Sure, the rise of food blogs has been chronicled in newspaper and magazine stories ad nauseam, but you know the phenomenon has really grabbed the attention of the mainstream when it appears in a Shoe comic, as it does today. By now, "civilian" diners are probably aware that the people making like Annie Leibovitz with their dinners are likely going to publish that photo on the internets. [via Off the Broiler]
So you all think locavore is a terrible word?
How 'bout this terribly awesome word: lolcavore.
It's a portmanteau of lolcat and locavore, of course. A reader of the blog Language Log came up with it and Photoshopped this lolcat-style image to go along with it: "I could not help misreading locavore/localvore as being prefixed by lol-, and then could not help but apply appropriate text to a photo... resulting in the pic."
All you locavore haters, heads-up: The woman in the photo is Jessica Prentice, the coiner of the term you loathe. [via Talley Sue]
Related
Locavore: 2007 Word of the Year
Locavore vs. localvore: the coiner speaks [Language Log]
A couple days ago, Serious Eats contributor Lucy Baker put me on to Posh Nosh, a short-lived series of comedy shorts on BBC2 television. It's a send-up of upscale cooking shows, in which husband and wife hosts Minty and Simon Marchmont (Arabella Weir and Richard E. Grant) cook "extraordinary food for ordinary people." They pretentiously demonstrate recipes and wine advice all the while using nonsensical cooking terms ("Then thrill your mussels in hot, bubbling water," "Appliqué the currants," "First you'll want to alienate the chorizo," etc).
An overly detailed recipe for Boiled Water, written in the style of Cook's Illustrated magazine. CVilleBilly, this one's for you! ;)
If anyone out there can't get a pot going after this, I'm banning you from Serious Eats.
Yeah, by now I think the blog Stuff White People Like has made the rounds. Here's a list of all the food-related material on the site so far. The site is probably better described as "Stuff Yuppies Like," and some of these write-ups are pretty spot on:
This video really made my day. Improv Everywhere, which stages synchronized outbursts of surrealist performance art, recently organized a musical in the food court of a Los Angeles shopping mall:
We used wireless microphones to amplify the vocal performances and mix them together with the music through the mall’s PA system. We filmed the mission with hidden cameras, mostly behind two-way mirrors. Apart from our performers, no one in the food court was aware of what was happening.
Link: Food Court Musical
When I got in this morning, Raphael, our web developer here at Serious Eats, pinged me with the link for what's essentially a "Fake Gordon Ramsay" blog. (You've heard of Fake Steve Jobs, right? 'Cause that's what they're shooting for here.)
I didn't jump on blogging this right away because I was a little underwhelmed. Maybe I'm just used to the keenly insightful and wickedly hilarious FSJ posts, but FGR seems to miss the mark by a little bit. Maybe I expected more F-bombs (there are only six in a total of 16 Fake Gordon posts so far). I don't know. But, it looks like FGR has only been blogging since late October, so I'm sure hoping he'll hit his f&*%ing stride soon enough.
The secrets of hamburger production are revealed with this new T-shirt from Threadless. All it takes is a cow, a winged gnome-fairy creature wielding a magic wand, and in a poof of red smoke—TA-DA—instant burger! (A few steps may have been left out and/or altered in the design of the shirt.)
Radar magazine offers 50 things not to say at the Thanksgiving table.
What's a None Pizza with Left Beef? Very, very sad.
Need to look up a food term? Check out The Devil's Food Dictionary by Barry Foy where you will find only the most accurate and succinct definitions. For instance, butter is "the fatty substance said to have inspired the invention of margarine," organic food is "a term describing what our ancestors knew simply as 'food,'" and shelf life is "the amount of time that a food product can be offered for sale before finally being donated to poor people." Hopefully the dictionary will someday exist in physical form and grace the countertops of kitchens everywhere.
Best Wishes Suzanne
Under Neat that
We will Miss you
Huh?
He told them to write: "Best Wishes Suzanne" and underneath that write "We Will Miss You."
That's what miscommunication with the cake decorators at Wal-Mart will get you.
Through the execution of a series of carefully planned procedures in controlled environments, the team behind How Much Is Inside? discovers how much stuff is inside stuff. No, not like how many ounces of ketchup are in a standard ketchup bottle—that information is already written on the packaging—but how many free fast food packets of ketchup will fit into a bottle and how much each packet costs. You know, vital information that most people don't bother to test because they claim to have more important things to do, like work, sleep, or eat.
Behold, the combination of two things many parents highly disapprove of: candy and The Simpsons. Candy Addict lists the Top 10 Simpsons Candy Moments to celebrate the release of the upcoming Simpsons movie. While I can't recall every one of these moments, I agree that nothing can beat Homer's gleeful frolic through the Land of Chocolate:
If you're a zombie, be sure to follow the Zombie Food Pyramid to remain at peak human-eating condition. You wouldn't want your arm to fall off while cracking into a fresh human skull now, would you? Be sure to eat plenty of brains, but go light on the bones and gristle.
The drawing appears to have been originally made by Mike Capen for Threadless.com. For another take on the nutritional needs of zombies, read this zombie health article from The Onion.
Violent Veg is a series of dioramas featuring anthropomorphic produce in silly, strange, mostly pun-enhanced situations. These aren't just carrots with drawn-on faces—special lighting, settings, and props are used to bring life to this odd and elaborate world of wide-eyed fruits and vegetables. I think I'll be dead before carrots evolve into hoodlums with biceps; for now these creatures only exist on t-shirts, keychains, and other merchandise. [via chocolatesuze]
InventorSpot give their list of the Top Ten Weird and Bizarre Japanese Drinks as proof that Japan is at the forefront of beverage ingenuity. Do you dream of cucumber-flavored Pepsi? They've got it! How about salad flavored water? Got that too! Kids want to join in on the beer-drinking fun? Just give them a frosty bottle of non-alcoholic Kidsbeer!
If you have a local Japanese supermarket ("browsing supermarkets" is one of my major pastimes, at least) be on the lookout for "interesting drinks that probably wouldn't survive in the US market." There are loads of them. Check out Dan's photos of bizarre Japanese beverages for inspiration.
Handsome Donkey gives us the 5 Worst Candies of all time in this handy video that illustrates typical human reactions to eating such candies:
Who are the sugary perpetrators? Paper Dots , Wax Bottles, Chewing Tobacco (certainly a bad candy since it's not even candy), Circus Peanuts and Necco wafers (tie), and the number one criminal to all candy kind, Giant Jawbreakers.
While I don't necessarily agree that these are the worst candies of all time, I do think that they all suck. Out of everything on the list I've only had the displeasure of eating wax bottles and jawbreakers, probably because they came with goody bags from childhood parties and kids will eat anything artificially colored and borderline toxic as long as it's sweet (me being one of these kids). I distinctly remember chewing on a wax bottle, feeling perplexed because it was missing a property of food that I tend to hold in high regard—that is, digestibility—and then spitting it out, thinking that it would only be worth biting through the inconvenient wax receptacle if the liquid inside were some kind of serum that gave you superpowers or increased brain functionality, which it did not. If anything, it may have lowered my brain activity.
There's a lot of questionable candy out there. Bad Candy knows the horrors of these confections all too well.
How does one determine the winner in a battle between doughnuts versus celery? Taste? Texture? Color? No way; those factors are too open ended. Comedy duo Smosh knows there are better ways to test the merits of food. Does it make a good pogo stick? Is it an effective oven mitt? Can it be used to rob a defenseless person? Find out who the champion is in the video, Food Battle 2007.
[Caution: This video may not be safe to watch if you're offended by idiocy. Otherwise, it's kind of awesome.]
Natalie Dee (whose equally funny husband draws for the recently posted Toothpaste For Dinner) gives us a look into the state of fine dining with her latest drawing, "dumb fancy restaurants." It's disturbing perhaps, but I wouldn't be surprised if these dishes already existed.
I think our Serious Eatin' overlord, Ed Levine, may be too embarrassed to post this, so I will.
Last Friday, just as we were packing up and about to leave the office for the weekend, a messenger arrived with a delivery for Ed.
Prominently bearing the Sullivan Street Bakery logo, it was loaded with bread, a handful of Band-Aid strips, and a note: "Hope your thumb feels better," proving that its sender, Jim Lahey, is not only a whiz with bread but also has a good sense of humor.
Humorist Brian Unger in his latest "Unger Report" on NPR:
"While we're sticking up for the eaten, let us not forget the eaters in this new era of the cruelty-free restaurant....
Restaurants should cease killing lobsters by cutting them in half while they are still alive. But that lobster should be served while the customer is still alive. If food takes longer to arrive than the Iraq war to end, that's inhumane.
Nabokov once threw his manuscript for Lolita
The chapter was for my book, which is based on my website, The Amateur Gourmet. It was a chapter about challenging yourself, about the way that cooking something complicated can motivate you to take big chances in life. The original idea was to make croissants, but that would've been too time consuming. Croissants require lots of resting. I didn't want to spend 36 hours making pastry.
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