You know that Chinese immigration to the US exploded during the California Gold Rush and the building of the Transcontinental Railroad. There were fortunes to be made, if not in the industries themselves, then in providing services to settlers of the frontier. Chinese restaurants fed San Francisco from the beginning, so why is the oldest continuously operating Chinese restaurant in the United States in Montana, of all places?

If it seems strange that the nation’s oldest functioning Chinese restaurant is in Montana, chalk it up to 19th century immigration patterns. Between 1850 and 1900, around 250,000 Chinese people came to the United States. Many of them were fleeing political strife, poverty, and famine; others were lured by the 1849 Gold Rush. Montana Territory was a mining mecca, and thousands of Chinese immigrants flocked there looking for work. By 1870, nearly 10 percent of Montana’s population was Chinese-American.

Eventually, gold reserves dwindled and animosity from white miners grew, so Chinese immigrants then found new jobs building America’s first transcontinental railroad. Once the railroad was completed in 1869, they gained new livelihoods as entrepreneurs, founding small businesses like laundries, groceries, farms, and—yes—Chinese-American restaurants.

The Pekin Noodle Parlor has been serving Butte, Montana, since 1911, and is run by family members of original founder. And they still serve the same dishes they started out with over 100 years ago. Read about the restaurant and its history at mental_floss.

(Image credit: Flickr user ramsbee)

Oliver Babish (Andrew Rea) recreates Ross Geller's disgusting-sounding Thanksgiving Leftover Sandwich from the TV series Friends, by cooking an entire Thanksgiving meal in order to have leftovers. The tutorial is perfectly seasoned with occasionally snarky commentary   

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Babish has a whole series of videos in which he recreates fictional food from TV and movies. That's a thin but entertaining disguise for some seriously good recipes. -via reddit 

One of the reasons we eat what we do for Thanksgiving is to celebrate the uniquely American foods that the Pilgrims discovered when they came to Massachusetts and learned to grow with the help of Native Americans. At their first Thanksgiving feast, they ate lots of seafood and venison, but what we concentrate on for the holiday are the foods that Europeans didn't have at the time: turkey, cranberries, corn, potatoes, pumpkin, pecans, etc.

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Joe Hanson of It's Okay To Be Smart looks at those American foods and how they were cultivated for centuries before Europeans arrived. American foods are something worth celebrating! -via Tastefully Offensive

Have you ever wished you could eat inside a cliff beside the see or that you could have food cooked from the heat of a volcano? Maybe you dream of eating at the bottom of a waterfall as the river flows along your feet. Of course, you could always try to eat below the sea in an underwater restaurant. If these kinds of crazy restaurants sound great to you, then check out these an more dining locations on this fascinating Travel and Leisure article.

Cristian Ramirez is an Army veteran and a video producer at Cracked. For Veterans Day on Friday, he went on a mission to see how many free meals he could actually eat. He was prepared for the challenge with his identification and shorts with an elastic waistband. Ramirez ruled out buffets ahead of time, but appears to have endangered his well-being anyway. He ended up consuming seven meals. The brisket sandwich wasn't even the final one.

I had to rally again before this one. I think I'll probably need to after each subsequent one. The meat sweats are so real right now. This stopped being funny in the last entry. I'm really not sure I'm going to make it back to my car after this one. I'm about as mobile as the Spruce Goose trying to achieve liftoff with both its wings on fire. I need to rally again, even if it hurts -- it's the only way I can keep going. I love you, America.

Read the saga of Ramirez' Veterans Day quest at Cracked.

You never know when you might find yourself stranded on a desert island, by choice or otherwise, and as every castaway movie has taught us there are coconuts a-plenty on desert isles.

Coconuts can be eaten, worn as a bikini and used to simulate the sound of horses galloping, but first the husk must be removed before the coconut can be cracked open, which is really hard to do without tools.

Enter "The King of Random" Grant Thompson with a time tested method for de-husking coconuts while using as little energy as possible- by dropping a giant rock on it.

(YouTube Link)

Once you're done dropping rocks on husked coconuts and dropping unhusked coconuts on sharp rocks you can use the fibers to make rope, which is another handy thing to have when you're a castaway.

(YouTube Link)

-Via Lifehacker

(Image credit: Byron Eggenschwiler)

With a name like Clementine Paddleford, she should have been unforgettable. So why don’t you know who she is?

In the Long Island Sound, the world’s fastest nuclear submarine was cruising 200 feet beneath the waves. Sirens and horns whined as the crew tested the submarine’s alarms. As usual, the USS Skipjack hummed with activity. Sailors walked purposefully through tight passageways, their buzz cuts skimming the ceilings. That wasn’t the only buzz in the air: Word on the ship was that Clementine Paddleford was touring the galley.  

It was March 26, 1960, and after a year of wrangling, the U.S. Navy had finally given the 61-year-old journalist permission to board the Skipjack. Now she was in the submarine’s capsule kitchen, a cape around her shoulders and a notebook in hand, scoping out the 54-square-foot room where cooks prepared nearly 300 meals a day for the crew. They flurried about, making strawberry shortcake, prime rib, and endless pots of coffee from ingredients compressed to save space. Though she was no stranger to unusual kitchens, the endeavor was nerve-racking. Paddleford would later write that as she boarded the ship loaded with torpedoes, she’d been “clothed in gooseflesh.” 

But she hadn’t worked so hard just to walk away empty-handed—she’d get her story, along with a brownie recipe that could feed 80. Whether Paddleford was inspecting a kitchen at the bottom of the ocean or piloting a plane across the country in search of new delicacies, she was a fearless pioneer, intent on uncovering tales that would resonate with the American public.

We've covered the history of margarine, but the development of real dairy butter goes back further than written records. When dairy farmers found that agitation separates the fat from the liquid in milk, the result was a delicious substance that made everything else taste better. They were making butter long before the butter churn we know was invented.  

You wouldn’t recognize the world’s earliest butters. For one thing, they were made from the milk of sheep, yak, and goats, not from cow’s milk. Domesticated cattle came much later in man’s conquest of various animals. From as early as 9000 BCE in the region of what is now Iran, communities relied on domestic sheep and goats, which are less intimidating in size and have comfort-loving dispositions that early man coaxed into submission. In the Near East, domesticated goats functioned as a virtual power tool and dairy plant for early man as well, defoliating the scrubby land as they grazed so it could then be cultivated. The animals turned this coarse plant diet into a ready source of good meat and milk. Goat’s skin, being nonporous, also provided an excellent milk vessel.

But water buffalo milk made better butter, or at least more of it. There's a lot more to the history of butter, as you'll see in an excerpt from the book Butter: A Rich History by Elaine Khosrova, at Lucky Peach. -via Digg

Before all the results came out yesterday, you may have spotted a number of articles focused not on the candidates, but on where you could get free or discounted food or drinks for voting yesterday. Krispy Kreme gave out free donuts, Firehouse Subs gave out free drinks, Nestle Toll House Cafe provided free cookies -even the local deli I went to yesterday offered $2 pints of beer for those wearing "I voted stickers." But what you might not know is that rewarding people for voting is illegal, even if it's done in a totally non-partisan manner like the ones listed above. In fact, the only company I listed above that wouldn't be busted for their promotion was Krispy Kreme because they changed their promotion from giving a donut away to those who voted to giving it away to anyone who came in.

Sure the Federal Election Commission hasn't really gone after anyone for running these types of promotions, other than issuing a warning to some of the larger corporations, but the fact remains that they absolutely have the right to. Learn more about the law over at Eater.

(Triple Peanut Butter Cookie Pie)

If you still have leftover Halloween candy it's because you overbought, no trick-or-treaters came to your door, or you've eaten so much candy you're sick of it.

So let's get rid of our Halloween stash and get ready for the holiday season at the same time by whipping up some candy filled treats!

I'm sure you know how good cookies and brownies are when they're made with chocolate candies, so imagine how heavenly cheesecake ice cream will be if you add Kit Kat or Twix to the mix.

(Twix Cheesecake Ice Cream)

If you have more than one kind of candy you'd like to throw into the mix you may want to consider making some Movie Theater Candy Chocolate Bark, because the more kinds of candy you add the better!

(Movie Theater Candy Chocolate Bark)

And lastly these Snickers Profiteroles prove desserts made with leftover Halloween candy don't have to look like a total mess. They're très élégante!

(Snickers Profiteroles)

See Epic Dessert Recipes You Can Make With Leftover Halloween Candy here

Those of us who love grape flavored sweets wonder why manufacturers don't make a grape flavored version of everything, and we assume it's because grape flavor doesn't work so well in things like cakes or donuts.

But grape flavored ice cream sounds like a delicious treat to me, so why isn't grape ice cream a thing?

Turns out it's because ice cream makers like Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry's use fresh fruit purees, and grapes have too much water in them to be easily added to ice cream:

Grapes have a high water content, so when you try to use the fruit as a base for ice cream, chunks of that water therein tend to freeze. Chefs whipping up small batches of homemade grape ice cream can avoid this problem by pureeing the fruit, but it’s much harder to manufacture large volumes of ice cream when it’s flecked with bits of ice.

Of course, other fruits, like cherries, are also mostly water—and Cherry Garcia is one of Ben & Jerry’s most popular flavors. In short, it’s possible to make fruit ice cream on a larger scale, but the demand has to be there to make the hassle worthwhile (and for that matter, profitable). And as Cohen explained, most people don’t even think to associate grapes with ice cream—so if Ben & Jerry’s made a grape-flavored dessert, it's likely that nobody would buy it. Since cherry and vanilla are such popular flavors, it pays for the company to make Cherry Garcia.

-Via mental_floss

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According to advertisements some snacks are so good people will do whatever it takes to get their hands on them, even if it involves breaking and entering.

These ads warn us against leaving our delicious snacks out in the open, and we assume the robbery situations portrayed in these commercials are ridiculous.

But life will always be stranger than fiction, and apparently some people really do find Kit Kat bars so appealing they'll break into your car to steal them.

Left my car for maybe 15 minutes in front of the dorms and I come back to this. College man pic.twitter.com/KlDx5BtXLX

— Hunter Jobbins (@jabbins) October 30, 2016

Hunter Jobbins was unaware Kansas State University had a candy theft problem, so he left a Kit Kat bar sitting in the cup holder of his unlocked car- and came back to find a hand scrawled note from the thief who stole his Kit Kat.

Kit Kat became aware of Hunter's loss and offered their support in his time of need:

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-Via 22 Words

Even if it's past Halloween, it's hard to resist wanting to munch on these Philadelphia roll brains. Food network's recipe looks pretty simple, as it mostly involves shoving rice around an avocado filled with cream cheese and then rolling up thin-cut salmon and arranging it on top.

It also looks delicious because, well, avocado, cream cheese and salmon. You could also try switching out spicy tuna and using a brain mold to make the creepy shape if you like something with a little heat.

Via That's Nerdalicious

Food fans naturally freaked out when they saw this Food Network video showing Chopped judge and chef Marc Murphy digging in to the amazing Pizza Pot Pie at the Chicago Pizza and Oven Grinder Co. back in 2011.

Since then the video has gone viral multiple times, making millions of foodies wish they could sink their teeth into this overstuffed treat without having to take a trip out to Chi-Town.

So the Food Network Kitchen came up with a recipe we can make at home, and while the photo they chose doesn't look so hot the recipe sounds delicious with plenty of room for customization and improvement.

Pizza Pot Pie Recipe here

-Via Food Network

Food challenges have made eating enough a mountain of food into a sport, and those who make it their mission to tackle challenges wherever they go have to physically train their bodies to handle the feasting.

As food challenges become more popular the restaurants putting out the challenges keep raising the bar, so only the mightiest of appetites will stand a chance of winning.

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This is the Kitchen Sink challenge from the San Francisco Creamery Co., which consists of eight scoops of ice cream, eight topping servings, whip cream mounds, three sliced bananas, chopped almonds and maraschino cherries.

Eat it all in 30 minutes and you win free ice cream for a year, but you'll probably need surgery to repair the damaging effects of brain freeze.

Eaters who prefer savory to sweet and adore seafood might want to try the 15 Dozen Oyster Challenge at the Acme Oyster House in New Orleans instead.

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If the competitor eats no less than fifteen dozen oysters in an hour their name goes up on the board, and they learn what walruses and carpenters feel like after dinner. 

Speaking of dining with buddies- this massive burger is the 50-lb Mount Olympus cheeseburger challenge offered by the Clinton Station Diner in Clinton, New Jersey.

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A team of five eaters has three hours to eat the whole thing...or they have to pay for the burger!

See 10 Insane Food Challenges Reserved For The Bold here