I don't know what the lyrics of this Japanese song mean, but watching a bunch of people prance around in super happy sushi costumes is captivating enough on its own. Whether or not watching this video will increase sushi consumption is yet to be determined.
Watch the video, after the jump.
Culinary Abortions from Japan is a hilarious blog written by a Canadian documenting the food failures of Japan—"failures" including off-putting flavors, poorly named items, excessive packaging, or all of the above.
While the wrongness of these foods may mostly be culturally relative, I can't argue against individually wrapped cashews joining the list. It's not like the cashew is a giant mutant worthy of its own bag; the description reads, "Aside from a light gown of salt, it rests naked within its deplorable womb of plastic."
I suppose it's good if you have a major portion-control problem, though.
Battle of the Hot Male Web Hosts on TVWeek.com pits male web-video stars in eight different categories against one another.
Our friend Adam "The Amateur Gourmet" Roberts is up against wine-vlogging maniac Gary Vaynerchuk.
To refresh you on how the rules work, we currently have 16 contestants divided into eight pairings of head-to-head battles in this first round. By Friday, the eight winners will move on to the second round. We will add one more contestant in the wild-card slot to make nine in the final round.
I'm not going to spoil the results, but AmGour sure could use your help.
No matter who wins the presidency later this year, our country is doomed. That's because it's filled with people who see fit to auction off the remnants of a candidate's breakfast on eBay. In this case, a leftover bite or two of sausage and a little more than a quarter waffle abandoned by Senator Barack Obama at the Glider Diner in Scranton, Pennsylvania. But, Adam, you'll say, it's only one auction. One wayward American among many millions.
Yeah? Well, as of 12:30 p.m. today, 23 morons have bid this thing up to $76. [via MenuPages Blog]
The following commercial for Wendy's Four-Alarm Spicy Chicken Sandwich was posted to YouTube by a guy who supposedly worked making ads for the chain. His claim is that they rejected this spot. Maybe, maybe not. In today's wacky world, this could just be an attempt at planting it virally. If so, I'm biting, because is one of the funniest ads I've seen in a while.
Think you're pretty darn smart, do you? A regular baking Einstein, huh? Well, do think you can make a brain cake? If you're not exactly a rocket scientist in the kitchen, the step-by-step article How to Make an Anatomically Correct Brain Cake on WikiHow.com will walk you through it. The one shown here appears to be based on a chocolate layer cake with the gray matter made of marshmallow fondant.
Why would you want to make a brain cake? That's a question our crack research team is still trying to answer.
First there was the french-fry-coated hot dog from South Korea. Then Phil Lees, of The Last Appetite tweaked the Korean version, bringing it more in line with Western tastes (complete with recipe). Now he's done away with the hot dog altogether and subbed in ... BACON: "Originally I was planning on making a French fry coated, bacon-wrapped hot dog, but thought that the inclusion of the hotdog was largely pointless," he says on his blog. "Why not just head straight for the bacon?"
Do you really like udon? I mean, really, really like udon to the point that you'd want to eat a bucket of it? Then Japanese competitive eater Nobuyuki Shirota has the restaurant for you: Shirotaya, a limited-time noodle shop in Osaka whose standard bowls of udon come with 16 portions of noodles for about $40. Don't be intimidated; those with normal appetites can order a sixteenth of a bowl of udon.
Previously
'Major League Eating: The Game' Coming Soon for the Nintendo Wii
One (or Fifty) Hot Dogs Too Many
59 and a Half!
Trompe l'Oeil Udon Dessert
I think this is a genuine commercial about kimchi. And that frightens me. Just a bit. Especially when the pile of fermenting kimchi pulsates. As for why the labels on the kimchi jars are in Japanese and the commercial is dubbed in English, I have no idea.
Watch the commercial after the jump. Prepare to be blown away.
Never before had I seen anything so marvelous that involve melted cheese product until the the nacho cheese fountain graced my monitor. DJ Grocery, creator of the mind-blowing General Tso's Philly cheesesteak, couldn't resist the temptation to fill his wife's chocolate fountain machine with cheese. I hear ya, man...I hear ya.
It turns out cheese fountains are acceptable alternatives to chocolate fountains, along with barbecue sauce fountains and egg nog fountains. However, I'd rather believe that the ideas behind these non-chocolate fountains come about because while staring quizzically at the ornamental food display contraption someone thinks, "Well, I'm gonna fill this with [insert questionable liquifiable food product], and no one's going to stop me."
Only YTMND could make this work: a bizarre electro remix of the Fresh Prince's Uncle Phil musing about pillowy mounds of mashed potatoes. [via Josh McHugh]
The Col-Pop: emerging technology from South Korean fried chicken chain BBQ Chicken. Popcorn chicken rides up top; cola chills out below.
Proving yet again that South Korea is light years ahead of everyone else in fast-food technology is The Col-Pop. The nation that brought the world the spiral-cut potato on a stick and hot-dog-stuffed pizza ushers in a new era of snack portability with this mashup of drink cup and food container that holds popcorn chicken up top and a cold drink in the bottom.
The Col-Pop is the brainchild of BBQ Chicken, a South Korea–based fried chicken chain that has recently set its sights on worldwide chicken domination (though at this time, it only has locations in New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina). From the looks of this container, on-the-go America will certainly eat it up. It's perfect for handy snacking while walking, driving, talking on the phone, or—as we discovered the other day—blogging.
And the genius doesn't stop at popcorn chicken. In South Korea, sister company BHC Chicken also offers spaghetti, french fries, and fried mozzarella balls in Col-Pop containers. The Col-Pops we inspected come in two sizes: small (20 ounce cup) and large (32 ounce).
Someone should make this life-size chocolate keyboard, which is, unfortunately, only a concept at this point. While it probably wouldn't work as a functional keyboard (the keys would either melt or get munched), it would be quite the geeky goodness. [via Gizmodo]
Talk about a gingerbread house. Here's the genesis of the idea, the floors and walls, the first story, the completed project. [via Elise]
It's a prototype, and who knows if it'll ever go into production, but a British tinkerer has introduced jetlike fan technology into the toasting process. He was frustrated with his plodding toaster while making his favorite meal, beans on toast. "The design came out of sheer frustration that by the time the toast is ready, my beans have gone cold," he said. [via Cold Mud]
Serious Eats public service announcement of the day: if you still have leftovers from Thanksgiving, it's probably a good idea to throw them out. Dangerous bacteria could be lurking in your tupperware!
I'm not exactly sure what's going on here. Can any Japanese readers explain? Video
Everyone has heard of I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!, the margarine spread with the memorably comical name. While there are many butter substitutes gracing our grocery store shelves (oh yes, how they make my stomach juices flow), I assumed that this was the only product that used the word "butter" to market its superiority over other butter substitutes through its fascinating ability to be mistaken for real butter.
But my world of fake butter (population: 1) was turned upside-down when I read Elyse Sewell's livejournal entry documenting curious products from her local supermarket, including two more I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!-like products: Butter It's Not! and Could It Be Butter? I found these names just as amusing as I Can't Believe It's Not Butter, possibly more so, but googling their names showed that the Internet didn't really give a damn about these other products. While I Can't Believe It's Not Butter returned 95,100 results, Butter It's Not returned 1,760 results and Could It Be Butter? brought up the rear with a paltry 186 results.
I came across a few other fake butter products with peculiar names. Check out the full gallery after the jump.
Because we're oddly fascinated by ice pops here at Serious Eats, and in the interest of keeping you abreast of what's going on in the frozen-treat sector, we present you with this Bratz concoction:
Never before have vapid gumball eyes been more appropriate in a Popsicle context. The backside, after the jump.
The grand prize of the 34th Annual Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Weigh-Off went to Thad Starr and his 1,524 pound pumpkin. How does one grow a pumpkin that large? According to Starr, all you need is "yards and yards of chicken manure, lots of mixed compost, and lots and lots of time." With enough hard work, a winning pumpkin can gain up to ten pounds a day during peak growing periods.
But what happens to these pumpkins after being declared "heaviest of them all"? One option: turn them into paddle boats.
Photograph from iStockphoto.com
Hope you enjoyed your General Tso's chicken, because your fortune is about to take a turn for the worse:
“Today is a disastrous day. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” reads one fortune showing up around the country.
“It’s over your head now. Time to get some professional help,” advises another.
As the messages, contained in cookies made by Wonton Food in Queens, have spread across the country, some diners have registered their reactions online. As a result, the company has a marketing challenge on its hands.
I've not gotten one of these grim fortunes yet, but I have gotten plenty of those lame non-fortune fortunes. You know, like, "Have a nice day." I don't put much stock in these slips of paper as it is, so maybe an odd disastrous one would be a welcome change of pace.
Aping the tagline of a television commercial, a woman in Hull, England, stabbed her partner after he nicked some of her leftover pork chops from the fridge:
Prosecutor Michael Wrigglesworth said: "At this point she went mad. She grabbed him by the neck. She went out of the living room and came back. She said the words, 'Eat my food, feel my fork,' which they both accepted was a reference to the Quorn advert. She then stabbed him with the knife."
Tracy Wenn pleaded guilty to the attack, which she says was simply a case of drunken shenanigans gone horribly awry, and was given a nine-month suspended sentence.
Here's the commercial that inspired the madness:
Though it's not exactly what the commercial or Wenn uttered, I think "Touch my pork, feel my fork" is destined to become a new catchphrase at the Serious Eats office. [via Anil Dash]
Remember the bacon mat that Robyn blogged about back in June? It was definitely interesting but it just kinda sat there.
Well, Kathie Lucas crafted one and gave it oodles of context, making an open-face BLT sandwich (bottom right), "with spinach and sliced cucumbers to bump up the healthiness of it all. It was so good. And yes, the two of us polished it off in a matter of minutes. Our 7-year-old daughter looked on in awe. Or something like awe."
Photograph courtesy The Meatwave
In these heady days when people are making bacon-based bacon cheeseburgers, bacon mats, and bacon salt, you can add another to the list: bacon-cheeseburger sausage.
If you cook with bell peppers, you've probably cut one open at some time and have seen the phenomenon of the pepper within a pepper. But an egg within an egg is a little more freaky and rare.
It was the first Sydney University poultry science professor Tom Scott had seen in his 30-year career. He says a normal egg disturbed in the shell gland could move back up into the oviduct and start production all over again, resulting in an egg inside an egg.
Sorta puts a new spin on the "which came first" debate.
I love bacon so much I'm considering making bacon ice cream this weekend, but even I have to draw the line at this bacon-scented bacon print tuxedo that Archie McPhee's now selling for $99.
Well, OK, so maybe it would be good for Halloween parties or if you were getting married in Vegas by, say, Elvis or Captain Picard. But other than those settings, I can't think of where this might be considered appropriate! [via Weird Asia News]
Check out this amazing deep-fat fryer with goldfish living in it! The fish live in water that sits below the oil, and eat the food particles that sink into their home. Crazy. And there's a video too. [via Jason]
I don't know what's scarier, that this guy has been saving McDonald's burgers for 18 years in his basement, unrefrigerated, or that the burgers still "look exactly the same." [via Jason Perlow]
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