before a ski trip in Colorado, ruining my ski trip and laying me out in the cabin all weekend. My roommate at the time almost at the lox as well before I warned him off of it, although maybe the diarrhea wasn't from the lox but some other mystery substance I consumed that weekend? Whatever it was, I'll always associate lox bagels with that fateful weekend...until today when I had it again. It was delicious! Food trivia is something I wish I was better at, just so many different foods I've missed out on over the many many years of existence, partly because I grew up in a Chinese household with strictly Chinese cooking but also just me not being curious about different foods and trying new things. So many different cereals, for example, as a kid, that I could have tried, but I settled on Honey Nut Cheerios (with the friendly looking bee mascot I now know to be named Buzz, how creative) and didn't get into Raisin Bran, Lucky Charms, Smacks, CornPops, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Wheaties, all the fun-sounding cereals that Corporate America wanted kids to get addicted on, I didn't pay much attention to. And lunch at school was just a steady diet of Subway Day, Hot Dog Day, Pizza Day......generic stuff. Not that I'm expecting exotic foods in a school cafeteria like Beef Wellington Day or Chicken A la King day, but some variety would have been nice with different pastas like rigatoni, bucatini, mastaccioli, just saying. And it's really too bad that salmon doesn't have a lot of specialty dishes with fancy names like duck l'orange or veal piccata, because I would have ate them all up, I was a big salmon guy even from a young age (my parents just got the pre-buttered salmon from Costco.....an unfortunate choice from a culinary perspective but equally delicious in my book as the lox bagels).