Not the dance, that’s merengue, which has plenty of chemistry, too. This concerns that delicious sweet fluff that tops your lemon meringue pie or the lightweight candy sold at bake sales. It’s made by beating egg whites into a foam, which can then be cooked. But getting it right is tricky. It may help to know the scientific reasons it might not turn out they way you expected. Smithsonian’s Food and Think blog tells you all about the meringue that went wrong. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user wiserbailey)

When TV characters cook, the results are often disgusting.

Drink: Flaming Homer

Show: The Simpsons (1991)

Origin: Homer is bored at home one night -forced to watch his in-law’s vacation slides- and he doesn’t have any beer, so he makes a cocktail from whatever he can find. He pours the leftover bits from several liquor bottles into a blender, along with the accidental addition of “Krusty’s Non-Narkotic Kough Syrup.” Homer thinks it tastes okay… but it’s even better after it’s lit afire by a stray cigarette ash. “I don’t know the scientific explanation, but fire made it good,” Homer says when he recreates the “Flaming Homer” at Moe’s Tavern. Moe then steals the idea and starts serving the drink (for $6.95) and renames it “The Flaming Moe.”

Food: Chocolate Salty Balls

Show: South Park (1998)

Origin: When the Sundance Film Festival comes to town, the soul-singing school cafeteria cook Chef (voice of Isaac Hayes) opens a stand to sell cookies to tourists. His most popular item: His “Chocolate Salty Balls.” It’s a blatant double entendre, and Chef even sings a song about them: “Hey, everybody, have you seen my balls? They’re big and salty and brown!” The song (which reached #1 in England) gives the recipe: cinnamon, egg whites, melted butter, flour, unsweetened chocolate, brandy, vanilla, and sugar. (Curiously, it doesn’t call for salt.)

(Image credit: Garnished Adventures)

Drink: Thankstini

Show: How I Met Your Mother (2005)

Origins: This cocktail, a martini, invented by booze-swilling playboy Barney (Neil Patrick Harris), combines Thanksgiving food with booze. It’s made from two ounces of potato vodka, four ounces of cranberry juice …and a bouillon cube for that poultry flavor. Barney remarks that it “tastes just like a turkey dinner.”

Food: Skip’s Scramble

Show: Arrested Development (2005)

Origin: On one episode, characters eat Sunday brunch at a bistro called Skip’s Church (the joke being that people “skip church” to go there). A brief shot of the menu shows standard brunch fare, along with an omelet called Skips Scramble. Its description: “Too many choices? Menu too big to swallow? Let Skip serve you up a scram that has something from every dish on the menu. It will knock you into next week!” Price: $47.95. The dish includes eggs, ten slices of bacon, ham, peppers, onion, sausage, and a chocolate glazed doughnut. (The menu also features the disclaimer that Skip’s Church is “not responsible for medical bills of deformities resulting from the digestion of its menu items.”)

(YouTube link)

Drink: Killer Shrew

Show: Mystery Science Theater 3000 (1992)

Origin: On an episode of the movie send-up show revolving around the 1959 movie called Killer Shrews, Joel (Joel Hodgson) and his robot companions devise the “Killer Shrew,” a cocktail that’s non-alcoholic but not very healthy. The recipe: combine chocolate chip ice cream, Cap’n Crunch with Crunchberries, Peanut M&Ms, pancake syrup, Circus Peanuts, Mr. Pibb, Marshmallow Peeps, Sweet Tarts candies, vanilla cake frosting, and Good & Plenty in a blender. Then, “pour into a plastic tulip vase” and throw in a wind-up toy shrew. Joel took a sip… and fell into a diabetic coma from all the sugar. (Note: If you throw in wax lips, it’s no longer a Killer Shrew; it’s a “Vulcan Mind Probe.”)

(Image source: iCarly)

Food: Spaghetti Tacos

Show: iCarly (2009)

Origin: One on episode of the popular nickelodeon comedy, Spencer (Jerry Trainor) had no idea what to make for dinner. So he invented spaghetti tacos, hard taco shells filled with noodles and marinara sauce. Since that episode aired in 2009, the food became a cultural phenomenon both on the show and in real life. In one episode, characters oversee a spaghetti-taco-making contest on a cable show, and in the real world, spaghetti tacos were the most-requested food item at American school cafeterias in 2010. “Spaghetti tacos made it possible to eat spaghetti in your car,” said Syracuse University pop-culture professor Robert Thompson in The New York Times. “It’s an important technological development.”

(YouTube link)

Drink: Bloody Awful

Show: Top Gear (2008)

Origin: This British show about cars and other manly stuff is co-hosted by Jeremy Clarkson, who came up with this recipe for what he calls “a man’s V8 smoothie.” And that’s not V8, as in the vegetable drink- that’s V8, as in the high-powered car engine, which he used to power a blender. Into that blender were placed a few pounds of raw beef with the bones, a dozen hot chilies, a half gallon of Bovril (a meat flavoring agent and tenderizer), two cups of Tabasco sauce…and a brick.

Food: Shepherd’s Pie Trifle

Show: Friends (1999)

Origin: In a Thanksgiving episode, chef Monica (Courtney Cox) makes a holiday feast, while Rachel (Jennifer Anniston) volunteers to make a trifle for dessert. The British dish is traditionally made up of cake, custard, and fruit, but when the pages of Rachel’s cookbook get stuck together, she inadvertently mixes in the ingredients of shepherd’s pie with the trifle, making for a disgusting crossbreed of the two. Joey (Matt LeBlanc), who has a huge appetite, doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with the dish, and eats the whole thing himself. “What’s not to like? Custard, good. Jam, good. Meat, good.” Ross disagrees, saying that it “tastes like feet.”

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The article above was reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Tunes Into TV.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books – go ahead and check ‘em out!

Frosty the Cheeseball Man is just like your everyday snowman, they melt away, except they are far, far more delicious. This terrifying treat was made by the same genius who invented the churpumple pie/cake crossover.

Link Via Geekosystem

Make A Sous Vide Cooker From A Beer Cooler

While “sous vide” has been one of the biggest buzzwords in the cooking world for the last few years, those of you who don’t work in kitchens or read cooking websites would be excused for not knowing the term. Sous vide literally means “under vacuum”  in French and that’s essentially how this food is prepared –vacuum sealed food is placed in a low heat water bath and cooked very slowly. The cooking method generally allows for foods to cook more evenly, retaining a better texture and its original appearance.

Unfortunately, a quick search on Amazon will show you that a sous vide cooker will run you a minimum of $200. Then you’ll need to buy a vacuum sealer, which will add on at least $30, and non-reusable plastic bags for the sealer that can quickly add up too. All of this is a pretty big investment –especially if you just want to check out the process before you commit.

To hack yourself a cheaper option, Serious Eats suggests using a beer cooler, a thermometer and a few Ziplock bags, which will cost less than $25 total. Just add hot water to your cooler until the temperature is a few degrees above your target cooking temperature, then add in your bagged food, close the lid and let the insulation do the work for you. As for how well the beer cooler holds up to the real deal: in tests, the beer cooler worked every bit as well as a quality $450 cooker.

Turn A Crock Pot Into A Yogurt Maker

Most electric yogurt makers only incubate the product, leaving out the critical heating and sterilization process. That’s why Chris Reilly of Make Magazine opted to hack his own yogurt maker out of a Crock Pot that automates the entire process. He call it the “Yobot.”

While the process is pretty involved, for those with the tech skills to pull it off, it seems like a great way to go through the yogurt making process. As a bonus, since you’re already programming a temperature gauge into the Crock Pot, you could easily tweak it just a bit more and make a combination Sous Vide cooker, yogurt maker and Crock Pot in one…now that’s a useful appliance.

Make Your Own Hotel Breakfast

(Video Link)

If you’re sick of leaving your hotel without a home-cooked breakfast, Natalie Tran has a solution. In this video, she shows you how to make oatmeal or soft boiled eggs with a coffee maker, and bacon and fried eggs with aluminum foil and an iron. It might not be the most delicious food in the world, but it’s better than nothing –which is what most hotels offer.

Concoct A Three-Course Meal With A Coffee Maker

Of course, oatmeal is far from the only food that can be made with a coffee maker. The John Hopkins Newsletter has a variety of recipes you can create with nothing more than a coffee maker. While the poached fish, pasta and cinnamon coffee all sound good, the chocolate fondue is certainly the highlight of this column.

Whip Up Fresh Chicken Pesto In The Office

For more advanced coffee-maker chefs, Food 2 suggests making your own chicken pesto pasta for lunch. Simply grill the chicken breasts on the base, boil the pasta in the coffee maker and then use a coffee grinder to create your own pesto sauce from scratch. If you’re really going to make this one though, you might want to buy a new coffee pot and grinder first or else everything is going to taste a little strange.

Brewing Beer With A Coffee Maker

Finally, for those with lots of time and no local bars (for example, someone stuck on an Oceanic Research Vessel), Southern Fried Science has some good tips to make your own beer with nothing more than a coffee pot and items you’d be likely to find on said Oceanic Research Vessel. While it might not be the most practical recipe for most people, it might just be the most useful for those people who do find themselves stuck out on the ocean for months at a time.

Build An Android Bartender

For those of you with some serious hacking skills, many of these tips and tricks will seem too easy or even downright boring. If that sounds like you, then here’s something more inspiring: an Android-powered bartender called “iZac.”

Using a battery-powered aquarium pump, a scale and a tablet with Android software, Nick Johnson devised this electronic bartender that can make any cocktail for you provided he has the ingredients on tap. He also offers an “I’m Feeling Lucky” feature that will provide you with any three liquids at random, providing for some disgustingly hilarious results.

Turn a Broken Wine Fridge Into a Fermentation Chamber

For most people, a broken wine fridge is little more than fodder for the closest landfill, but when Instructables user sklarm found out his neighbor was throwing away an old wine fridge, he jumped into action, hacking it into a top-notch fermentation chamber. By removing the cooling components and adding a lamp and temperature gauge, he was able to turn a piece of waste into an ideal chamber for fermenting bread, yogurt, kombucha and more. If you want to make your own, the process seems pretty straight forward even for the slightly-less tech savvy.

Use Liquid Nitrogen to Make Ice Cream In A Jiff

Homemade ice cream is so delicious, but making it can be so darn boring. What’s a geek to do?

Get an electric drill and liquid nitrogen involved in the process, that’s what. DocBug has all the directions you need to make your own delicious orange raspberry sorbet made with power tools and liquid nitrogen. While you can change up the flavors all you want, whatever you do, don’t forget your safety gear.

Make Some Stew While Taking A Drive

Going on a long road trip and don’t want to get stuck eating fast food? Why not take advantage of the heat generated by your engine? This great Manifold Stew recipe instructs you how to prepare a stew that can be cooked on your car’s engine by driving for about 4 or 5 hours. While it asks for squirrel, you city folk who find squirrel meat in short supply could try using rabbit or chicken in its place.

Personally, the only cooking trick like this that I ever used was making Top Ramen in a coffee pot. Have any of you ever hacked something to cook food it wasn’t intended to create? Are any of you planning to try some of the tricks here?

And while you’re at it, whip me up some eggs to go with the hash browns. Surely this imagined future of cooking from a 1930 issue of Modern Mechanix is finally achievable in our time.

Link -via Boing Boing

Tired of staring at your food while it cooks in the microwave? That’s so 1980. Fortunately, students from the University of Pennsylvania have managed to hack a microwave oven to play YouTube videos while your food is cooking. If you don’t feel like waiting, you can also have the microwave text you when your food is done.

Now that’s impressive!

Link Via Geekosystem

One of the few drawbacks to an outdoor grill is the difficulty of making french fries to go with your hamburgers. No more! The Blacktop 360 grill has a deep-fryer right in the middle. Plus a griddle, a warming plate, and an infrared grill. Plus an optional cutting board. And the legs fold up, so it’s completely portable. I know some men who will cook, but only outdoors. Now they can do all the cooking! Link -via Fark

While you won’t win any cooking contests with this recipe, you’ll certainly be able to impress your chemist friends at your next dinner party.

Link Via BoingBoing

This. Changes. Everything.

It never occurred to me to make tart crust out of cookie dough, but here it is. Just shape cookie dough around the outside of your muffin tin and bake with the tin upside down. Then use your imagination for what you can put in the bowls: fruit, yogurt, pudding, ice cream, whipped cream, or nothing at all! Link

(Image credit: Wilton)

Want to know how a bunch of brawny apes evolved into brainy humans? It all comes down to a pair of tongs and a flame.

People and animals eat basically the same food; the only difference is that we cook our meals. But does the ability to flame-broil a burger and burn a meal really make us that special? According to Harvard anthropology professor Richard Wrangham, it does.

Armed with mounting evidence, Wrangham believes that fire-kissed foods are what separated man from beast, allowing our ancestors to grow bigger brains and evolve into the intelligent creatures we are today.

THE MISSING LINK

The story starts roughly 2 million years ago in the age of the habiline -the so-called “missing link” between humans and apes. Habilines walked upright, made primitive stone tools, and had brains the size of oranges (roughly half the size of our brains today). Like chimpanzees, they subsisted mainly on fruits and veggies, with the occasional bit of raw meat on the side. They had strong teeth to chew all that plant matter, and big guts to process all that fibrous material. For them, digestion took an extremely long time. In fact, it’s believed that their bodies were constantly engaged in processing food. (Even today, chimpanzees spend more than six hours a day just chewing.)

So, how did Homo habilis evolve into Homo erectus? The dominant theory since the 1950s has been that meat-eating was responsible for the shift because it required habilines to gradually develop human intelligence. There’s something to the idea: To hunt game, our apelike ancestors had to reply on more than just physical prowess; they had to be clever and cooperate. The better they got at hunting, the smarter they became.

But the “meat made humans” hypothesis rankled biologist Richard Wrangham. In his 2009 book Catching Fire, Wrangham argues that meat-eating alone cannot account for the tremendous physical changes that occurred in the evolution of humans. Instead, he believes that man’s discovery of fire -and more importantly, cooking- did the heavy lifting.

(Image credit: Banksy work, photo by Flickr user Lord Jim)

For decades, many scientists dismissed cooking as a pleasant byproduct of civilization, a symbol of man’s dominion over nature. But Wrangham builds the case that cooking was crucial to human evolution because it made digestion so much more efficient, increasing the amount of energy our bodies derived from what we ate. As a result, humans became better able to think, hunt, sing, dance, paint on walls, and invent new tools. Ultimately, the top chefs were more likely to survive, reproduce, and pass along cooking techniques to their offspring, along with the physical evolutionary changes that come with them -namely, bigger brains.

The idea that cooked food offers more energy than uncooked food doesn’t immediately make sense. After all, recent studies show that cooking can leach food of its calories and nutrients. To understand the answers, we need to look inside -literally.

GUT FEELINGS

Back in the early 19th century, digestion was a mysterious process. But all that changed in 1822, when a 28-year-old Canadian soldier named Alexis St. Martin was accidentally shot in the belly, leaving portions of his lungs and stomach exposed. Thanks to the quick-thinking work of U.S. Army surgeon William Beaumont, the blast didn’t kill St. Martin. However, it did leave him with a fist-sized hole in his stomach that never closed. Immediately, Dr. Beaumont spotted an opportunity; it was a chance to observe human digestion as it happened.

Alexis St. Martin

Beaumont began introducing foods directly into St. Martin’ stomach and watched what happened. He observed the young man digest cooked lean beef; raw, salted beef; raw cabbage, soup, and cooked potatoes. The doctor quickly realized that the more tender and cooked the food, the more swiftly and easily it passed through the bowels. One experiment was especially telling. At noon one day, Beaumont introduced both boiled beef and raw beef into St. Martin’s stomach. By 2 PM, the boiled beef was gone, but the raw beef exhibited only slight maceration.

St. Martin’s stomach showed that consuming cooked foods makes digestion easier and more efficient. Because it’s already warmed and chopped into pieces, it saves the body work. According to Wrangham, that’s why human colons are so much shorter than those of other primates. Digestion is more efficient, which makes longer digestive tracts unnecessary. It’s also why humans have small, blunt teeth and weak jaws compared to apes, who spend their days chewing through tough, raw food.

THE TRUTH ABOUT RAW FOODS

The flip side of eating cooked foods is that humans are no longer adept at eating raw meals. Simply put, our tummies are just not made for that anymore. But the notion runs contrary to the growing raw food movement in America. Proponents claim that strict raw food diets can lower cholesterol and blood pressure and promote weight loss -all of which is true. But the unbalanced diet comes with problems. A recent German study found that, of the women they followed on totally raw diet, 50 percent of them ceased to menstruate entirely. Additionally, men on raw food diets reported significantly decreased sex drives. So, while catwalk-model proportions might be all the rage, for our ancient ancestors, such reduced reproductive capabilities would have been disastrous.

In the end, we don’t just need hot meals to satisfy our hunger; we need them to fuel our libidos. In a sense, prepared foods are old-fashioned aphrodisiacs. For Homo sapiens, cooking is as natural as the birds and the bees.

A Window Into the Stomach -and the Soul

So, whatever happened to Alexis St. Martin, the man whose stomach helped the world understand digestion? In 1833, more than a decade after he started working with Dr. William Beaumont, St. Martin cut ties with the medical community. The man with the transparent stomach got fed up with being a scientific freak show. When he died in 1880, at the age of 86, St. Martin’s family kept his body for four days to make sure it rotted, and then buried it in an unusually deep grave, hoping to deter any medical interest in his remains.

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The article above, a portion of the special section Shocking Moments in the History of Food written by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie, is reprinted with permission from the July-August 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ website and blog for more fun stuff!

When fantasy genre and food enthusiast Adam Bruski read the “A Game Of Thrones” novels by George R.R. Martin, he paid close attention to an aspect that i’m sure very few reading the books have even noticed-the amazing sounding recipes. So he has taken it upon himself to recreate the recipes, using only ingredients which would have been available during the Medieval period, on his cooking blog “Cooking Ice And Fire”. Bruski’s passion for food shines through in his recipes, of which there are six so far, and the fantasy food turned haute cuisine recipes range from the strange (cold egg lime soup) to the sublime (veal cutlets blanched with almond milk). With many more books and recipes to go, Adam aims to show us all what we’ve been missing while reading through the series, and how we can bring home exotic and interesting flavors from our favorite fantasy novels!

Link -via Ology

(YouTube Link)

The guys from Epic Meal Time are blowing up YouTube with their crazy food-centric comedy videos, recipes seemingly created by Paula Dean while she was on acid, and devil may care attitudes that make them a big hit with the ladies. Every recipe these guys dream up starts with trays full of bacon, and become more and more insane as another ingredient is added. This edition, entitled Sausage Fest, shows you how to make sausage out of big macs and beef sandwiches, among other crazy combinations of (often fried) food which have never been stuffed in a sausage casing before. Let Epic Meal Time show you why things get strange in the kitchen when you’re cooking drunk.

Holy crap!

As an area of the cracker cooks, it bubbles up in just a few seconds, leaving clear marks as to where there is microwave power and where there isn’t. For this particular microwave, Saturn-shaped objects will cook evenly.

Obviously what is happening is that there are two hotspots in this microwave: one in the center, and one offset from center which traces out a circle thanks to the rotating plate in the bottom.

And then, like any good scientist, she recreated the entire experiment in four other microwave ovens to see if the results could be duplicated. Link

We sell some pretty cool aprons over in the Neatoshop, including some superhero ones, but just in case we don’t have exactly what you’re looking for, check out Bethany Sew-and-Sew’s shop. Bethany makes customized aprons in superhero styles and more. She even has some Princess Peach, Mario and Alice In Wonderland ones that are simply adorable.

Link Via Craftzine

What will Catholics eat today in honor of the saint’s feast day? Some traditions call for cold cuts and other uncooked foods, in pious avoidance of anything that would too closely resemble Lawrence’s burned flesh.

But others go the opposite direction, celebrating the manner of his death with a barbecue. As Evelyn Vitz, author of A Continual Feast: A Cookbook to Celebrate the Joys of Family & Faith throughout the Christian Year explains on her blog, “We decided that serving barbecued chicken is a great way to signify his triumph over the fire.” A contributor at the Catholic Cuisine blog interprets the theme another way, with cupcakes decorated to look like grills, complete with little shish kebabs made of frosting.

Smithsonian has the story, and a list of other saints connected with cooking. Link

I know the Fourth of July is pretty much over by now, but summer sure leaves us with plenty of time for grilling and while many of us are ok with the classic dome-grills, these 15 awesome grills on WebUrbanist are certainly a lot more stylish. I’m a particularly big fan of this wall-mounted grill.

Link

BBQ Sword Cooking Fork -  $27.95

It’s your Dad against the grill! This Father’s Day arm Dad with a proper weapon. Get him the BBQ Sword Cooking Fork from the NeatoShop!  Now Dad can burn steaks in swashbuckling style.

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more fabulous Cooking Gadgets and Father’s Day Gifts!

I don’t know about you guys, but I have a soft spot for seriously strange and seriously niche blogs. Paula Deen Riding Things is one of those blogs.The name says it all. The entire site consists of images of Paula Deen riding on things. Enjoy.

Link

Pi Day, March 14, is long gone, but Serious Eats has only now released the winners of their Pie Day Contest. The one above won first place, but I love the Pi Within A Pie.

Link

A couple of years ago my parents moved in with us to help take care of our daughters as my husband and I juggled two stressful careers.  My dad likes simple food and struggles with some of my more adventurous meals.  This year, at Father’s day I made him his favorite dinner of hamburgers and pork and beans.  That’s when inspiration hit – could I take the beloved burger and make it the vehicle for introducing my dad to new flavors?  Indeed, looks like I can!

So, here’s the goal…create one burger recipe for every country in the world.

Monach is not trying to recreate the hamburgers of the world, but trying to put the flavors of the world’s traditional cuisines into each hamburger meal. She’s got several nations covered so far, all beginning with A. Link -via Metafilter

Modernist Cuisine

Take the book’s hamburger. Prepping the lettuce and tomato requires a vacuum sealer. The cheese is restructured—heated with ingredients like carrageenan and cooled in a mold—for a gooier texture. And making the burger itself requires hand-grinding the beef and using half-cylinder molds to catch the strands and gently form the patties.

Get a closer look at the burger at the Wall Street Journal’s interactive feature. Link to article. Link to hamburger. -via Nag on the Lake

Amy from Very Culinary made a trailer for her site that mirrors the Inception trailer exactly, except that it’s about cooking. She also posted a shot-by-shot comparison in case you want to see how closely the two trailers match. Link -via The Daily What

Researchers found grains from numerous plants, including a type of wild grass, as well as traces of roots and tubers, trapped in plaque buildup on fossilized Neanderthal teeth unearthed in northern Europe and Iraq.

Many of the particles “had undergone physical changes that matched experimentally-cooked starch grains, suggesting that Neanderthals controlled fire much like early modern humans,” PNAS said in a statement.

Stone artifacts have not provided evidence that Neanderthals used tools to grind plants, suggesting they did not practice agriculture, but the new research indicates they cooked and prepared plants for eating, it said.

Link -via J-Walk Blog

My mom doesn’t accept much help in the kitchen, holidays or Mondays—not because she doesn’t trust others to get it right, but because she just doesn’t know how to slow down. Never did. And accept help? She’s as likely to do that as she is to ask for it; i.e., not at all. She reminds me of the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, who systematically gets his appendages hacked off in battle but still won’t call it a day. Make no mistake, having grown up as one of five girls in an inner-city, working-class home, I’m no stranger to hard work. But there was never a time when we did more work than she did. Ever. Even at 83, I’m not sure it’s even possible to outwork my mom. As she’s aged, all we can manage is guerrilla warfare.

My mother and grandmother helped me learn the family recipes as soon as I was old enough to be interested, and I’ve been hosting the family feast for quite a few years now. Now if I could only get my children interested… How about your family? Link

I hope I’m not the only person on the planet who cannot understand why dining at one’s home or apartment has to be so complicated. Personally, my favorite meal situation is when I am sitting on a large boulder near timberline looking at chipmunks and pine trees, while eating a sandwich, an orange and a candy bar. The flat part of the boulder makes for an adequate table. That is my idea of dining “out”.

The act and process of preparing food, dining, and then cleaning up seems to entail too much work and too much equipment, like it was designed for the needs of a regiment of soldiers, or for a family on a large country estate in England which employs kitchen servants.  Typically, a standard kitchen with cupboards, drawers and refrigerator includes redundant and special-purpose items. There are large knives, small knives, large-size stainlessware items for serving food, small spoons, forks and knives for personal dinnerware, tiny stainlessware for olives or cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving dinners; there are various sizes and shapes of pots and dishes, microwavable containers and refrigerator storage containers; there are table mats and napkins; there are scouring pads, sink drain cleaning chemicals, dishwasher and/or dishwashing soap, sponges (ranging in texture from smooth to multi-surfaced artificial pads for coarse scrubbing), metal polish, stainless steal pan cleaners, sink scrubbing powders or bricks, dishwashing gloves, storage racks, bins, drawers and cupboards. And there is food: Condiments, mayonnaise, salad dressing, olive oil, vinegar, jams, jellies, frozen foods, canned foods, microwaveable foods, fresh fruit, dried fruit, milk, diet drinks, cereals of many types, coffee or tea, alcoholic beverages.

There is often wine or beer to help deal with the stress of dining.

At times, I have wondered whether food itself should be made simpler. In a gag, comedian Steve Martin once referred to an imaginary uni-food, a single substance that is all one would eat day and night, year after year. The simplicity of such an idea appeals to me. Above, I have depicted a future dining event involving seniors who eat either refurbished or uni-substance foods.

But seriously, I would be happier if the process of eating and cleaning up after a meal required as few steps as possible. Eating is, after all, simply a body function necessary for its maintenance.  If I could don some type of hat and suit that fed me, wiped my mouth, caught my crumbs and drools, I imagine I would be happy. Or, instead of having a dining suit, I would be happy having an automatic one-stop dining machine.

The illustration above shows a reasonably elegant, civilized-looking dining setup that simplifies at least some of the steps. The machine seats four.  It requires no more effort than tipping up the metal dining table – which doubles as a dish washing machine lid – when the meal is done. For this particular design to work, the dishware bottoms need magnets. I would want to study the effects of magnetism on food before I felt comfortable manufacturing and marketing my Easy-Tip Dishwashing Dining machine. What is the effect of strong magnets on food quality? Are the electrons rearranged, and if so in a good or bad way? I know for example that there are health claims made for products that enhance the quality of water when a water bottle is placed on a magnetic tray, or encircled by a flexible magnetic strip.

I have tried to think up different types of dining machines. This one, dubbed The Lonely Diner, conveniently co-locates many functions within a small space. Not shown is a pull-down computer keyboard for use with the combination TV-computer LCD screen. The Lonely Diner is designed primarily for stay-at-home, socially-inept, reclusive persons.

Other designs that might serve to integrate dining and dishwashing functions are shown above. The Kitchen Counterpart serves two individuals who eat off metal trays. When done, food scraps are tossed into a tabletop disposal, and the metal trays are folded up and slid inside the washing machine. The Tabletop Kitchen is a simpler, semi-portable design that can be placed anywhere in the kitchen. Grouped together and attached to this small appliance are water and drain hoses as well as TV, Ethernet and electric cables.

Making daily tasks more convenient is the primary criteria for many of my design efforts. The RotoTask Table Top and RotoTask Jr. are perfectly suited to the reality of lives increasingly full of distractions, which require constant tracking, juggling and multi-tasking. Often the act of eating is something we try to “fit into” our busy schedules if there is time. On the left, the tabletop rotates around a central hub containing a small dishwashing machine. Having the RotoTask appliance at home, a person can sit in one place all day, not having to search far for dishes, pans, pots, water, food, flowers, data, printer paper, pens or paper clips: everything is at hand!

Though the possibilities for various kinds of dining machines fascinate me, I need to consider that many families require a full kitchen and dining area that can serve multiple family members and friends. Moreover, most people have become dependent on and addicted to the modern belief in the need for a complicated kitchen. But if the kitchen, dinette, and dining room functions are considered an essential part of  “living” then at least the kitchen itself deserves an upgrade, one that better acknowledges modern needs! Mates might enjoy each other’s company yet find they learn little new information from each other by chatting everyday, at least less than they might learn from perusing CNN.com or Neatorama.com on the Internet. A set of sliding divider panels could be incorporated into a narrow divider wall in a family dinette. It could include a sliding LCD screen for TV and Internet. If your mate’s conversation becomes painfully uninteresting, simply shut the sliding panel and go online!

Visit Steven M. Johnson at his website.

Mira Grant, author of the zombie novel Feed, shows how to make adorable braaains cupcakes for the zombies in your life.

So you’re preparing your ultimate zombie-themed dinner party, and you’re stuck for a dessert. Or you’re entertaining a zombie who’s recently gone vegetarian, and is jonesing for those good old days of gray matter and the delicious taste of human brains. Whatever your reasons, you need a brainy treat that puts the “sweet” back into “sweetmeats.”

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by jimmdare.

“Cooked food does many familiar things,” he observes. “It makes our food safer, creates rich and delicious tastes and reduces spoilage. Heating can allow us to open, cut or mash tough foods. But none of these advantages is as important as a little-appreciated aspect: cooking increases the amount of energy our bodies obtain from food.”

He continues: “The extra energy gave the first cooks biological advantages. They survived and reproduced better than before. Their genes spread. Their bodies responded by biologically adapting to cooked food, shaped by natural selection to take maximum advantage of the new diet. There were changes in anatomy, physiology, ecology, life history, psychology and society.” Put simply, Mr. Wrangham writes that eating cooked food — whether meat or plants or both —made digestion easier, and thus our guts could grow smaller. The energy that we formerly spent on digestion (and digestion requires far more energy than you might imagine) was freed up, enabling our brains, which also consume enormous amounts of energy, to grow larger. The warmth provided by fire enabled us to shed our body hair, so we could run farther and hunt more without overheating. Because we stopped eating on the spot as we foraged and instead gathered around a fire, we had to learn to socialize, and our temperaments grew calmer.

Wrangham also asserts that cooking strengthened the bonds within early hominid communities and established lasting gender roles.

Link via Choice | Photo: flickr user flowcomm, used under Creative Commons license

The 1947 Radarange was a whopping six feet tall, weighed nearly 750 pounds, and required its own 220 volt electrical line and a dedicated water line for the cooling tube. It sold for $2000, or nearly $22,000 today. Not yet an appliance for the home cook, Raytheon marketed the behemoth appliance to high-volume, quick service restaurants. Busy diners, ocean liners and hospitals all purchased their own Radaranges, cooking hamburgers and sheet cakes in less than 30 seconds.

Link -via Boing Boing

A simple but elegant solution to a common household problem: you have raw bacon, but you have no frying pan with which to cook it. You do, however, have a machine gun. All you have to do is wrap the bacon in tin foil, tie it around the barrel of your Rheinmetall MG 3, and fire off about 150 rounds (250 if you like it crispy). Step-by-step pictures at the link.

Link via Say Uncle | Photo: redditor Oelund

If you love Futurama, then you’ll certainly appreciate these adorably gross brain slug cupcakes. Just hope they don’t take over your mind after you eat them.

Flickr Link Via Craftzine

When you cook up a batch of candy, you cook sugar, water, and various other ingredients to extremely high temperatures. At these high temperatures, the sugar remains in solution, even though much of the water has boiled away. But when the candy is through cooking and begins to cool, there is more sugar in solution than is normally possible. The solution is said to be supersaturated with sugar.

Supersaturation is an unstable state. The sugar molecules will begin to crystallize back into a solid at the least provocation. Stirring or jostling of any kind can cause the sugar to begin crystallizing.

Explore the science behind cooked eggs, rising bread, preserved pickles, and more. Recipes are included. Link -via the Presurfer

Which is better, a fresh apricot or a dried apricot? The way they argue, nothing will be settled. This is just one example of a series of talking food ads to promote the Supercooks program from the British Food Standards Agency. See sausages, potatoes, nuts, and more discuss their virtues at Eat Me Daily. Link -via Everlasting Blort

Link.  Via Reddit.

Where else but in Japan do you see the ultimate combination of robot and ramen? Instead of (puny) human chefs, a restaurant in Japan has programmed industrial robots to cook the perfect bowl of ramen, each and every time with precision.

Take a look – it’s riveting!

– via gruvix

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by origen2007.

The Art of Manliness has a wonderful post on 5 classic cocktails that all men should be familiar with and how to mix them for maximum effect.

There’s been a trend lately to get back to the old way of doing things, especially when it comes to things we ingest. This trend has also entered the world of libations. Drink menus around the country are starting to have more of the old classics included on them. Many mixologists are using these cocktails as starting points for newer versions that take advantage of the plethora of products out there today. Recipe books from classic bars such as the Old Waldorf-Astoria, The Savoy, and the Stork Club are available in reprint editions for the new generation to use. And who can forget Old Mr. Boston? They’ve been printings those books since 1935 and still do to this day.

But you don’t need a recipe book to get started mixing up some of the classic cocktails men have been drinking for decades (and in some cases, more than a century). Here’s how to create the 5 classic cocktails every man should know.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by msaleem.

Pink salt from the Himalayas has been used for seasoning by chefs at fancy restaurants … and now, you can cook food directly on the slabs of the stuff!

The thick 8-by-11-inch piece of solid salt can be placed directly on a stove burner and heated gradually; it will not melt. Lightly brushed with butter or oil, it will fry eggs that come away with quite enough salt. The same goes for jumbo shrimp, fish steaks or fillets, thin slices of beef and portobello mushroom caps.

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From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Minnesotastan.

91-year old Claire shows how she cooked meals during the Great Depression.  Nothing special – potatoes and hot dogs – but her commentary does make today’s problems seem less intense. 

"I had to quit high school because we couldn’t afford socks…we couldn’t afford anything to wear."

– via consumerist

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Minnesotastan.

If only Luke Chipwalker could stop by and help unfreeze him by gulping down all of that delicious lime-loaded guacamole. (He added extra lime juice to make it thick enough to stand like that.) It took him about a day and a half to get the creation together:

The body was created using a plastic torso I found at a used mannequin/store display shop downtown. It only went down to the top of the thigh, so I had to build out the rest of his legs to the knees using molded chicken wire. The hands were tough… If I knew used male mannequin hands would be so tough to find on a whim, I would’ve used eBay. Given that I was running out of time, one hand was made using one of those articulated wooden artist’s hands you can buy at an art store, and covered it in papier mache. The other hand, not nearly as nice, was foil covered in papier mache, and had to do for now. The boots were old work boot toes I cut and epoxied to the board. [...]

Emily made the guac with 50(!) avocados, garlic, cilantro, salt, pepper, a little onion, and lots of lime. We spread it on, hoped it would stick, and, well… behold: Han Solo in Guaconite.

Link Via Al Dente

These cucumber growing molds from Japan are so fun! They would be great for bento boxes or in salads and sushi. I bet you could also use them for zucchini. I want one!

Link

“Slice an onion, separate into rings, and stack it to make a cone. Then
fill with oil and water, and get annoying restaurant patrons to lean in
really close with their cameraphones to see what percentage of their
eyebrows you can remove. Optionally, add soy sauce for lava.”

- via videosift

Viewers love him, says Portland Community Media executive director Sylvia McDaniel. The station wants to include more young people in its shows and Julian was a particularly good find, she says.

“It even has potential to be a national program,” she says. “It’s a wonderful show. We’re just thrilled. He actually understands what he’s doing. He’s not just following orders.”

Link to story (with video). Link to another episode. -Thanks, Rosalyn!

This is adorable, Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg are Bonding through mashed potatoes. My favorite part is Snoop demanding black pepper instead of white pepper.

Link Via BoingBoing