Restaurant reservation site OpenTable will now tell you if that restaurant is worth the reservation. Or at least, some stranger will. After dining, site users will receive a survey on the food, ambiance, service, noise factor and overall dining experience. OpenTable will combine these results (ranked between one and five stars) with those of other local diners. Will Yelpers jump ship? [via DCist]
Here's a beautiful grape shallot, and microgreens salad made by Jacquie to offset the duck fat fries and the spit-roasted guinea pig and the egg yolk-laden hamburger and...well, I could probably keep going. Basically, here's your phytonutrient dosage for the day; I thought you could use it.
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This week, The Kitchn shares a recipe for super thin homemade breakfast pizza topped with herbs, ricotta cheese, and oozing eggs. It's so delicious, you might want to eat it for lunch and dinner too.
Also on The Kitchn, a review of the Pancake Puff Pan, the unconventional green, fuzzy state of a common food, recipes for rhubarb-based drinks, and ideas for displaying cookie cutters.
I don’t know what it’s like where you live, but here in Seattle, summer is taking its time to roll around. On Friday, though, the forecast says we’ll be in the 80s, and with Memorial Day fast approaching, it looks like gin & tonic season is here.
Too bad I hate them like poison.
Well, maybe I should put that in past tense. Until recently, pouring a gin and tonic typically entailed cracking the lid on a plastic liter bottle, and pouring a fizzy, somewhat oily mix of carbonated water, high-fructose corn syrup and assorted flavorings over ice with a good belt of gin. To my taste, it’s too sweet and synthetically bitter at the same time, and on those occasions when I’ve been handed a cup of gin & tonic at a barbecue, I always wind up trying to drink half the mess good-naturedly in gulps so I won’t taste the tonic, then conveniently losing my cup when I just can’t take any more.
In recent years, however, there’s been a growing movement to rescue tonic's reputation. Put off by the sickly sweetness and artificial flavors of mass-produced commercial tonic water, adventurous bartenders such as Daniel Shoemaker at Teardrop Lounge in Portland, Oregon, have been crafting their own tonic waters using natural ingredients. Some entrepreneurs and artisinal producers are following suit, introducing small-batch tonic waters that taste of real botanicals and are lightly sweetened—a vast improvement on the stuff hiding behind yellow labels in the grocery store.
Because I rarely think about color when I’m planning what to cook, I always feel guilty when I read about how important it is to one’s enjoyment of a meal. The thing is, I’m not sure how true that is for me. One of my favorite things about my family’s Thanksgiving is that everything on my plate is unapologetically brown, white, and delicious. And when my Tuesday night dinner at home has already taken twice as long as I thought it would to prepare, taking the extra ten minutes to clean and chop a dusting of green herbs or red peppers or yellow lemon zest almost never seems worth it.
I do have a soft spot for vividly or oddly hued foods, and I do try to get a lot of different colors in over the course of the week; I just don’t manage to make every night’s plate look like a color wheel. As a child I was fascinated by page 117 in Martha Stewart’s Entertaining, which features a bowl of pepto-bismol-pink iced borscht framed by spring flowers and garnishes. My desire to eat pink soup was matched only by my determination never to consume a beet, and there the matter stood for most of my life.
Having in my ripening become quite fond of beets, I finally made that soup the other day, and…the color was not right at all! Instead of being spring-tulip-pink it looked, alas, like normal borscht, the shade just past hot pink and before magenta. Since my soup was also not nearly as glossy as the model, I’m wondering if they stirred in some heavy cream, or maybe they used those beautiful candy cane beets instead of the plain old dark ones.
In any event, here is a colorful menu for springtime, all adapted from Entertaining:
Ever look at a radish with a long root and think, "Hey, that looks like a rat!" Maybe not. But with just a few small slices and cuts, you could make something that kind of looks like a rat. Impress your friends with your food-carving technique; just don't serve your radish rats to anyone who's afraid of rodents.
Watch the instructional video, after the jump.
Nick and Blake, the guys behind The Paupered Chef (also contributors to Serious Eats), retooled their site and headed in a new direction a couple months ago. Toward more involved, long-process, obsessive at-home food adventures. I love reading what they set about doing. Today, Blake posts about making guanciale at home, a process that had him sourcing pig jowls (more difficult than you'd imagine), scavenging an extra fridge, and then going about turning it into the bacon that's preferred by Italians and only now just catching on in the U.S.
"Once a dusty formality that lived on in the form of radish roses in out-of-the-way hotels, food art, as it is known, is enjoying a new vogue." The New York Times gives us an inside look at the competitive world of fruit and vegetable carving. Some chefs take up produce carving to battle boredom or to impress customers, while top carvers can earn thousands of dollars creating elaborate biodegradable centerpieces for their clients.
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I was reminded while doing some grocery shopping recently just how important it is to pay attention to what you put in your cart and how you can't always trust your old stand-by brands, especially when those brands start showing up on products outside the area the company built its reputation on.
Case in point: Land O'Lakes®. I've always thought pretty highly of their dairy products and it really didn’t surprise me when I noticed their name on some bags of powdered hot chocolate mixes. What did surprise me was the phrase on the front of a bag of Land O'Lakes Triple Chocolate International Drinking Cocoa™ ... "Brimming With Chocolatey Flakes."
Just between you, me, and everyone else who is going to read this–chocolatey is shorthand for faux-chocolate. Even though the FDA legalized white chocolate in 2002 (a crime against chocolate according to most chocolate lovers) they actually do regulate the use of the word chocolate very closely; a food or ingredient must contain a minimum percentage of ingredients that actually come from a cocoa bean in order to call itself chocolate.
So, when Land O'Lakes says that their Triple Chocolate International Drinking Cocoa is Brimming With Chocolatey Flakes what they're really telling you is not to expect much actual chocolate in the product. A glance at the lengthy list of ingredients reveals just how true this is.
Chopping, dicing, grating, wine-opening. These sounds combine to musical effect in this commercial for the Saclà brand of Italian sauces. Do you hear strains of "Hey, Mickey!" in this beat, too? Listen closely—and watch—after the jump.
Would you vote for someone older than your food? As the Things Younger Than McCain blog points out, Cobb salad, Spam and McDonald's were all born after the septuagenarian Republican presidential hopeful. Most baffling on the list is the chocolate-chip cookie. Seriously? Dinos didn't dunk them in milk after watching Eve eat one? When McCain was one, the Toll House Cookie recipe first appeared in Ruth Wakefield's cookbook.
Here's a few other food-related items we came up with, all younger than McCain: Cheerios, M&Ms, Ranch dressing, Denny's, In-N-Out Burger and the frappuccino.
Not dumplings made out of penguins; dumplings that look like penguins! Wendy ate these cute penguin dumplings at Super Star Restaurant in Hong Kong.
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I've always thought pretty highly of dairy products from Land O'Lakes® and it really didn’t surprise me when I noticed their name on some bags of powdered hot chocolate mixes. What did surprise me was the phrase on the front of a bag of Land O'Lakes Triple Chocolate International Drinking Cocoa™ ... "Brimming With Chocolatey Flakes."
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Fresh fruit and hearty beans make a refreshing side for our Morningstar
Farms® Southwestern Style Veggie Cakes.
Get this recipe »
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