Stupid Table Manners

Posted by Alex in Food & Drinks on August 21, 2009 at 1:42 am

If you think about it, table manners are just one of the ways The Man has got us under his thumb. Separate forks for salad, fish, oyster and dinner? It’s oppression, I tell you.

Our BFF BuzzFeed is revolting against some of the stupidest table manners today and have provided means for us regular Joes to resist being civilized:

1. Multiple Forks
Oppressive rule: You sit down at a fancy restaurant and are immediately faced with a vast array of forks.

Resistance solution: Side-step the utensils. God gave you hands for a reason.

2. Eating Soup With A Spoon
Oppressive rule: Despite the fact that soup is a liquid, we’re forced to ladle in out in painfully small increments, always with the threat of spillage.

Resistance solution: Use a straw if it’s thin broth; lift the bowl and DRINK DIRECTLY FROM THE BOWL if it’s anything hearty.

Miss Manners is surely horrified: Link – Thanks Matt!

 
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Neatorama Shop » Food & Drink » Offbeat Mints & Candies

Waiter, There's a Hawk in My Soup!

Posted by Alex in Animal on June 19, 2009 at 4:22 am

David William of And I Am Not Lying For Real blog was having a nice lunch when a hawk flew into where he was eating and landed on his food:

I was sitting at a window seat next to the open door, and my food had just been brought out. I looked down to see this guy (or gal – I don’t know hawks) just standing in the doorway, looking back and forth. After surveying the place for a few seconds, it flapped its way in and up onto one of the empty tables. [...]

The hawk just sat there for a little while, getting jerk BBQ sauce all over its talons and looking all emo, until it was spooked by the restaurant’s delivery guy walking in, whereupon it shot past all of us into the kitchen.
The counter guy, the delivery guy and I heard a few pots clanging as we debated calling animal control versus just trying to shoo it back out the door, when one of the cooks who was back there caught the hawk with his bare hands, and walked it back outside.

“What restaurant was this?”

I am so glad that you asked.

The place is called, I kid you not… “BIRDIE’S”.

Link

 
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The Sumo Soup

Posted by Alex in Food & Drinks, Sports on December 28, 2008 at 2:16 pm

Just how do sumo wrestlers bulk up for their sport? Turns out, it’s by eating soup!

Here’s a neat article by Tania Kadokura of Saveur magazine about chanko-nabe, a hearty, protein-rich one-pot meal that has been the staple of sumo warriors for over a century:

Today’s wrestlers train and live at heya (stables) run by former sumo champions, where everything from their grooming to their diet is carefully controlled. Because strength and size are factors key to success in sumo, what and how much a wrestler eats are of particular importance. No wonder, then, that the staple dish of the sumo world is a hearty, filling one-pot meal, consisting of broth, vegetables, and meat or seafood, called nabemono, or nabe for short. (Nabe, pronounced nah-bay, means pot; nabemono means things in a pot.) The dish likely dates to the Jomons, who inhabited Japan a dozen millennia ago. The inventors of pottery, they were apparently the first people to cook food in pots.

When nabe is prepared by sumo wrestlers, it’s called chanko-nabe, a name whose origin is unclear – although since chan means father and ko means child, some believe the term refers to a stable , master and his apprentices. The tradition of sumo wrestlers’ eating nabe supposedly began in the early 1900s, when star wrestler ~ turned stable master Hitachiyama ~ (sumo wrestlers traditionally go by a single ring name) made a batch for his charges one day. He quickly realized that the meal ~ usually cooked over a gas burner set on the table with diners gathered around-was not only nutritious and inexpensive but also easy to prepare and eaten in a way that reinforced the communal aspect of the stable. It wasn’t long before other stable masters were serving chanko-nabe, too.

Link – via grow-a-brain

(Photo: Christopher Hirsheimer)

 
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