What do you get when you combine your love for biking and coffee? Product
designers Amos Reid and Lasse Oiva did just that to create a mobile espresso
bar named the "Velopresso."
The duo designed the custom trike from the grounds up with environmental
sustainability in mind. The Velopresso has sports a pedal-driven grinder
and a gas-fired espresso machine. No electricity, no motors, no noise
(except for the noise of the coffee beans being ground). Plus, it's a
gorgeous work of engineering and art!
It's just two more weeks until the Super Bowl! Beth Jackson Klosterboer has some great treats for the football fans in her house. She made these fritters by grating zucchini, potato, carrot and onion together, then shaping the mixture with a football-shaped cookie cutter. You can find her recipe at the link.
If you've ever wanted to eat a Wookie, here's your chance! Jill of Kitchen Fun with My Three Sons has spent the past week making s'more pops that look like characters from Star Wars. Click through the gallery to see them all. At the link, you can find instructions on how to make your own.
A chocolate omelet? Why, sure! There's nothing about eggs that says they have to be paired with bacon, ham, or cheese. And what's in your chocolate cake and cookies? Eggs and chocolate. But unlike a chocolate cake, this recipe is gluten free! It was designed as a sweet breakfast for people on gluten-free diets, but anyone can enjoy it. Make your own with the recipe from Living Gluten Free in San Diego. Link
Reed Rothchild came up with a recipe to combine "the three the things that are most important in my life, bacon, steak, and tacos." The Steako is a taco that uses a steak instead of a taco shell. And not just any steak -one with bacon weaved through it. The filling has both ground beef and bacon in it, and everything is cooked in bacon grease. Add butter, sour cream, cheese, and salsa and you have a real heart attack special! See the process of making this carnivore's delight at Cooking with Reed. Link -via Foodbeast
In his laboratory, Nick of DudeFoods has been experimenting with BacoBurger, a combination of ground beef and ground bacon. He's used it to make this: the Breakfast BacoBurger. To make you're own, you'll need a waffle iron and a frying pan. Nick writes:
It sort of reminded me of the McGriddles that you can get at McDonald’s, except for the fact that BacoBurger patties are 100 times better tasting than the sausage at McDonald’s.
Emmylou Cakehead organized an all-cake promotion for the DVD release of the movie The Helpers. The pictures you are about to see recreate a grisly murder scene -all done in edible cake (well, a few items are cookies). The fairly innocuous photo above may look like Chinese takeout, but it's all cake, made by Nevie Pie.
Nevie Pie also made the pizza, which is a cookie. The rest are on the next page, if you care to delve into the more explicit parts of the murder scene. The details of the cakes are incredible, but be warned that the effect is pretty gory. Look at your own risk.
Bee Wilson wrote Consider the Fork, a history of the technology of cooking and eating. The way we prepare and consume food has greatly changed over time and those changes have had an impact on the human body. For example, one anthropologist thinks that using the knife and fork to eat food leads to an overbite:
Until around 250 years ago in the West, archaeological evidence suggests that most human beings had an edge-to-edge bite, similar to apes. In other words, our teeth were aligned liked a guillotine, with the top layer clashing against the bottom layer. Then, quite suddenly, this alignment of the jaw changed: We developed an overbite, which is still normal today. The top layer of teeth fits over the bottom layer like a lid on a box.
This change is far too recent for any evolutionary explanation. Rather, it seems to be a question of usage. An American anthropologist, C. Loring Brace, put forward the thesis that the overbite results from the way we use cutlery, from childhood onwards.
What changed 250 years ago was the adoption of the knife and fork, which meant that we were cutting chewy food into small morsels before eating it. Previously, when eating something chewy such as meat, crusty bread or hard cheese, it would have been clamped between the jaws, then sliced with a knife or ripped with a hand -- a style of eating Professor Brace has called "stuff-and-cut."
It looks like a football, but it's an egg. But it's not an egg, it's just an eggshell (although one that resembles a football) that has chocolate cake inside. Got it? Pull off this project, and the response at your Super Bowl party will surely be, "Oh, you went to a lot of trouble for these, didn't you?" Yes, indeed. Get complete directions to make your own at The Cupcake Project. Link -via Laughing Squid
Scouting New York reports on the difficulty of pleasing movie and TV directors by finding them the Chinese restaurant they want to film in. It must look exotic, with red wallpaper and lots of dragons and intricately-carved furniture. After all, they've seen that Chinatown restaurant in lots of other movies! The problem is, they are looking for the restaurant decor of the early 20th century.
But those days are gone. Chinese restaurants don’t need crazy decor anymore to convince New Yorkers that the cuisine is worthwhile. And while I really wish just one holdover from the 1940s or 1950s had survived into the modern age as a historical relic, they’re kaput, and no amount of scouting will bring them back.
So the Chinatown restaurants you see on film are usually built on sound stages. You can see plenty of those screenshots, plus what actual New York restaurants look like, and a couple of vintage interiors that no longer exist, at Scouting New York. Link -via Digg
We've told you about Sarah Illenberger's food art before
on Neatorama, but the German artist has new ones for her art series
aptly titled "Strange Fruits."
Poutine--it's the national dish of Canada! There are three basic ingredients: cheese curd, beef gravy and potato fries. Despite the great difficulty of finding cheese curd in Texas, I made it once. My mouth was in ecstasy. If you haven't tried poutine yet, you must.
But that's just basic poutine. There's also poutine pizza (pictured above), ice cream poutine, foie gras poutine, Guinness beer poutine, deep fried poutine and more! You can view 38 different kinds at the link.
At Mike's Amazing Cakes they make some amazing cakes. You need proof? Just look at the amazing storm trooper cake above! I don't know which is better, this cake or the life-size storm trooper cake from last year. They are both pretty great, but the life-size one got to be eaten by 600 fans at a later date. Just saying Mike's Amazing Cakes, who is going to eat that cake?
Beautiful Existence, a woman from Seattle, is going to eat and drink Starbucks for a year. Only Starbucks. I know what you may be thinking- is her name really Beautiful Existence, why Starbucks, why this challenge? Well I can tell you it is not a ludicrous marketing ploy and that she answers all this on her website, 1 Year of My Life.
Beautiful Existence? Is that your real name? The answer is YES, it is my real name.
So again, WHY? am I doing this challenge? Or WHY? will I do any challenge in the future? Because I LOVE being human and I LOVE the privilege of being able to ask the question WHY? in the first place! I love the question WHY? because sometimes I find that the answer leaves me with even more questions about life… and then, my circle starts all over again and I wouldn’t want my WHY? any other way.
She does a challenge every year, from living the Goodwill life to testing Parents Magazine on her real life family. Now the goal isn't to lose weight, just to complete the challenge, but so far she has already lost 3 pounds on the Starbucks diet and she is only two weeks in. Then again, she spends on average $18.79 dollars a day on food and drink. According to the USDA, women spend on average around $3,000 a year on groceries- if her current average holds she will spend just under $7,000. Well that just happens to be the price you pay to be cool- and to eat and drink Starbucks for an entire year apparently.
Good looks and charm are one thing, but if you want to be a real hot tamale, you'd better smell like one and Etsy seller TamaleZoilsChicago can help with their tamale perfume. The real question now is how do you choose between smelling like a tamale or a pizza?
