(Image credit: Kjokkenutstyr)

The following is an article from Uncle John's 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader.

Inside that textured green skin, it’s ripe with mystery. It’s an “evolutionary anachronism.” It’s not a vegetable, and not exactly your typical fruit. It’s an acquired taste that most Americans still resist. Meet the avocado.

HAVING A BALL

The avocado came from South America, so it’s not too surprising that the Nahuatl language of the ancient Aztecs gave us its name, derived from ahuacatl. Besides referring to the fruit, the word had another meaning: “testicle,” which also isn’t too surprising, considering the fruit’s shape and texture. Although “guacamole” doesn’t really sound like “avocado,” the two words share a root: Guacamole comes from the Nahuatl ahuacatl-molli, which means “avocado sauce.” (The fact that it also means “testicle sauce” is probably not something we want to dwell on.)

BEEN THERE, DUNG THAT

Biologists suggest that it’s a lucky accident the avocado is still with us, because it evolved to fill a niche in an ecosystem that went extinct eons ago. As with many fruits, the avocado developed as a mutually beneficial trade-off with animals. The tree provides tasty food, but there’s no such thing as a free lunch- the plant’s price for its fruit is mobility for its seeds. How does that work? The seeds of the fruit are typically small enough to pass through the digestive systems of the animals that eat it. The seeds are often bitter, sometimes even toxic enough to cause nausea. So animals rarely chew them more than once, but instead learn to swallow them whole. The seeds exit the digestive system intact, as waste, and end up planted in the animal’s nutrient-rich dung.

There’s no reason to believe that the avocado was an exception to this rule. It’s unlikely that the plant species’ survival was ever meant to depend on humans poking its seed with toothpicks and suspending it in water to get it to sprout. But that begs the question: What animal in South America is big enough to eat a avocado whole and poop out its oversize pit?

If you can speak the language of food then you can communicate with people from other cultures better than any language ever could, because all humans enjoy sitting down to a good meal.

Food slides right past our tongues and speaks to our very souls, and when someone prepares a special meal for you they're sharing the flavors of their culture, life story and family heritage with you- and no words need to be spoken to enjoy each other's company.

Cartoonist and installation artist Shing Yin Khor learned the language of food from her grandmother, who also taught her that preparing food is a marvelous way to express your love when you have trouble saying it aloud.

Shing paid homage to her grandmother with this wonderfully honest autobiographical comic strip, telling the story of how food became an important part of her life- and how her relationship with food became complicated.

See Say It With Noodles: On Learning To Speak The Language Of Food here

If you're lucky, you have fond memories of the wonderful dishes your grandmother used to cook. If you're even luckier, she wrote out those recipes so you could make them on your own. These traditional family recipes get handed down to a generations who believe they have something special that no one else could replicate. A restaurant owner gave his grandmother's secret potato salad recipe to his chefs to recreate, and they laughed because they knew that recipe came from the label of Hellman's mayonnaise. That happens more often than you think. Atlas Obscura's food section, Gastro Obscura, asked readers to send in stories of secret family recipes.

In response to our call, 174 readers wrote in with stories of plagiarized family recipes. Hailing from New York to Nicaragua, from Auckland, New Zealand, to Baghpat, India, they prove that this is a global phenomenon. The majority of readers described devastating discoveries: They found supposedly secret recipes in the pages of famous cookbooks, and heard confessions from parents whose legendary dessert recipes came from the side of Karo Syrup bottles.

You can read some of the funnier stories at Gastro Obscura. There are some recipes you might want to try, too.

(Image credit: Paul Boston)

Jon Townsend (previously at Neatorama) cooks up a little macaroni and cheese from a recipe published in 1784. Along the way, we get a bit of history about the term "macaroni" in the sense that it was used in the song "Yankee Doodle." But that has nothing to do with food. This dish is pretty basic, and sounds delicious.

(YouTube link)

Several comments under the video asked where the nutmeg is. I had never heard of macaroni and cheese with nutmeg, but apparently there are a lot of recipes that call for it. I prefer onions and dry mustard. Townsends has a blog about historical recipes and food for historical reenactments, called Savoring the Past. -via reddit

Here's a cooking video that you'll enjoy watching all the way through even if you have no intention of ever making the recipe. Anne Reardon of How to Cook That manages to make individual-size apple custard pies with rainbow stripes on the crust!

(YouTube link)

Making the crust is the time-consuming part, but the finished product is quite impressive. If you want to give it a try, read the complete recipe with amounts (in weight, not volume). Meanwhile, I'm thinking about how I could use those rainbow discs for something else, like maybe the top crust of a regular size pie. -via Boing Boing

The following is an article from Uncle John's 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader.

If a recipe called for you to blanch some almonds, would you know how to do it? Cookbooks are full of techniques that are a mystery to most of us, even if their names sound familiar.

Heat and Serve

There are many different ways to cook food, and each method affects food differently. Most techniques can be broken down into two categories: wet and dry – but it’s not quite as straightforward as you’d think.

Wet cooking involves the use of water or water-based liquid. This includes wine, broth, stock, milk, vinegar-whatever you like, as long as it’s water-based. Wet techniques (also called moist techniques) include boiling, blanching, poaching, steaming, and stewing. The temperatures involved in all of these techniques are actually pretty low-because boiling water doesn’t get any hotter than 212° F.

Dry-cooking techniques include baking, broiling, frying, sautéing, and you might be surprised to learn, deep-frying. Reason: Though oil is a liquid, it’s not water-based and its use is therefore considered a dry cooking technique. Dry cooking involves cooking at temperatures of 270° F and above. It is these hotter temperatures that allow dry cooking to brown food-which cannot be done with wet technique.

Wet Cooking Techniques

There is no restaurant too small, too fancy or too franchise-y to receive a review on Yelp, yet most of the reviews related to the big fast food chains are posted by people who act like they've never been to a fast food restaurant.

That's because most Yelpers take themselves a bit too seriously, critiquing places like McDonald's as if they're serious food critics slumming at a fast food joint, and their reviews are completely unhelpful.

But when someone writes a review that is both hilarious and helpful they deserve to be upgraded to platinum level Yelper status, along with the folks who manage to tear down Mickey D's in a funny way without lowering their star status.

The truth is Yelpers suck unless they're either being funny or putting their ego aside and sharing helpful information, and even though I rarely go by Yelper reviews unless the restaurant has a low rating I always have room for another funny review!

Read 17 Hilarious McDonald's Yelp Reviews You Won't Believe Are Real here

(Image source: Parker Molloy)

Now that sonograms for pregnant women are common, a new tradition has evolved called the "gender reveal party," in which the family, and often the parents, find out for the first time whether the baby will be a boy or a girl. The person entrusted with this information devises a way to make the surprise happen, often with a cake. The cake inside is tinted either pink or blue, completely covered with frosting or fondant until the ceremonial cutting. Some of these cakes are rather strange. The cakes above took advantage of a joke, while others take gender stereotypes to the max for a slogan.  

See a roundup of some of the strangest gender reveal cakes at Buzzfeed.

Because food is such a big part of our lives, and something we like sharing with our friends and family, new food trends are constantly popping up and sweeping through our networks until everyone is talking about the latest taste sensation.

Most of these trends take off and become a way bigger deal than they deserve just because they seem like new and interesting ideas, which leads to something as dumb as rolled ice cream becoming a huge social media trend.

But if your food "creation" was made just so it'll look good on Instagram then it really needs to go away, along with these glittery lattes that turn your guts all nice and shiny.

A post shared by betty collective (@bettycollective) on Dec 18, 2017 at 1:02am PST

Let's make 2018 the year we do away with dumb food trends and come up with something real and genuinely delicious, because throwing flaming hot Cheetos on a pizza isn't a trend- it's an idea you come up with when you're stoned.

A post shared by Food | Travel | Pizza (@sorrynosalad) on Dec 19, 2017 at 1:32pm PST

See more Food Trends That Need To Die at 22 Words

Fanciful and sculptural cakes are so popular that every time I Google a specific character, franchise or animal I find that someone has already made a cake with that theme.

A post shared by Gordoceria (por Tamy) (@gordoceria) on Feb 5, 2018 at 4:10am PST

I never thought to look up fat unicorn cakes but they're a thing too, and after seeing this article on Mashable I have fallen in love with these sweet and silly character cakes!

The chubby and sleepy little unicorn is obviously the star of the show, but the little touches like the bite taken out of the cake and the unicorn's placement on the cake make each one extra special.

A post shared by loren stanard - owner & chef (@littlewatermelontreats) on Feb 11, 2018 at 3:26pm PST

And when that cute little unicorn gets tired of eating round cakes they can gorge themselves on something else- like tacos and pan dulce!

A post shared by Candy Ramirez (@candyqueenbeebaker) on Feb 9, 2018 at 8:29am PST

See Fat Unicorn Cakes Are The Adorable Trending Dessert We're Eating Up here

If you ever cruise down to the Barra de Navidad marina and lagoon in Jalisco, Mexico, be on the lookout for a French baker peddling fresh bread and other baked treats boat to boat. Who could resist?

Chef Emeric Fiegen opened up shop, with his wife Christine, in this small laidback beach town over 15 years ago after a stint in Montreal. Early each morning, Chef Emeric still personally delivers his many breads, baguettes, croissants, pies, and quiches by boat. Not surprisingly, his pastries sell out by the time he's done making his rounds.

Fiegen also has a shop on land. Check out the menu and see more pictures at Boing Boing.

(Image credit: Andrea Cook)

The following article is reprinted from the book The Best of the Best of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

Oh, the poor potato—a symbol of laziness (couch potato) and unhealthy eating (cheese fries). But it deserves much better. Here’s how the lowly potato altered the course of human history.

SPUDS OF THE INCAS

For at least 4,000 years, potatoes have been cultivated in the Peruvian Andes. The Incas called them papas, and although the flowers are toxic (they’re members of the deadly nightshade family), the part that grows underground -the tuber- is one of the healthiest foods humans have ever cultivated. Consider this: The average potato has only 100 calories, but provides 45% of the U.S. Recommended Daily Allowance of vitamin C; 15% of vitamin B6; 15% of iodine; and 10% of niacin, iron, and copper. Potatoes are also high in potassium and fiber, with no fat and almost no sodium.

But the papas that the Incas cultivated looked more like purple golf balls than today’s potatoes. More than 5,000 different varieties grew in the Andes, and there were more than 1,000 Incan words to describe them. The potato was so integral to Incan culture that they buried their dead with potatoes (for food in the afterlife) and measured time based on how long it took a potato to cook.

THE EDIBLE STONE

My wife likes ketchup so much she slathers it on all kinds of different foods, including those I consider her sacrilegious for slathering ketchup upon- like tacos.

Personally I prefer salsa to ketchup, but I guess we've all got to get our daily dose of tomato blood somehow, and some people have stranger cravings than others.

And just so you know this Maximumble comic confirms the fact that tomatoes love how much we love their blood, so suck that red vegetable vital fluid down by the gallon! Stick a straw straight into a tomato if you have to, and don't worry- they don't feel pain!

-Via Geeks Are Sexy

The food you get at a restaurant tastes different than homemade by design, because why would you pay restaurant prices for food you can make at home?

This difference in flavor often come from the chef adding way more salt, fat or spices than you would ever add at home, but sometimes restaurant flavor is the result of a simple cooking trick like pressing a dimple into your burger before cooking it.

(YouTube Link)

This video by Bright Side reveals 14 Cooking Secrets Used By Restaurant Chefs, including the secret to  cutting the perfect slice of cake (hold knife under hot water before cutting) and how to pick the perfect lemon (the thinner the peel the more sour the lemon). 

Binging with Babish (previously at Neatorama) is the video series where Andrew Rea recreates the food seen in your favorites movies and TV shows. If he's going to do Breaking Bad, you'd expect him to cook up some blue crystal methamphetamine. No, he's not going to do that ...exactly. He's making some dipping breadsticks.

(YouTube link)

Rea also makes some tasty Paila Marina, as seen in the show, and the piece de resistance, blue crystal candy.  -via Boing Boing