If you live for celebrity food and beverage lines, then you’ll love Mental Floss’s list of 10 Celebrity Refreshments.

Personally, I’d like to mix some of The Situation’s Devotion vodka mixed with some of Rush Limbaugh’s Two if by Tea. It might not be the most delicious drink, but the conflicting celebrity endorsements must give it a great kick.

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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

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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?

They hardly needed to put the name on the pot -just about everyone knows what they’ll be drinking from it. Link

Who knows? It might be the same restaurant where the cold drink dispensers are labeled with pictures as well.

You know what you never hear people say? “I really love the taste of whiskey, but I sure wish it didn’t get me drunk.” Yet, from the annals of incredibly stupid ideas comes ArKay, the O’Douls of whiskey.

Link Via Geekosystem

If you love Jell-O and Harry Potter, these might just be the ultimate adult party treat. The recipe sounds delicious, as it includes amaretto, vanilla ice cream, Bailey’s and chocolate liquor. If that’s not enough for you, they also have a link to a butter beer Jell-O shot recipe with cream soda and butterscotch schnapps.

Link Via Craftzine

This week, mental_floss welcomes guest quizmaster Hillary Buckholtz of the blog I’m Remembering for series of nostalgic Lunchtime Quizzes! Today you are challenged to remember bygone drinks. This coffee drinker scored miserably -only 40%. You will do better! Link

If you like chocolate, berries and booze, then  you’ll love these amazing strawberry shot glasses seen on Sweet Tooth. Instructions can be found at the link if you want to make your own delicious treats.

Link Via BuzzFeed

Link Via The Consumerist

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

Drinks

Every party has to have drinks and here are a few perfect brews for O Hallows’ Eve, including one virgin punch that is perfect for kid’s parties.

Perhaps the most beautiful Halloween cocktail is this Morphing Martini that changes colors from blue to fuchsia and has an impressive layer of fog over the top thanks to the addition of dry ice.

Alcoholic brain Jell-O is one of my own concoctions that involved the wonderful brain mold from the Neatorama shop. It’s delightfully sweet, looks creepy and the addition of Knox made it sturdy enough that guests were able to take slices from the brain a mess on their hands. If you replace the alcohol with water, this could also be a great kid-friendly dessert.

Swamp Juice is a fun, kid-friendly cocktail made with gummies, tapioca pearls, seltzer water, lemonade and some food coloring. Aside from the spooky look, the strange texture is sure to be a hit with kids too.

Appetizers

If you’re throwing a full dinner party, many of these can be repurposed as side dishes to round out your main course, but these snack-sized treats are also perfect creepy canapés.

While the potential messiness of roast tentacle au jus makes it a little intimidating for a party setting, the pure awesomeness of an alien tentacle complete with bones makes it worth buying a few party plates and forks.

For the more sophisticated monsters, these marinated mozzarella eyeballs with olive irises are both creepy looking and delicious.

These devilish eyes were actually just featured on Neatorama, but they do look awesome and would make an excellent party dish, so I couldn’t leave them out from this article.

Eyes are a particularly popular body part for these treats because they can be made from so many things. These edible zombie eyeballs are one of my favorites on the list because the sweet fruits paired with yogurt are delicious as well as gross looking.

This one may not be as spooky as the rest, but this cute spider cheese ball is a good way to sneak a traditional party favorite in. Plus, its adorability makes it perfect for kid’s parties.

Entrees

Now that you’ve selected your appetizers and sides, it’s time for the main course. These three dishes are great because they offer quite a bit of variety and each looks gross in its own, special way.

This recipe for roasted fleshworm offers instructions for making the creature in two ways, with either bacon of prosciutto. The best thing about fleshworms is the impressive level of detail you can put in them, including spiky teeth and spilling guts.

If you’re throwing a kid’s party, fleshworms might be a little too spooky, but these rats in blood provide the perfect balance of ickyness with cuteness. Best of all, most little monsters will love the basic spaghetti and meatballs recipe it takes to give birth to such creatures.

For something a little more party-friendly, but still filling, the Kentucky Fried WTF on a stick is an easy-to-eat main course that is both creepy and funny.

Desserts

If you’re like me, then dessert is probably your favorite part of any dinner party and Halloween-themes provide you ample opportunity to reward your twisted sweet tooth.

These Dexter-inspired blood slide suckers are a good treat for any party and certainly look awesome. Kids are sure to love them too, but hopefully they won’t have actually seen Dexter to get the reference.

These Frankenstien finger cookies are another great treat for non-dinner parties and for kids. The coconut cookies with almond fingernails are probably pretty delicious too.

This thorax cake is a marvel of disgusting dessert engineering. While it looks cool and is probably pretty tasty as it five flavors of cake with six different sauces, it requires a pretty advanced knowledge of baking, so if you have any reservations about trying to make it, you probably shouldn’t.

For something a little more simple that is still suitable for a sit-down dinner party, this gelatin heart is sure to impress as you cut into the juicy artery and blood starts spilling out. If presentation is everything than this dessert is certain to be the highlight of the evening.

If you are interested in reading more Halloween food ideas, be sure to check out these Mental Floss articles by Miss Cellania.

With names like “Beam Me Up Scotchie” and “Phasers on Stun Punch”, there’s no possible way to go wrong if you mix these at your next “Trekker” party… unless the borgs decide to show up of course. Then having a “successful” party is probably the last thing you’ll care about.

I don’t know which tastes best, but I love the name “Vulcan Death Grip” for a cocktail! Link

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.

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From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by msaleem.

I’ve never had fungus tea, the cloudy juice left from the fermentation process of kimchee, or fermented dandelion and burdock roots, but I would be willing to try it. Some look downright tasty, like the cinnamon aroma of Guaraná Jesus from Brazil, or the ice cream soda from Pakistan, Pakola.

Almdudler is the brand name of a popular Austrian soft drink. The original Almdudler is a sweetened carbonated beverage flavored with herbs; its flavor is similar to ginger ale or elderflower cordial but with a somewhat stronger and more complex flavor. Almdudler has been called the “national drink of Austria”. Its popularity in Austria is second only to Coca Cola; 80 million liters of the beverage are produced yearly.

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From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by notoriousnicholas.

A man stands next to a 490 liter Grande Cuvee TBA NV No.7 2005 of Austrian wine maker Kracher during its presentation Rehetobel Switzerland, some 40 km (26 miles) from lake Constance on November 28, 2007.

The bottle itself has been certified by Guinness World Records as the world’s largest bottle of wine which holds the equivalent to 640 regular bottles, or 69,000 glasses of wine. Yum!…”hic”

Who want’s wants one for Christmas?

Link: Yahoo News