RocketNews 24 has a roundup of the best works of bento. Many make great use of nori, an edible seaweed that can be cut into precise shapes, including text. Content warning: one work is pretty gory. It bleeds when you cut it.
How do you make hash browns and eggs even better? By putting one inside the other, of course. Just soft boil your egg, wrap the raw hash browns around it and then throw it all in a deep fryer. If you really want a delicious heart attack though, you might try combining this and a Scotch egg so you can have eggs, sausage and potatoes all in one easily portable snack.
Link Via Food Beast
This butter sculpture spotted at The Canadian National Exhibition is absolutely amazing. What's even more impressive though is that it made its way to the bloggosphere via Hugh Jackman's Instagram.
Link Via The Mary Sue
Like Sharknado, "Enough said!" We need creations like this in our lives. Trish dipped Eggo Minis in chocolate, then added them to ice cream sandwiches made of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.
Link -via Love from the Oven
How can you possibly say that any recipe is "the world's best"? There is no body of experts that control such titles, but a lasagna recipe submitted to AllRecipes in 2001 by John Chandler has some impressive statistics to back the claim.
Chandler is, by day, a 43-year-old salesman and father of two, a self-proclaimed “Southern boy” who lives outside Dallas and grew up on college football and barbecue. Online, Chandler’s fans know him differently: He is the creator of the World’s Best Lasagna, an artery-clogging tower of sweet Italian sausage, ground beef and ricotta cheese that has reigned as the most popular recipe on AllRecipes.com for more than a decade. It has earned 10,423 ratings and been “pinned” to Pinterest more than 25,000 times. AllRecipes estimates that 12 million people viewed it in the past five years alone.
Given the wild popularity of AllRecipes.com — it averages 20 million visits each month, according to analytics firm SimilarWeb — it’s entirely possible that Chandler’s lasagna is the most popular recipe on the English-speaking Internet.
I checked out the recipe, and found that it's not all that different from the lasagna recipe in my circa 1974 Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook, except I don't use any eggs. But when you want to make something delicious, you can't go wrong looking for a basic recipe for lasagna from the most popular recipe database on the internet. Link -via Digg
(Image credit: Heather)
It's the three B's of delicious cupcakes: banana, bourbon and bacon! Oh, and there's peanut butter too. More specifically, the cake is actually banana, the frosting is peanut butter-flavor, then there's a bourbon glaze and a piece of bacon. Best of all, thanks to How Sweet It Is, you can make your own.
The Food and Drug Administration knows from experience that if terms are not strictly defined, manufacturers will push the boundaries of regulations as far as they can. That's why commonsense words that everyone sort of knows are defined with utmost precision when it comes to food labeling. Surprisingly, this doesn't always mean the standards for food are all that strict. Just strictly-defined. For example, the word "free":
If it’s free of fat, or sugar, or salt, it doesn’t mean that not one trace of those things is to be found in it. The FDA evaluates certain terms with reference to a typical portion size known as an RACC (reference amounts customarily consumed per eating occasion). An RACC of eggnog, for example, is ½ cup. For croutons, it’s 7 grams, and for scrambled eggs, 100 grams. To be labeled “free” of calories, the food must have less than 5 per RACC. For fat and sugar, less than .5 grams. For sodium, less than 5 milligrams. Also, the food must somehow be processed to be “free” of those things in order to get the simple “free” label. You can’t have “fat free lettuce,” only “lettuce, a fat free food.”
Other words defined are "light," "natural," and "more," among others. Learn what those really mean in your food at mental_floss. Link
(Image credit: Flickr user Enokson)
Tama-Chan, an incredible sushi artist in Japan, can recreate famous images in rice, seaweed and fish. If you've ever wanted to eat a Vemeer painting without getting in trouble with the museum guards, this guy can set you up. View more photos of his work at the link.
(Photos: Nifty)
Cake Wrecks has a collection of cakes on which someone's name was just plain wrong. This one stood out to me. What do you think it was supposed to be? Surely someone didn't name their new baby Felony! The rest of the cakes are almost as funny. Link
It's the kind of thing you heard about all the time now, but back in the 1960s, a scheme to build houses out of beer bottles on a large scale was way out there. Heineken had a real plan, though, which never got far off the ground.
It was called the Heineken World Bottle (or WOBO), designed by architect John Habraken after then-CEO "Freddy" Heineken had an epiphany. While visiting the island of Curaçao, Heineken was bothered by the mass amounts of trash--including his own bottles--and the lack of housing. His solution? Make a beer bottle that could serve as a brick when it’s finished.
Habraken came up with several designs, one of which was actually manufactured, but never made it to market. Read about the design and marketing troubles for the WOBO at Fact Co Design. Link -via the Presurfer
Oh, that Hello Kitty. She's got everything: spa, jet plane, restaurant, gold business card, castle (yes, Hello Kitty castle) ... the list goes on. It's enough to drive one mad with envy.
And if you want to drown your sorrow at your comparative lack of everything when compared to Hello Kitty, then this is the perfect drink: Hello Kitty Beer.
There are six Hello Kitty beers, which come in easy-drinking fruit flavors like peach, lemon-lime, passion fruit, and banana. They have about half the alcohol content of mainstream American beers - a Budweiser runs 5 percent alcohol-by-volume, where the Hello Kitty brews range from 2.3 percent to 2.8 percent.
“The beers were introduced in Taiwan, and are now also available in China, where flavored beer is a new trend in the market,” David Marchi, senior director of brand management and marketing for Sanrio, the company that created Hello Kitty, told TODAY.com. He confirmed that Sanrio licensed the beer, brewed by the Taiwan Tsing Beer Company.
Jim Galligan of TODAY has the full story.
It was the best blockbuster of the summer and now it is one of the summer's best cakes as well. This amazing Pacific Rim cake featuring a Jaeger and the Shatterdome was created by gifted husband and wife baking team The Bunny Baker.
Link Via When Geeks Wed
Brilliant! Ann Reardon made a cake that cuts neatly into the Instagram logo with every slice. She used chocolate mousse and colored jello for the details. At the link, you can find her recipe and a video showing how she made it. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to Instagram this!
P.S. Remember that Neatorama is on Instagram!
(Photo: NariNari)
With a bit of rice and seaweed, you can make little pandas. Here's a herd of them heading down to the curry pond for a swim.
While writing this post, I discovered that there is no specific collective noun for pandas. In the comments, suggest one.
Now that the weather is finally cooling down, we probably won't be eating as many ice cream cones. Fortunately for those of us who love food in conical form, Dude Foods has developed a new and improved way to eat one of our favorite Chinese food snacks -sweet and sour chicken. The treat is made from a deep-fried won ton skin filled with rice, chicken and sweet and sour sauce.
