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
Preparing food is probably a mere child’s play for master chef Julia Child, so here’s something a little more challenging: cooking up a batch of primordial soup.
This delightful video of Julia Child in her kitchen boiling up a batch of primordial soup was made for the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum and shown in Life in The Universe gallery from 1976 until the exhibit closed.
This brain cake looks terrifying, but the process to create it is pretty cool. The brain folds are simply made of frosting and the blood is only food coloring. I think a simple way to make things even more delicious would be to used a raspberry puree in place of food coloring.
The picture above sure looks like a minuscule watermelon doesn’t it? Just imagine biting into it, skin and all, to discover it is entirely tomato-y though. That’s because the adorable creation is actually made from a green zebra tomato shell filled with tomato gel and topped with black sesame seeds. It might not be the most productive way to spend your time, but the effect is certainly fascinating.
Someone alert This Is Why You’re Fat, because this sexy dessert certainly will help you pack on the calories…but oh man does it look delightful. I must admit, if I were to choose the next food trend after bacon, I’d totally chose s’mores –although s’mores with maple bacon would be good even with the current food trend.
What would you guys choose for the next food trend?
Here comes October, which means it’s close to pumpkin carving time. But if you’re reluctant to let go of summer, head on over to Takashi Itoh’s and check out some wonderful watermelon carvings. Takashi says it only took him three weeks to become skilled at it.
People love watching unbelievably intricate contraptions designed to perform simple tasks. Days to design and build, a minute or two to use (depending on how many times something goes wrong), and possible YouTube stardom are involved. Eat Me Daily has collected videos of ten Rube Goldberg contraptions that use food, make food, or deliver food. Link -via Metafilter
These visually striking eggs are produced by hard-boiling an egg, cracking the shell, and then steeping the egg in a flavored tea or broth. The batik-like marbling effect is more prominent when teas with high levels of tannin are used; the duration of the second boiling will influence both the color of the marbling and the degree to which the tea or broth flavor penetrates the egg.
These flags made out of food were created to promote the Sydney International Food Festival. Each national flag is illustrated with food associated with that country: Greece has black olives, India features curry, South Korea has kimbap, etc. Guess which country is represented by the flag pictured. Link -via b3ta
London’s Borough Market, which specializes in fresh gourmet food, held a banquet for 500 in which all the ingredients for the featured dishes were scrounged from what supermarkets throw out!
This bin banquet was staged to highlight the scandalous amount of food waste in the UK. Each year, we throw away 20million tonnes of food.
Every day, that equates to nearly three million tomatoes, five million potatoes, 4.5million apples, seven million slices of bread and one million sausages.
What we demonstrated was that so much of what we discard is, in fact, perfectly safe to eat.
No one got ill; no one said anything about the food tasting anything but 100 per cent fresh.
But a lot of people got angry when we reeled off the figures about how much we waste, and the fact that each family in Britain throws away more than £400 worth of perfectly edible food a year.
You’ve seen square watermelon and even heart shaped cucumbers, but Buddha pears? They are made with a cool plastic mold that is attached while they are still little. I’d love to say more about them, but I don’t speak Spanish Portuguese, so I can’t read the original site. Any of you Neatorama readers care to help translate?
The food we eat – from corn to cattle – has been domestically modified for thousands of years. Today scientists, agronomists and geneticistsare taking the next step: improving our food from the inside out.
Allergic to tomatoes? It’s more likely than you think – up to 16 percent of people are sensitive to tomatoes, adding extra complications to life in a world of free-flowing ketchup, tomato sauce and burgers with the works. It’s not tomatoes themselves that are at fault, it’s a small protein called Profilin. By silencing two genes responsible for Profilin production in tomatoes, scientists can create non-allergenic fruit that are otherwise completely normal in taste, texture and appearance.
Throughout history, intrepid adventurers and successful armies of conquest
have marched on their stomachs. The wagon trains and cattle drives that
opened the American frontier would have stalled without Cookie and his
chuck wagon. Camp cooks have always ruled their little kingdoms, be they
isolated lumber camps, mine operations, or construction projects.
All of which NASA researchers took into consideration as they prepared
to breach the frontiers of space.
MERCURY POISONING?
Unfortunately
for the early Mercury astronauts, Buck Rogers and Isaac Asimov had more
influence on their meals than Martha Stewart might have.
The menu consisted of unidentified snacks: cubes textured like dog biscuits,
freeze-dried powders as appetizing as Mojave Desert dust, and tubes of
glutinous matter resembling toothpaste but not nearly as flavorful. The
cubes crumbled, the powders wouldn't dissolve, and those tubes - they
were the first to go. Fit fare for Martians, maybe, but not for humans.
Gemini
astronauts had it better. Packaging improved. The ever-adventurous food
scientists at NASA now dared to identify the food for their astronauts
- for example, shrimp, chicken, applesauce.
This was one step for mankind, but still a long way from the real thing.
Maybe that's why astronaut John Young smuggled a corned beef sandwich
aboard a Gemini flight in 1965. Gus Grissom ate it, but Young was officially
reprimanded (the first astronaut to be reprimanded for anything).
THE AGE OF TANG
Tang ad from 1971
Grissom may have washed down that sandwich with a swig of Tang. Pillsbury/General
Foods had been trying unsuccessfully to foist the powdered orange drink
on a highly suspecting public for three years. But once Tang qualified
for the space program, sales shot up. Everybody wanted to try the "drink
of the astronauts."
THE END OF HIGH-FLYING HASH
As the Apollo program went into orbit, NASA's faith in the skills of
their astronauts improved. This time it actually provided them with spoons
- another leap forward. But special containers had to be designed to overcome
the near-weightlessness of the cabin. Nobody wanted their pea soup stuck
to the ceiling any more than they wanted to have to chase after shrimp
that had floated off their dinner tray. Another boon was hot water to
rehydrate those powders; that meant fewer lumps and better flavor. Still,
no one in orbit was getting fat.
PLEASE PASS THE POTATOES
Skylab food heating and serving tray with food, drink, and utensils. The
tray contained heating elements for preparing the individual food packets.
(Photo: NASA)
Skylab, launched in 1973, changed everything - it had an actual dining
area, with a table and chairs (that diners had to strap themselves to).
Utensils now included not only a knife, fork, and spoon, but also a pair
of scissors for opening food packets. A refrigerator and a freezer completed
the homelike atmosphere. With things looking up on the equipment side,
the food side got better, too. Astronauts could now select from 72 items.
They seemed to have everything but a maître d' and a decent wine
list.
EATING LIKE EARTHLINGS
Given the confined dining space, an astronaut's food choices were more
contingent on the development of packaging, preparation, and serving equipment
than on available foods. The concoctions were already available. Earthbound,
we've got egg substitutes, hamburger extenders, chocolate bars without
cocoa, artificially flavored and colored fruit, and so on. In space, so
do the astronauts - but they've had to wait for suitable packaging.
PACKAGING THE MOVABLE FEAST
Food preparation aboard the space shuttle STS-4 in 1982 [YouTube
Link]
Space shuttle meals limit each astronaut to one pound of packaging waste
daily, a day's food supply having a gross weight of 3.8 pounds, including
snacks (this means that more than 25 percent of a meal package is meant
to be thrown away - and if you think that's a lot, have a look at almost
any frozen dinner available to us nonastronauts).
Months ahead of a flight, astronauts plan their own meal. Engineers review
their choices to make sure they won't weigh too much (the meals, not the
astronauts). Then nutritionists review the menus to ensure the shuttle
won't be harboring a junk food addict or a budding anorexic. Too much
packaging and too much waste food (what we Earthlings call leftovers)
could screw up the garbage compactor. Just prior to the flight, the food
packages are individually color-coded and stored in the shuttle galley.
A MEAL THAT STICKS TO YOUR ... TABLE
To an astronaut, the single most important technological advance for
space flight wasn't all-purpose duct tape or crazy glue, it was Velcro.
The individual packages containing a full meal could be Velcroed to a
tray and all opened at the same time. Previously, packages had to be opened
one at a time and consumed before the next was opened. Otherwise, the
first package could float away while the astronaut snipped at the top
of another. Shuttle crews can now have a full-course hot meal reconstituted
in a recognizable form and on a dinner tray within 35 minutes. Not bad.
KITCHEN WIZARDRY
NASA chefs were no slouches. When the tricks of conventional cookery
didn't work, they invented some of their own. Many of their offerings
were provided with varying amount of water removed from them. "Add
water and eat" or "Add water, heat, and eat" were about
the only directions astronauts needed. Breakfast was a breeze: cereal,
sugar, and powdered milk in a single pouch. Add water, and voila! It would
snap, crackle, and pop with the best of them, even if it didn't come with
a prize.
You can taste some of this handiwork in commercially available camping
and trail foods. (And we can thank NASA impetus for those small, full-panel
pull-off lids on cans - they thought of them first.)
THE LONG HAUL
Astronaut Michael Foale describes what eating in space is like [YouTube
Clip]
And all that while, NASA was gearing up to feed astronauts for prolonged
periods. THe orbiting space station has facilities to provide frozen,
refrigerated, and thermostabilized food (heat-treated to kill off the
bad stuff).
NASA had to give up its passion to just add water - the space station
couldn't generate enough - which meant that astronauts could finally eat
fresh food. Moreover, every four astronauts had their own microwave/convention
oven; no more line ups to liquefy and heat those first cups of morning
coffee.
With all these technical advances has come a quantum expansion of the
menu. Astronauts can choose from nine different cereals, some with fruits;
nine different chicken entrees; ten different vegetables; four flavors
of yogurt; regular, decaf, or Kona (excuse me!) coffee - and that's just
for starters.
The menu on space flights seem to have reached such gourmet standards
that private citizens are paying millions just for a short hop. Of course,
there's still no wine list, but when tourists can plan their own menus
months before tying on the bib - that gives NASA a lot of time to procure
the best ingredients, not to mention using the acumen of expert chefs
and the latest technology to ensure optimal quality and freshness.
CHIX IN SPACE
NASA knows that accessing remote space frontiers may require space flights
that last for years, so they've started to figure out ways to fashion
a self-contained, self-sustaining food system - shades of 2001: A
Space Odyssey, not to mention Silent Running.
The cities in space that cosmologist Stephen Hawking talks about will
require the same approach. NASA has already sent (unplanted) tomato and
mung bean seeds into orbit, as well as chicken embryos, just to find out
what effects, if any, space travel would have on them. As it turned out,
the effects were negligible. And NASA scientists have been fiddling with
hydroponics (that is, grown only in water) lettuce in space simulation
labs.
Help in this regard has come from the private sector: The tomato seeds
courtesy of H.J. Heinz, and KFC footing some of the bill for the "Chix
in Space" experiments. (We're getting kind of bored with "spacecraft
metallic" anyway: Make way for billboards in space!)
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular
books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure
yet fascinating facts.
Do you have a special connection with bacon? Can you get it to pose for you in sexy positions? The Official Bacon Contest at Mr. Baconpants might be your chance to win all kinds of glorious bacon prizes. Categories include:
Most Creative: This is a photo that shows a creative way to use bacon. Think bacon AK-47 or Waken Bacon.
Funniest: This is a photo that incorporates bacon that will make us laugh. Think Lol Cats or Fail photos.
Sexiest: This is a photo of bacon that will make us drool for two reasons. Think bacon babes.
To enter, send your photo to jmosely@mrbaconpants.com and use “photo contest” as the subject line.
Looks like America is not the only country that needs to be weary of fast food. While not many outside the US can see the appeal of
a Big Mac, people in Morocco just love the McArabia.
This new sneaky tactic of adapting global fast food chains to the local palette is happening all over the
world from squid topped Dominoes pizza in Taiwan to KFC’s vegetarian Chana Snacker, a chickpea burger topped with Thousand Island sauce, in India.
Watch out global obesity! I see a plot for a Super Size Me sequel.
Walk into a McDonald’s in Morocco and you’ll find a sandwich you can’t get anywhere else in the world: a cumin-spiced flatbread creation called the McArabia Tagine.
“Honestly it tastes Moroccan,” said Noor El Ghoumari, 34, a man who had just paid 53 dirhams, or about $6.60, for a meal with one of the ground beef sandwiches in Rabat on a recent afternoon. “This is a local McDonald’s and obviously they have to adapt.”
Fans of the book will love these delicious cupcakes. They’d be great for any kids party, but that doesn’t mean adults won’t enjoy them too.
These are texas-sized snickerdoodle cupcakes. For frosting and decorations I used chocolate ganache (Moishe), canned vanilla frosting (Max), sprinkles, store-bought gumpaste eyes, and fondant colored tinted by hand.
Someone in Australia has robbed over $10,000 worth of cucumbers in eleven separate robberies over the last three months.The latest robbery of 50 bags of pickles is the largest of the heists so far.
“The issue with the cucumber is how do you and I tell who owns a different cucumber?,” SA Police Chief Inspector Kym Zander told ABC Radio on Wednesday.
“We’re having difficulty establishing where they (the cucumbers) are going.”
What do you think? How can they track down the cucumber thief?
If you wondered how people actually made some of the cakes in the Threadcakes contest, previously featured on Neatorama, then you’ll love this time-lapse video of a Threadless tee shirt being made into a cake. The process is so detailed and so fascinating.
A sign of a tightened economy, ramen noodles are more popular than ever. Still, they can get boring after a while. From Rasmussen College, here are 50 ways to dress up ramen noodles in salads, soups, main dishes, breakfast, and even desserts. Link -via Geek Like Me
I know they’re bad for you, but some of them are so tasty! I’m talking about deep fried foods of course, and Now That’s Nifty blog has pictures of many of the most fattening and delicious deep fried treats:
All countries deep fry food, it’s an easy way to cook, and it is tasty. Of course, deep frying food is also very bad for you. It is even worse for you, when the food was unhealthy for you to begin with. Is deep fried food terribly unhealthy? Yes. Would I try most of these anyway? Yes. Below is a deluge of diabolically delicious, deep fried dishes:
Microwave dinners usually don’t look like the picture on the front of the package. In this quiz, you’ll be given a picture of what the food actually looks like. Can you tell which box the pictured food came out of? In the second part of the quiz, you select which meal is homemade and which is a microwave meal, which just proves that real food doesn’t photograph all that well, either. I scored only seven out of 15. Be warned, this is British food. Link -via b3ta
Did you know frozen peaches and peas can actually be healthier for you than fresh ones? Were you aware that Chicken McNuggets actually contain beef extract?
There’s a whole lot most of us don’t know about the foods we eat every day and HowStuffWorks is here to fill us in on some of that info. Of course, I don’t recommend reading this if you’ve just ate -particularly if you just ate canned mushrooms.
You might know beans are delicious. You may even remember all the words of the schoolyard rhyme about them, but what else do you know about the fruit? Most people take beans for granted because they seem to be such a simple side dish, but there’s a whole lot more to beans than you probably realized.
A Bean By Any Other Name
Because beans are grown all throughout the world, it’s common for certain species to have multiple names. In fact, at least 11 types of beans have four names or more and certain species like the fava bean and navy bean have over 10 names. Other names for the fava bean include broad bean, butter bean, Windsor bean, horse bean, English bean, fool, foul, ful, feve, faba, haba and habas. The navy bean is also known as Yankee bean, white pea bean, pearl haricot, Boston bean, Boston navy bean, pea bean, haricot blanc bean, small white bean, haricot bean and fagioli. You may have thought you never tried a type of bean and actually just heard one of its alternate names. Source
Beans Kick It Old School
These fruits are one of the longest plants to be cultivated by humans. Broad beans have been planted and grown since at least ancient Egypt and common beans were harvested over six thousand years ago in the Americas. Most of the beans we eat fresh come from the Americas and were first discovered by Christopher Columbus. Source
They Really Are Somewhat Magical
Or at least, magical enough to be involved in folklore. There are multiple folk tales that involve magical beans growing all the way into the clouds –the most famous of these is, of course, Jack and The Beanstalk. There is also a Grimm’s fairytale that describes a bean that laughs at the failure of others so hard that its sides actually split open. Source
They’re Often Considered Lucky
Multiple cultures associate eating or planting beans on certain days with good luck. Certain areas of Europe consider it to be lucky to plant beans on Good Friday. In Nicaragua, newly weds eat a bowl of beans for good luck. New Year’s Day involves a number of superstitions, in the Southern U.S., Malta, Brazil and Italy eating beans or lentils is considered to bring increased prosperity in the next year. Source
Attack of the Killer Beans
Certain beans, especially those that are red in color, contain harmful toxins that can only be removed through cooking. Strangely, eating these beans when they are undercooked may be more toxic than eating the beans raw. Sometimes the undercooked beans will still taste and smell fine though. The toxicity will usually not result in death, but in severe nausea and diarrhea. Source
Ever Wonder What Makes Them So ‘Musical?’
It’s widely known that beans and cabbage can make you fart. The reason is that many beans have the same sugar molecules found in cabbage. Because a certain enzyme that humans don’t have in their body is needed to digest these molecules, bacteria in the large intestine digest the sugar. This digestion produces increased gases as a byproduct. Soaking the beans in water for a few hours can help reduce this problem, so will the induction of certain other enzymes, like those found in Beano. Source
Hold the Beans Please
The followers of Pythagoras had a lot of dietary restrictions, on top of being vegetarian, they also refused to eat beans. The reason is unclear, but many people believe it was due to flatulence, while others believe it was because they look like female genitalia. The most commonly accepted reason though is that the beans and humans were said to be created from the same material. Source
If you’re more into eating circuit boards than walking on them, then this candy circuit board might be just what you sweet-toothed geeks are looking for. This one is based on an iphone circuit board.
Yummy, classy and fat free. These Jell-o jewels have real gold powder in them. They’re part of a Jell-o mold competition in Brooklyn. The cheeseburger and shishkabob ones are fantastic, along with the oyster pearls. It’s all worth a look.
This painting, commissioned by a jam and preservative maker, was painted using only the products made in their factory!
Artist Lindi Kirwin was commissioned by F. Duerr & Sons a British Jam Maker to create a work of art to raise money for charity.
Sadly seeing as not many people have ever painted with jam and mint sauce before they have no idea how long it will last, so the winner will also get a full sized canvas print just in case.
Black current jam trees, marmalade pavements, mint sauce buildings and a tartar sauce sky all feature in a mouth watering new painting set to raise funds for The New Children’s Hospital Appeal.
F. Duerr & Sons, makers of jam, marmalade, sweet spreads and condiments commissioned local artist Lindi Kirwin to capture the iconic Central Library building in Manchester using the products available from their factory.
Named ‘Manchester Preserved’, the vibrant and creative interpretation, created at Lindi’s studio in Vernon Mill, Stockport and due to be unveiled at Broadstone Mill, Stockport, is being auctioned on ebay. Duerr’s hope that the painting will raise more than £1,000 for the charity.
Summer is almost upon us, and with it, comes the strange and wonderful food festivals around the country. Cheese, watermelon… pierogi? I’m all over that one. Yum, pierogi!
Brynn Mannino of Woman’s Day has a list of 12 of the most spectacular summer food festivals in the States. Take, for instance, the Pierogi Fest in Whiting, Indiana:
Celebrate everyone’s favorite potato dumplings at the Pierogi Fest in Whiting, Indiana, beginning July 24th. What started as a way to honor the Eastern European heritage of many in the nearby communities has grown into an event that has been featured on The Food Network and in the pages of Bon Appetit magazine. Fun-filled activities include a pierogi eating contest, a pierogi toss and a polka parade! Last year’s festival even featured the “World’s Largest Pierogi,” which was made with 27 lbs of flour, 18 eggs, 58 potatoes, two gallons of water, “too much” butter and “lots o’ onions.” Total weight? 92 lbs!
Have you ever seen a neighbor’s fruit left unharvested, all those fruit wasted? Think there’s a better way? Though neighbors trading apples for plums isn’t exactly new phenomenon, the Internet is changing the way and fueling growth in the "underground economy" of trading fruit.
Kim Severson of The New York Times has an interesting article about this trend:
All over the country, the underground fruit economy is growing. At new Web sites like neighborhoodfruit.com and veggietrader.com, fruit seekers can find public mulberry patches in Pennsylvania and neighbors willing to trade blackberries in Oklahoma.
In Royal Oak, Mich., a woman investigated how to start a fruit exchange modeled after Fallen Fruit (fallenfruit.org), an arts group that designs maps of accessible fruit growing in Los Angeles neighborhoods.
In Alaska, cooks used Facebook to find willing donors of backyard rhubarb, the first dessert crop that grows after the long winter. In Columbia, S.C., university students pulled spare peaches from orchards and donated them to a local food bank.
Supporters of this movement hold two basic principles. One, it’s a shame to let fruit go to waste. And two, neighborhood fruit tastes best when it’s free.
Seriously, my arteries would need a Rooter Router if I let myself eat ever one of these that I thought were yummy (cough. ALL.). I’ve actually had the Mac ‘n’ Chese Sampler from S’MAC. Sooooo good. Next on list, the baked apple mac and cheese.
Got the blue-box blues? We thought so. That’s why we dug up the most tempting and creative recipe twists on everybody’s favorite comfort food: macaroni and cheese. Whether you like yours meaty, gourmet or even in bite-size servings, you’re sure to find something here that inspires you to think, well, outside of the box.
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People love watching unbelievably intricate contraptions designed to perform simple tasks. Days to design and build, a minute or two to use (depending on how many times something goes wrong), and possible YouTube stardom are involved. Eat Me Daily has collected videos of ten Rube Goldberg contraptions that use food, make food, or deliver food. Link -via Metafilter
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The food we eat – from corn to cattle – has been domestically modified for thousands of years. Today scientists, agronomists and geneticistsare taking the next step: improving our food from the inside out.
Unfortunately
for the early Mercury astronauts, Buck Rogers and Isaac Asimov had more
influence on their meals than Martha Stewart might have. 
Gemini
astronauts had it better. Packaging improved. The ever-adventurous food
scientists at NASA now dared to identify the food for their astronauts
- for example, shrimp, chicken, applesauce. 
A sign of a tightened economy, ramen noodles are more popular than ever. Still, they can get boring after a while. From Rasmussen College, here are 50 ways to dress up ramen noodles in salads, soups, main dishes, breakfast, and even desserts. 
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