Chinese food, and a good berry smoothie.
This wasn’t really serendipity, but a few years ago at the Hollywood Bowl, the people in the seats next to us brought figs stuffed with bleu cheese. It was amazing (nice people, I would never share something that good 
These days they even sell Tabasco-flavored ketchup, but when a co-worker first introduced me to it, I’d never heard of it before. It doesn’t really work with any other hot sauce I’ve tried, but Tabasco-ketchup on fries is excellent.
Our standard pizza combination is similar to, but slightly different from, Greek pizza: it’s spinach, feta, and walnuts. The walnuts make the thing work.
But my weirdest one was when I was on a long drive with a container of spicy Indian food, vegetables in a cream sauce. I didn’t have a fork, so I stopped at Bojangles and got a plain biscuit to pile the stuff on. It was delicious–the biscuit kind of filled the same niche as naan.
That sounds good.
I love harvard beets, and I love mac n cheese, I need to try the combination.
My roomie makes chocolatl chip cornmeal based cookies for a celiac friend of ours. She will split the batch an dmake some base and add finely chopped jalapenos to the other half of the batch.
I used to get the cinnamon raisin bagel chips to use as croutons on my chicken noodle soup.
I do that whenever we do crisps, I am not into sweets much but I adore salt n vinegar crisps. I am also one of those odd Americans who likes Vegemite, musk candies and will put malt vinegar on chips.
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Noodles from a can of chicken noodle soup, cooked, and spooned onto Muncho’s chips.
Just tonight, I discovered Zwackand 50/50 soda. Wow!
I have occasionally made “raw apple pie”: sliced Grannies, cinnamon, brown sugar, salt, and melted butter tumbled together. It’s delicious.
When I was in school they always served chili with peanut butter sandwiches. I still eat it this way about half the time. I wonder if they did that to “complete a protein” (may have been soy in the chili) or to accommodate kids who didn’t care for chili. Whatever, it’s a rocking combination.
A chicken SALAD sandwich on cinnamon raisin toast. An old-fashioned luncheonette downtown in my old town served it that way (with carrot-raisin salad!) and it became my favorite thing to order.
Been doing this forever…or just chopped tomato and bell pepper if I have nothing salsa-like in the house. Plain cottage cheese is good with lemon pepper and parsley, too.
Cracked black pepper on canned pears is really interesting–I discovered that by accident at a buffet.
In college I “invented” blue cheese dressing on black bean soup. Usually with a side sandwich of cucumber, sprouts, provolone and swiss, which ended up tasting a lot like Camembert.
Cold fried chicken dipped in chunky applesauce.
Not that unusual, but I love leftover ham (especially if it has crispy, fat edges) on toast with cream cheese AND butter.
Bacon (or salami) sandwich with peanut butter.
[ol]
[li]Peanut butter on apple slices has been my favorite snack since forever.[/li][li]Of all the combinations of two flavors I’ve ever encountered, cinnamon+vanilla is truly a match made in heaven.[/li][li]My GF just turned me on to sesame sticks topped with ranch dressing, and it’s instant addiction.[/li][/ol]
It wasn’t really serendipity, because I could taste it in my mind before I tried it, but pears and anise are a really lovely combination - in various forms; my favourite being brioche tart with pear slices baked into it, then the whole thing drenched in anise syrup.
Cinnamon in hot chocolate, and cinnamon added to chocolate cake or brownies. Mmmmm
Leeks and many other bland/mild tasting foods like mashed potatoes. I make a leek and swiss chard tart that is delicious. Leeks are, overall, under appreciated IMO.
Curry paste is quite nice mixed into mashed potatoes. Also instant grits can give a nice bit of body to certain Indian dishes like Chicken Masala.
I believe it; I actually looked up my coffee/bacon combo, and apparently salt knocks the bitterness down from coffee, so I bet that’s part of what’s going on with the salt & vinegar in your example.
Peanut and mayo on cheap white bread. I haven’t had one in a very long time, but growing up they were a staple after school snack.
Ritz crackers washed down with Diet Dr. Pepper. This is what I had as a snack at my desk one day, and the flavors went so surprisingly well together that I actually had a moment with myself!
I’ve found that peanut butter goes with practically everything.
I was turned onto granny smiths on a grilled cheese with a dab of dijon mustard. The mustard and grannies are like opposites that compliment each other. Now I just dip grannies into the mustard.
Also I was turned onto these brie raspberry chipolte puff pastry things and loved them and then I found this recipe for brie raspberry chipolte sauce.
Some days that goes on everything.
Sriracha sauce stirred into spaghetti sauce/pasta. Good in pizza sauce, too. Adds just the right heat. Also, Sriracha on hot dogs (instead of ketchup).
Back when Square Pan Pizza was a booming business franchise, they had a $1 pepperoni slice deal and kept several pepperoni pizzas going for the slice-buyers. There was one near the theater where I worked and we employees would unofficially trade sodas and popcorn for slices of pizza. One afternoon I was in the mood for “Hawaiian Style” (Canadian Bacon and Pineapple) pizza and asked one of the server guys for a slice. He said he couldn’t make a whole pizza for giveaways, so I asked if he could just throw some pineapple on a slice of the standard pepperoni. Wow! The mild spiciness of the pepperoni balanced by the sweet smoothness of pineapple!
Long ago I was at a Denny’s and, on a whim, I ordered a grilled-cheese sandwich and a side of bacon. The waitress asked if I wanted those slices inside the sandwich. Apparently I wasn’t being as innovative as I thought. It’s kind of a hand-sized-heart-attack but not so uncommon, I guess.
A couple years back, I butterfly-cut a croissant and lightly toasted it, then built a BLT with it. YUM! That’s another decadent hand-sized-heart-attack. I should try it with cheese–after I lose a few pounds first.
A couple weeks ago my wife bought fresh rosemary for a recipe and used about a half-teaspon from a cup-worth. I ground up the leftover needles and made rosemary mayonnaise with the rest so it wouldn’t go to waste. Later, when I was making Manwhich/Sloppy Joes (chile burgers?) I was going to toast up a bun with some mayo on it. I saw the rosemary mayo and decided on a whim to try that in the toasting process. Wow! That kicked it up a bit!
–G!
Reminds me of when I was visiting my sister’s family in Texas and wanted to make French toast for breakfast. Sitting atop their fridge was most of a loaf of cheddar cheese bread. Somebody gave it to them, they sampled it and atop the fridge it went. So I used it and it turned out so good that sometimes I’ll get jalapeño cheddar bread specifically for French toast.
Barbecue sauce on pizza.
Most salty snacks go well with ice cream. My favorite ia Multi Grain Dipping Chips with Ben & Jerry’s Pineapple Passion Fruit Greek Yoghurt.