Mismatched dinner, or why menu planning is extremely difficult for me

Tonight, Kait turns 21. To celebrate, I made her Ina Garten's pumpkin roulade with ginger buttercream. Weshop didn't have mascarpone, so I substituted by mixing cream cheese, heavy cream, and butter. It's not going to fool anyone, but it's still pretty good. For dinner we made pizza margherita. The courses didn't exactly match... After dinner I briefly read Ina Garten's tips on menu planning "I don't have to think about it, I just know it will be delicious", and it dawned on me that we inhabit completely different taste-universes.
I was reared on a particular set of flavors that doesn't seem to apply to the food I cook now. A lot of cooks emphasize putting together dishes and flavors that go together (like lamb and mint, pork and apple), and I never understood what they meant. I think a lot of it has to do with cultural differences--because I didn't grow up eating lamb with mint, I never understood why people think lamb and mint match. In my mind, lamb and cumin is the more natural pairing. Same thing with pork and apple. When I think pork, I think cabbage. I love lamb and mint, and I really like pork and apple. However, a lot of people take those combinations for granted. Ina Garten says that certain foods just have a "natural affinity" for one another. I think she's just a little ethnocentric. Ina, it would be so much more useful if you could explain why you think certain foods just go togehter, instead of just telling me to do it intuitively. My intuition is completely different from yours. Afterall, this is the girl that wanted Jamaican beef patties with sushi for the reception after my opera, which was orchestrated for western instruments and gamelan, and featured a paper mache dinosaur painted like a De Kooning.

Anyway, I really liked the pumpkin roulade. Although the cream cheese really just made it into carrot cake with pumpkin. The only tricky part was inverting the cake from the pan, but I managed. It also doesn't look too professional, but I blame our lack of space (I assembled the cake on a chair because we didn't have counter space), and the fact that we don't have a fine sieve for confectioner's sugar.