What's more summery than watermelon? Watermelon Oreos, of course! Unlike some of the other odd Oreo flavors, Dinosaur Dracula says these ones are actually pretty good, though they taste more like watermelon Bubblicious than the actual fruit. Some people would say that's even better though.
Link Via The Consumerist
This great 8-bit Mario cake by DeviantArt user I-Am-Ginger-Pops is so delightfully true to the original game's style that I can't help but get the Mario noises and soundtracks in my head.
I got the drinks like Jabba...I got the driiiiinks like Jabba. Oh, and the cookies that look like Han Solo in carbonite. Of course, if anyone ever tells you they love this coffee break treat, you can only respond by saying, "I know."
There was once a TV commercial in which a chef was frustrated to find that the Italians did not invent spaghetti -it was supposedly the Chinese. It ended by saying at least the Italians invented ice cream. Well, that's not exactly true, either. It turns out that earliest form of ice cream was made in -you guessed it- China.
No specific person has officially been credited with inventing ice cream. Its origins date back as far as 200 B.C., when people in China created a dish of rice mixed with milk that was then frozen by being packed in snow. The Chinese King Tang of Shang is thought to have had over ninety “ice men” who mixed flour, camphor, and buffalo milk with ice. The Chinese are also credited with inventing the first “ice cream machine.” They had pots they filled with a syrupy mixture, which they then packed into a mixture of snow and salt.
But frozen dairy desserts popped up in various places over history, making it hard to pin down any one place of origin. Read about the history of ice cream at Today I Found Out. Link -via Digg
You don't have to decorate these heroically good Rice Krispie treats with Superman's shield, but I'm glad that Janine did so. Her recipe uses dark chocolate Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and dark chocolate peanut butter spread, which apparently exist.
Redditor bluesberry's mother ordered a graduation cake. She said something to the effect of "put a cap on her head." And apparently they heard that just a little wrong. Still, the finished product is a work of art! Link
It seems like a silly question, as we tend to think of spaghetti and meatballs as an Italian feast. But like many Chinese-American recipes, what we eat in the U.S. is quite different from what you'll find in the old country.
If you go to Italy, you will not find a dish called spaghetti and meatballs. And if you do, it is probably to satisfy the palate of the American tourist. So if not Italy, where does this dish come from? Meatballs in general have multiple creation stories all across the world from köttbullars in Sweden to the various köftes in Turkey. Yes, Italy has its version of meatballs called polpettes, but they differ from their American counterpart in multiple ways. They are primarily eaten as a meal itself (plain) or in soups and made with any meat from turkey to fish. Often, they are no bigger in size than golf balls; in the region of Abruzzo, they can be no bigger in size than marbles and called polpettines.
So there are meatballs in Italy. And marinara sauce. And spaghetti noodles. But combining them was a process made in America. Read about how Italians immigrants in the U.S. developed the spaghetti and meatballs we grew up on. Link
(Image credit: Flickr user Roger Ferrer Ibáñez)
Looking for poutine in all the wrong places...or, at least you are if you're looking for it outside of Canada. If you do happen to live in Canada, you have your choice of tasty poutine dishes, including this Pizza Hutt cheesy beef poutine pizza topped with mozzarella, fries, gravy, beef and tomato sauce.
Takoyaki is a Japanese variety of battered and fried octopus. There's a soda that tastes just like it. Master Blaster of Rocket News 24 tried it as well as other flavors including salted watermelon, corn potage and curry.
Do you know how many ways one can misspell "father"? The folks who submit pictures to Cake Wrecks have found quite a few, but the most common seems to be "farther." Besides the spelling, there are some examples of sad decorations in a roundup of awful Fathers Day cakes. Link
This cake by Conjurer's Kitchen is brilliant in that it not only looks totally realistic, but it also is reminiscent of the last scene from A Christmas Story, only with a swan in place of a duck, you get even more neck leading up to the head.
A fluffernutter is a sandwich consisting of marshmallow fluff and peanut butter. It's a traditional food of Massachusetts, if not the state's signature sandwich. Shannon Marie's intoxicating version blends marshmallow vodka, hazelnut liqueur and a syrup made from peanut butter, sugar and water.
Link -via Tasteologie
The Food Lab at Serious Eats looks at things you've been told about the proper way to cook a steak. Some of what you've heard is correct, but some are just myths, like "Only flip your steak once!"
The reality is that multiple flipping will not only get your steak to cook faster—up to 30% faster!—but will actually cause it to cook more evenly, as well. This is because—as food scientist and writer Harold McGee has explained—by flipping frequently, the meat on any given side will neither heat up nor cool down significantly with each turn. If you imagine that you can flip your steak infinitely fast,* then you can see that what ends up happening is that you approximate cooking the steak simultaneously from both sides, but at a gentler pace. Gentler cooking = more even cooking.
That's just one of seven myths about steak debunked, with the science behind each. Warning: reading this will make you hungry. Link
(Image credit: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt)
A generation of Americans grew up thinking that the instant drink powder Tang was developed for the space program. That isn't true, but Tang was used during John Glenn's historic Mercury flight and then during the Gemini missions, which forever linked the drink with astronauts.
But last night, during an awards show on Spike TV, Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin revealed the truth about the legendary drink by saying "Tang sucks." NPR responded with a poll in which the majority of the respondents agree (so far). The comments reveal some fondness for Tang with vodka, often called a Cosmonaut, which probably has more to do with nostalgia than taste. For those too young to remember the hype about Tang, or who have never consumed it, imagine SunnyD without the 5% orange juice or the water.
Link -via reddit
