The UK's Telegraph has a good set of pictures from the record-breaking set of simultaneous explosions of Diet Coke and Mentos in Leuven, Belgium. Or as it's known in Belgium: Coca Cola Light. Several videos of the event have appeared online - the best we could find are after the jump.
In Frank Bruni's review of Belgian restaurant Resto he mentions one of the more than 50 beers served: "Order the Kwak, a beverage and a puzzle in one. If you don’t remove its hourglass-shaped goblet from a wood cradle at just the right angle, you go thirsty. And if you don’t return it to the cradle just so, it goes horizontal."
A tip for Frank Bruni and anyone else unfamiliar with Kwak: it's perfectly acceptable to keep the glass in the cradle, raising the cradle and glass together to drink.
And there's a reason for the unusually shaped Kwak glass. Kwak was first brewed in 1791, in the days of the stage coach. Stage coaches would often stop at an inn for refreshment, but the coachmen were required to stay with the coach and horses. So that coachmen wouldn't have to go without, Pauwel Kwak, an innkeeper, had a special glass created for his beer. The shape of the glass enabled it to be hung on the coach and be easily held in a thick glove.
Novel Noshing: When Dining Rooms Upstage Menus by Fodor's Katie Hamlin discusses six different restaurant concepts from around the world. Most of them are old hat (kitchen tables and conveyor belt sushi, especially) but I'd love to eat at the Fukuoka branch of the Zauo, The Fishing Boat Café chain, a restaurant that has "500 seats on two giant boats "anchored" side by side in the restaurant's massive indoor pond. After casting your pole (there is one stationed by each seat) and making your catch, your fish or lobster is wisked away to the kitchen for proper cooking." (There's also a Belgian restaurant that lifts your dining table 50 meters in the air, but I'm not really one for heights.)
The scrambled brains recipe got me thinking that, in the spirit of the season, I should gift the internet with an heirloom recipe for cooked porcupine.
A description of this delicacy and its exquisite preparation was related to me by a partly psychotic Belgian ostrich farmer who often gets hungry whilst rambling through the woods. Upon capturing the unfortunate creature, he packs it thoroughly in mud (the soil in the Belgian Ardennes is clay-based). Place the package in the fire; after an hour the ball will have hardened, and you can set upon it with a stick or rock. When it breaks open, the spines and skin will stick to the clay, leaving the steaming viscera ready for finger-licking consumption.
Yum!
No mention, by the way, is made of how one should capture the porcupine, or build a fire with one's bare hands, both skills of which this farmer is apparently capable. Could he hail a cab in Midtown traffic during rush hour, though?
I didn't think so.
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