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I went to a restaurant last week that offered alcoholic punches served in a cookie jar. As it turns out, that's nothing compared to some of the ridiculous serving methods some hipster restaurants are resorting to.

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How do you like your ceasar salad? Without cheese with a cruton napkin ring around a head of romaine? Yeah, that's fancy.

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And plates are so 2015, wouldn't you rather eat on a shovel, mouse trap or skateboard? Yeah, the restaurant scene is getting pretty damn stupid. 

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And what is this even?

See the full list of utterly preposterous food trends over at Buzzfeed.

A food truck in Breda, Netherlands, is called Keuken van het Ongewenst Dier. That translates to Unwanted Animal Kitchen in English. They serve dishes made of animals that would have been disposed of anyway. The point is to use instead of lose, to stop wasting a potential food source. The menu might make you squirm.    

The truck boasts a one-of-a-kind menu highlighting the “wild flavor” of animals otherwise doomed to die, like old horses, pigeons, canal crayfish, and parakeets. Twice a year, it hosts a five-course “Big Pest Dinner” that might feature coot or some rats. Goose croquettes and something called Bambi Balls were also early favorites, but the big-ticket item has always been the $18 My Little Pony burger, seen up at top-left with its pink-ribbon pony flag.

That they named the burger after the cartoon is almost as perverse as the thought of eating pony when one's culture does not do that. Then you think about how, um, elderly the animals are. The real kicker is that the main source for pony meat is a chain of amusement parks. Read more about the Unwanted Animal Kitchen at Grubstreet. -Thanks, John Farrier!

(Image credit: Keuken van het Ongewenst Dier/Facebook)

We love a good ramen here at Neatorama, but one with four servings of ramen, almost 9 pounds of bean sprouts, 24 ounces of broth all coated in chili powder? That's taking things a little far. But eating something on this scale isn't just recreation, it's a challenge.

And if you can take down this big bowl of noodles and broth from The Umakara Ramen Hyouri restaurant in Tokyo, you could earn $438 -if you do it in 20 minutes. Do it in 30 and you can still walk away with an impressive $236. Of course, a challenge like this isn't without its risks and in this case, it's not just the risk of a very, very bloated belly. If you fail, you owe the restaurant $88 for this massive meal.

You can see more pictures of the crazy dish over at My Navi, but be warned the writing is all in Japanese.

Via Thrillist

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Some gingerbread houses are made to be eaten, others are made to look pretty on the table as a centerpiece, but one of the gingerbread houses pictured above might actually kill you if you eat it.

Can you guess which one? It's hard to tell, isn't it?

That's the point of this Christmas themed experiment, posted by Redditor Mmnking to see if people can tell the difference between a gingerbread house made of candy and one made with pharmaceutical medicines:

A little bit of backstory - a friend of my mum works in a poisons department at a children's hospital in Sydney. She made this, to be blown up into a poster, but didn't have a good camera other than her phone. She rang up, and I took the photos for her with a nice DSLR. I thought it was pretty interesting, as a ridiculous number of the people I asked couldn't tell which was which, so I figured I'd share it here.

So which one is the killer treat? If you guessed the one on the left you're right! Now imagine how hard it would be for a child to tell the difference between the two...

-Via The Daily What

Guy Fieri rubs a lot of people (myself included) the wrong way, but the fact remains that he has some truly die-hard fans who follow Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives everywhere. And it's those fans that make it so worthwhile for restaurants to appear on his show despite the fact that it requires them to close down shop for days and make any and all food items available at the host's requests. While Fieri might seem obnoxious on the show, he's actually more muted and likable in person and his rabid friends flock to restaurants seen on the show making them tourist destinations for years to come.

Read more details about what it's like to work with Fieri on Thrillist.

Christine McConnell spent around 250 hours building this beautiful gingerbread castle for Food.com. Every part of it (with the exception of the lights) is edible, meaning there are no plastic or wooden supports inside. I imagine the supports are made of sturdier-than-usual gingerbread or chocolate. Even the window glass is made of sugar!   



See pictures of the build process and closeups of the details at imgur. -via Boing Boing

Also see previous projects from Christine McConnell.

Anthony Bourdain is the loud, foul-mouthed chef you either love or love-to-hate, but did you know he was a published mystery novelist long before he wrote Kitchen Confidential? Or that writing runs in his blood as his mother was a copy editor at the New York Times? 

Of course, it's not his writing that really made Bourdain what he is -it's his abrassive, aggressive personality and in that way, it's hardly surprising that he once considered it a fireable offense to listen to or even enjoy Billy Joel in his presence. 

Learn more about the chef with attitude over at Thrillist

There are plenty of awful videos on YouTube which you can use to torture your eyeballs and scar your brain, but why would you want to watch such horrible things?

Instead, expose your eyeballs to the wonderful world of factory food processing videos, where you'll witness massive machines turn normal shaped food into paste, but that's not all!

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These videos also feature funky synth jazz tunes, which are the perfect soundtrack for that food factory life and therefore helps them sell machines to food factory processing engineers.

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Slate's Shon Arieh-Lerer shared his strange obsession with factory food processing videos on YouTube with the world, and now it feels like season one of How It's Made all over again! 

See more from Take a Trip Down YouTube's Strangest And Most Satisfying Rabbit Hole here

I gave one of my daughters her first taste of eggnog (store-bought) when she was maybe seven years old. She sipped it and said, "Oh Mom, that's disgusting. Why did you give me that?" I thought, "sez the kid who eats sardines in mustard sauce." That's eggnog for you; people either love it or hate it. Eggnog is a real American drink, from our colonial history when milk, eggs, and rum were  plentiful here compared to Europe. The real pull was that the original drink had more alcohol than milk or cream, which conveniently preserved the milk and eggs. We've refined our recipes considerably since then, and egg nog connoisseurs agree that homemade is better than store-bought. Uproxx has three different recipes for your holiday eggnog, including George Washington's popular recipe that produced the drink by the gallon.

Throwing a going-away party for an employee who quit is a nice gesture. Getting a cake specially decorated is even nicer. But those cakes don't always have nice things to say. Yeah, it's all in fun, because if the quitter's colleagues were really angry, they'd throw a party and not bother to invite him. Take a look at 30 clever going away cakes that range from sweet and sentimental (those are in the minority) to rude to bordering on vicious. Some contain NSFW icing text. -via Pleated-Jeans

There is no gift more personal or thoughtful than a gift basket, but they can also come off as a bunch of junk you threw together at the last minute because you couldn't be bothered to buy a real gift.

However, the junky factor can be avoided by thinking about what the recipient likes, what you can make that won't look like crap, and how much the recipient cares about overall presentation.

Guys are less likely to give or receive gift baskets during the holidays, but if the baskets contained cool stuff for barbecuing, like a homemade rub and sauce and some special tools, they'd get the gift basket appeal.

And speaking of appeal- orange-cardamom marmalade. It's a yummy treat that's pretty easy to make, and it adds that homemade wow factor to any basket you put together.

But what if you're hopeless in the kitchen? You should consider giving a themed gift basket that contains cooking utensils and other kitchen stuff, soaps and stuff for the bathroom, etc.

The recipient will still appreciate and applaud the effort, and you won't have to worry about your lack of cooking skills making your basket look subpar.

See 11 Ideas For DIY Gift Baskets That Make Great Christmas Gifts here

What's better than a twenty peice chicken nuggets? How about one jumbo nugget that takes two hands to hold? This video shows two different methods to make your McNugget dream a reality -though one is clearly better than the other.

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Of course, the problem with having a nugget this big is that your dipping sauce options are limited and I doubt most McDonalds will give you twenty sweet and sour sauces to pour into a large bowl for dippping.

Via That's Nerdalicious

Fruit always looks delicious even if it's sliced, chopped, crushed or otherwise mangled, and watching someone cut a piece of fruit tends to make my mouth water.

But it turns out color has a lot to do with produce appeal, and when a piece of fruit is sliced open to reveal flesh that's a different color than expected it triggers our WTF response rather than our salivary glands.

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This video by Mathieu Stern and UV photographer Pierre-Louis Ferrer shows what the inside of our favorite fruit looks like when viewed under UV light. Here's how it was made:

For this UV video, the subject is illuminated directly by UV emitting lamps . UV filter is placed on the lens, which allows ultraviolet light to pass and which absorbs or blocks all visible and infrared light. UV filters are made from special colored glass and may be coated or sandwiched with other filter glass to aid in blocking unwanted wavelengths.

-Via Laughing Squid

A burger bun pumped full of cheese sounds like heaven, but when you see it launch the cheesy goo in a stream that looks disturbingly pimple-ish way, it may just change your mind. 

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The burger, created by RawMaterialNYC is totally dividing audiences, with some mesmorized with the delicious cheesy filling -and others utterly disgusted with the zit-like visual that happens whenever someone bursts that bun open. What do you guys think? Nasty or nice?

Via Incredible Things

Tye Lombardi is a writer for the SyFy channel zombie show Z Nation. She also shows that wicked sense of humor as she blogs about food "from the Devil's Kitchen" at The Necro Nom-Nom-Nomicon. For Thanksgiving this year, Lombardi prepared a dinner that you'll be glad you didn't see before you feasted with the family. It's a turkey with a chestburster! The Alien critter is a pork loin wrapped in prosciutto with spaghetti teeth. She finished it off with a wash of cranberry sauce for the blood, and served it with green gravy. Relatives assured Lombardi that it was delicious, and that she'd never host the family Thanksgiving feast again. See the step-by-step process of making this turkey at her site. -via io9