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Photographer Caren Alpert takes pictures of food. Really, really close-up pictures of food. What you see here are cake sprinkles, shot at a 65x magnification. See more at her website. Link -via Boing Boing
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Thieves in Vienna, Austria made off with 21 tons of mustard and ketchup.
The loot was in a semitrailer parked in a lot over the weekend northwest of Vienna. Police say the truck driver showed up Monday to deliver his cargo only to see the trailer missing.
Police assume the thieves were more interested in the trailer than its contents.
Authorities are on the lookout for the missing mustard as well as the $22,000 trailer. Link -via J-Walk Blog
(Image credit: the NeatoShop)
Kids selling lemonade on a street corner is a classic American icon, but according to Georgia State Police, it’s actually against the law. Cops recently busted two tweens for selling without a business permit and a food vendor’s license. According to the police chief, the city won’t be backing down soon:
“We were not aware of how the lemonade was made, who made the lemonade, of what the lemonade was made with, so we acted accordingly by city ordinance.”
Who knew lemonade could be so dangerous to the public health?
Link Via Consumerist Image Via ChocoladeHam [Flickr]
I know it’s a heart attack on a plate, but this fried pound cake peanut butter and jelly sandwich looks so delicious to me -and I don’t even like peanut butter! Would you guys try it or is it just another nasty overindulgence that belongs on This Is Why You’re Fat?
BuzzFeed has a great list of alcoholic drinks based on the Harry Potter series. Personally, I’m intrigued by the Gryffindor:
Ingredients:
1 part Liqueur, raspberry (Chambord)
1 part cranberry juice
1 part orange juice
1 Maraschino cherry
1 twist (of peel) orange Instructions:
‘Mix juices and Chambord with ice, strain. Garnish with an orange twist wrapped around a cherry with a sword-pick through it. Serve in a hurricane glass.’
Would you try any of these magically tasty treats?
Luc St. Pierre took this colorful photo of an assortment of candies on display at Boqueria Market in Barcelona, Spain. Oh, what fantastic selections!
Via National Geographic's Travel Photo of the Week
Photo: @CanalMercer
Ranjit Bhatnagar, Astrida Valijorsky, Mimi Hui and Catarina Mota must not have listened to their mothers telling them not to play with their food ... and that's a good thing. They won top prize in creativity for the piece above, a playable (yes, playable) piano made from Jell-O called "The Resistor Jeltone," at the 2011 Cooper-Hewitt Design Scholars/Jell-O Mold Workshop.
Previously on Neatorama: Lifelike Gelatin Creations | Jell-O Cartridges
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Love
french fry? You ain’t tasted nothin’ yet! Research chefs have inveted
a new way of cooking fries that supposedly made them taste so much better.
The secret? A little ultrasonic wave:
Maxime Bilet, Johnny Zhu and the other research chefs (including
Young) at our culinary lab in Bellevue, Wash., explored a variety
of techniques for doing better still. The winning combination is simple
in its ingredients but quite fancy in its execution. The potato batons
are vacuum-sealed with 2 percent salt brine in bags to keep them intact
during boiling. They are then bombarded with intense sound waves from
the same device that dentists and jewelers use. A lengthy ultrasound
treatment at 40 kilohertz causes the surface of each fry to crack and
blister with myriad tiny bubbles and fissures.The cook next vacuum-dries the pretreated potato sticks to adjust
the water content of the exterior and then briefly blanches them in
oil at 340 degrees Fahrenheit to tighten their network of interlaced
starch molecules. After cooling comes the final step: a quick plunge
into hot oil at 375 degrees F. Water flashes to steam inside each minuscule
bubble on the surface of the fries, expanding in volume by a factor
of more than 1,000 and forcing the bubbles to puff up. In just a few
minutes of deep frying, the french fries take on an almost furry appearance.
The annual Jell-O Mold Competition was held in Brooklyn about a week ago, and the winning works are even more impressive than those from the 2010 competition. Take a look at amazing gelatinous versions of dentures, cups of espresso, a pancake breakfast, and more. Link -via New Jovian Thunderbolt | Photo: Francesca Signori
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The United States has the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but China has got something truly important: the Strategic Pork Reserve.
You’ve read that right: the Chinese government is stockpiling frozen hogs in warehouses to stabilize the price of pork against market fluctuations and ensure supply.
China is a porcine superpower as well as a human one. The Middle Kingdom boasts more than 446 million pigs — one for every three Chinese people and more than the next 43 countries combined. So when there’s a major disruption in the pork supply it hits the economy hard; the "blue-ear pig" disease that forced Chinese farmers to slaughter millions of pigs in 2008, for example, drove the country’s inflation rate to its highest level in a decade.
To prevent further disruptions, the Chinese government established a strategic pork reserve shortly afterward, keeping icy warehouses around the country stocked with frozen pork that can be released during times of shortage. The government was forced to add to the reserve — taking pigs off the market — in the spring of 2010 when a glut led to prices collapsing.
From a very interesting Foreign Policy article about the politics of food: Link – via Fast Company
See also: NeatoShop’s Bacon Store
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Educated Guess, a wine produced by Roots Run Deep Winery in California, summarizes the wine making process on its label. Running clockwise from the top-right corner, you see sucrose conversion, sulfide production, bleaching with sulfur dioxide, its relationship to wine quality, and the formation of acetylaldehyde.
Chemistry Information and Winery Link -via Diary of a Death Starlette | Photo: GeekFeed
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Photo: mr.pepquinohead [Flickr]
No, it’s not ‘shopped. You’re looking at the Pepquino melon, which looks very much like a micro watermelon (but tastes like a cucumber instead):
While they might look genetically-engineered, Pepquinos come from an ancient wild plant in South America, and are 100% natural. They are just 3-cm-long and 2 cm in diameter, but apart from their size, they look just like regular watermelons. But only on the outside, because once sliced, the juicy green flesh of a cucumber is revealed. They also have the crisp fresh taste of cucumbers and usually served in luxury restaurants, as appetizers, in summer salads, stir fried and even as a sorbet.
The rare Pepquinos were discovered and brought to Europe in 1987, by a Dutch company that later began producing them and selling seeds. They’ve only recently started cultivating them in the US and Asia, but their popularity in foodie communities is growing rapidly.
This snack ain’t politically correct, but it’s rather clever. Or should we say racist?
Here’s Black Melon Bread from Japan, featuring the character Afro Tanaka from the anime series by Masaharu Noritsuke. Via One Inch Punch.
Charm City Cakes prove themselves to be true wizards of cake decorations with this fantastic Hogwarts cake for the Harry Potter premiere in New York City.
I so would’ve scarfed down the whole thing, had I not already been victimized by the evil "chubbify" spell
That’s Nerdalicious blog has the pic: Link
Foodies may argue that the stuff you get from McDonald’s barely qualify as food, but we ask the question above because of the actions of the company itself.
You see, McDonald’s lawyers are arguing that the fast food chain should be classified as supermarkets rather than restaurants to avoid a huge tax bill:
In a legal battle that is likely to see dozens of other fast food chains in the world’s largest country following suit, McDonald’s successfully argued that it should be classified as a food retailer for tax purposes rather than as a restaurant since many of its products are pre-packaged and sold to customers in the style of a supermarket rather than a restaurant.
It is a decision that will allow McDonald’s in Russia to continue paying ten per cent tax on its profits rather than the eighteen per cent tax levied on restaurants.
A while ago, I posted an article about someone requesting a picture of Yoda riding a tauntaun in the “special instructions” section of Domino’s online ordering form. Well, they’ve done it again as you can see in this great pic where they’ve drawn a giraffe fighting a unicorn with the wrong scale.
This homemade “Beer-O-Bot” uses an iPhone App to launch a selection of beers across the room to the user. While fun it seems like a lot of work to get a beer. Check out the full demonstration video at the link. What types of beer would you load in your Beer-O-Bot?
Somehow I feel like this cake would just have to taste like Pop Tarts. Strangely, I still want to try it even though I can’t stand the dried out preserved pastries.
Jelly Shots: The Jell-O Mold Competition is organised by an artists’ collective in Brooklyn. A group of chefs, artists and designers produced some amazingly realistic looking creations using gelatin as their medium.
Dentures (pictured above) by Kyla Blakney and Suzan Akpinar (Cooper-Hewitt Design Scholars), an even too-realistic set of dentures in strawberry and coconut gelatine was the Winner for Structural Integrity.
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G&T Jelly is British for Gin & Tonic Jell-o. What’s special about this recipe is that it glows under a black light (UV light to you young folks)! The active ingredient is the quinine in the tonic water -or the gin, depending on your goals for the recipe. Find it at Instructables, with US conversions and some variations in the comments. Link -via Nag on the Lake
Jamie Masterson looked at Angry Birds from a non-cartoony point of view when he and his wife made this cake for the Threadcakes baking competition. Bakers pick a favorite Threadless T and create an edible version of it. In this case, the eggs, birds, slingshot, crown and the pig’s ears are all made of modeling chocolate; the rest of it is delicious cake. Here’s the original t-shirt – I think the likeness is pretty sweet.
Link via Geeks Are Sexy
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To-may-to, to-mah-to … fruit, vegetable – whatever you call it, one thing’s for sure: people love it. But if you have only tasted tomatos bought from the supermarket shelves, you’re missing out on flavor.
Barry Estabrook of Politics of the Plate blog has the inside story of the dirty little secrets of supermarket tomato over at NPR:
… the tomatoes you see in those supermarkets have been bred for high yields and durability, not flavor. "As a farmer once said — an honest farmer — ‘I don’t get paid a cent for flavor,’" Estabrook says.
There’s an even darker side to the modern commercial tomato, too, he says. Up until recently, workers on many of Florida’s vast industrial tomato farms were basically slaves. "People being bought and sold like animals," Estabrook says. "People being shackled in chains. People being beaten for either not working hard enough, fast enough, or being too weak or sick to work. People actually being shot and killed for trying to escape. That sounds like 1850′s slavery to me, and that, in fact, is going on, or has gone on."
Estabrook adds that there have been seven successful slavery prosecutions in Florida in the past 15 years.
Link (Photo: Robert Browman)
Heston Blumenthal is the mad genius behind the wild and experimental menu at the Fat Duck restaurant in Berkshire. People from all over are clamoring to try Heston’s weird and wonderful delights, such as egg and bacon ice cream, salmon poached in licorice sauce and snail porridge, and the restaurant claims 30,000 calls come in a day to inquire about reservations, which must be made 2 months in advance. If you opt for the tasting menu, be prepared to sit for around four hours and shell out 160 Euros per person. But Heston’s menu promises not to disappoint, and prospective diners see eating at the Fat Duck as a life experience, and not just another gourmet meal.
Starbucks VIA are for sissy hipsters. Real men BREW their coffee, even in the great outdoors.
But if the thought of making coffee on a camp stove make you shudder like the thought of sipping decaf (the horror!), then take heart because there’s this: a propane-powered coffeemaker. Yes, that’s right, people. Propane-powered.
Coleman, we coffee-addicts salute you! Link
South Koreans have some of the longest work hours in the world, which makes it difficult for them to go grocery shopping. To counter the problem (and to help their market share), Tesco installed virtual grocery stores in the subway stations where items can be ordered via QR code and later be delivered to the person’s home.
Still dipping your McNuggets in sauce? That’s so last week! The hot new trend in fast food cuisine is injecting sauce directly into McNuggets.
J. Kenji Lopez-Alt of Serious Eats dared to push the culinary envelope:
There’s not really much to say about this project that the pictures don’t already explain much better. I opted for the Tangy Barbecue sauce not because I love the careful balance of herbs and spice or the gentle, tangy heat, or even its sweet kick, but because it was the only one that looked like it was a truly inject-able consistency. …
And there you have it. McNuggets with the sauce built-in, and they tasted exactly like you’d think. Are there any real advantages to eating these over the traditional dip-and-pop method? Not really. But after downing a couple of’em, regular McNuggets just feel so… empty inside.
Link (Photo: Robyn Lee) – via Geekosystem
Artist Bashir Sultani makes amazing art using nothing but table salt. You can see his process in the video above and check out more of his artworks at the link.
If you keep up with the riveting world of competitive eating contests, then you have probably heard that hot-dog-munching legend Takeru Kobayashi once again refused to eat in the annual Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest due to a contractual dispute. But Kobayashi proved that he still has what it takes to be a champion, smashing the existing record for number of hot dogs eaten in 10 minutes -bringing it from 62 dogs to 69.
Link
Remember that flash mob you went to? Well, that ain’t nothing compared to this – what we can seriously call the mother of all flash mob: a "secret" picnic called Dîner en Blanc, where 10,000 participants gather to have dinner and dancing:
Three weeks ago, in the golden light of an early-summer evening, thousands of Parisians dressed entirely in white converged on two of the city’s most picturesque locations — 4,400 of them in the plaza at the cathedral of Notre Dame; 6,200 in a courtyard of the Louvre — for a feast that was neither advertised nor publicly heralded. They had brought along not only their own epicurean repasts but also their own tables, chairs, glasses, silver and napery.
At midnight, after dining and dancing, they packed up their dishes, stowed their empty Champagne bottles in trash bags brought for that purpose, stooped to pick up their cigarette butts from the cobbles and departed. The landmarks were left immaculate, with no traces of the revelry of the previous three hours.
Diner en Blanc is now coming to New York. Liesl Schillinger of The New York Times has the scoop: Link
There are so many companies that put a crown on the labels of beverages that mental_floss decided to make a quiz out of them! In today’s Lunchtime Quiz, you’ll be given a picture of a crown, and you try to match it with the drink it comes from. Simple? No. I scored horribly, but you might ace this one -you won’t know until you try it! Link
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