I'm currently on a caraway jag, caraway the seed of my childhood. I go without it for years and feel guilty but then I have little rye with caraway and I'm IN LOVE. Again.
Right now I'm eating toasted rye with caraway with blue cheese spread on it. Caraway and blue cheese are made for each other.
I've had a relationship with all the seeds I listed except chia and with sunflower it was an abusive relationship and I don't go there anymore. Most of them are rancid. Really.
Peppercorn is pretty much air to me. It's on everything, coating everything, making everything oxygenated.
Today I had
tangyuan with black sesame (glutinous rice balls in a delicate water, hot, filled with black sesame) and while I was eating it I was thinking how black sesame kinda spoils you for the regular white stuff because it is so intense. SO DELICIOUS. These ones were salty too, just little warm round soft works of art.
I went through a big poppy phase, making all those european pastries and such.. I was big on this poppy seed cake. The recipe was full of stages, sift this, fold that, set aside the other.. one day I was in a huge rush and I just dumped EVERYTHING in the bowl at the same time, slammed it around with a spoon and baked it. Came out exactly the same as the delicate operations I had previously performed making this cake. That was a culinary lesson I took to heart.
Poppy seeds make stuff look classy. Boring potato salad? throw in some poppy seeds! They are pretty little bits of decor.. but concentrated.. yum. I used to buy a thousand years ago this poppy seed spread. It was a jam type thing, a paste really. Thick, black, from Poland. It was very good. But then my friend started referring to it as the Chernobyl paste because there was all this stuff in the newspaper about the Chernobyl winds blowing over Poland and I (being very young and not yet realizing that your fate can't be decided by jam) stopped buying it. And now I can't find it.
The only time I still use cumin is making chilli. But I've had that cumin coated lamb northern chinese restaurants serve and that is WOW. But I think I burned out during my very brief Indian cooking phase on cumin and now I rarely bother with it. It's too blatant. Or something. But it's fab in pappadams
Seeds are like music, you think you're over one of them, that it was a season you went through and then suddenly BAM they're back and you are tossing that seed into everything and singing its praises.