(Photo: Vinnie's Pizzeria)
Now can I get a pizza topped with tiny pizza slices that are themselves topped with even tinier pizza slices? Let's see how far we can take this idea.
Vinnie's Pizzeria, a restaurant in Brooklyn famous for its funny signs, is an innovator in pizza design. If you want a plain pizza, but you want to maximize its plainness, you can order your plain pizza with another plain pizza sliced up and layered on top.
-via Incredible Things
Image: Tim Lewis
Magazine and leading culinary website Epicurious compiled an article on their picks for their 50 best holiday cookie recipes from their large archive. So whether you'd like to get an early start on cookie baking or cookie eating, the linked article sets you up with a list that's handily divided into categories: The Classics, The Decorating Favorites, For Chocolate Lovers, The Kid Friendly Set, and The Spiced Ones.
Check out the recipes from each delicious category here.
The Reese's Peanut Butter candy empire began with a cup, but nowadays that chocolate peanut butter goodness comes in all shapes and sizes, from tiny round bites to pumpkins and trees.
People are fond of those festive shapes, especially around Easter, Halloween and Christmas, but this year things got dark for Reese's on social media when their Peanut Butter Christmas trees didn't fit the mold.
People took to Twitter and Instagram to complain that the Reese's Peanut Butter Trees didnt' look like trees at all, sarcastically tagging the Tweets #happythanksgiving. First world problems, amirite?!
Personally, I eat them too fast to pay attention to how they're shaped, and sometimes I don't even have time to open the package!
-Via The Daily What
McDonald's runs some pretty lame ad campaigns here in the U.S., but overseas they run all kinds of crazy promotions that make them look a heck of a lot cooler than some commercial aimed at hipsters.
(Via Instagram user ryukayen)
The McDonald's corp recently ran a promotion in Malaysia where customers could score a free Big Mac if they submitted a recording of themselves singing the song "Sama-Sama Big Mac" using the Dubsmash voice dubbing app.
(Via Instagram user tc_danny123)
The entrants were obviously hungry for a Big Mac, because their entries were creative, rehearsed and some look like they took a lot of work. Perhaps they had all fallen victim to a Big Mac Attack?
(Via Instagram user chrizooi)
You can see all of the contest entries here
-Via Mashable
(Photo: Holly Lynn Ellis)
A toad-in-a-hole is a dish in which a hole is cut inside a slice of bread and then an egg is fried or baked inside that hole.
(Yes, I know from previous discussions that some people insist on referring to this dish as an "egg-in-a-basket" or other eccentric appellations. But I grew up in the South where I learned to speak the English language properly. I will continue to do so.)
Endless Simmer offers this unique take on the dish. Its chefs hollowed out spots on a pork tenderloin, then baked it. After it was mostly done, they cracked open 3 eggs and placed them in the holes. After 15 more minutes of baking, this was the delicious result.
Former Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis believes you are not through with Thanksgiving cooking when the meat is stripped from the turkey. Don’t throw away the carcass! He saves not only his Thanksgiving leftovers, but those of friends, too. He gets one out of the freezer occasionally over the year to make soup. Dukakis has always been famously thrifty, and he eventually became a cook, too.
“It all started when my dear wife after 23 years of marriage — and she was a good cook, I must say — one day said, ‘That’s it, I’m not cooking any longer,’ ” he said. “Just like that. At the time the only thing I knew how to make was French toast. So I was confronted with a choice: Starve or start cooking. So I’ve been doing all the cooking the last 29 years.
“I should also add one of our favorite purchases at Costco is rotisserie chicken,” he continues. “They sell them for $4.95. Kitty and I must get 10 meals out of them.”
First, he says, they eat the chicken itself. Then, just as he does with the turkey carcass, he uses the chicken carcass to make soup. The soups, particularly hearty ones, have become a bit of a specialty of his.
You can see Dukakasis’ recipe for turkey soup in case you want to try it yourself. But if you don’t want to use your turkey carcass, he’ll take it off your hands, as he explains in an article at the Boston Globe. -via Digg
(Image credit: Flickr user leigh wolf)
You may have some older relatives that get all nostalgic about salt-rising bread. You don’t see it much anymore, because it’s hard to make and not all that popular among anyone who wasn’t raised with it. The smell is described like either cheese or dirty socks. But those who love it really love it. Salt-rising bread doesn’t even have salt in it, and no one is sure how the name came about. It was made by pioneering American women who didn’t have access to yeast, and who didn’t always have sourdough starter ready. They made salt-rising bread rise with environmental bacteria. Yes, they did.
In the early 20th century, this lengthy, yeast-less process also became an interest of microbiologists. In 1914, Richard N. Hart noted in his book Leavening Agents that salt-rising bread “seems to fail in a well-sterilized room," and alludes to the experiments of Henry A. Kohman, who discovered that salt-rising dough lacked yeast completely “but literally swarmed with bacteria.”
In 1910 Kohman was funded by the aforementioned bread-obsessed Kansas Governor, Walter R. Stubbs, to learn how bakers may reliably make it, and concluded that a variety of anaerobic bacteria allowed the bread to rise. In 1923, microbiologist Stuart A. Koser began to suspect the mix might include bacteria found in human intestines and wounds.
The experiments Kohman did after that might make you a little queasy, but the fact is that not a single case of food poisoning has been attributed to salt-rising bread. Read what we know about this classic bread, including instructions for making your own starter, at Atlas Obscura.
(Image credit: Flickr user Wonderland Kitchen)
Preparing a Thanksgiving meal can be quite an ordeal, especially when you've decided to cook the entire thing by yourself, but recipe writers and those pretty little pictures on the box are mighty encouraging.
Maybe they should put a picture of an utterly failed attempt on the box as well, to warn the would-be cook about what they're getting into.
But Thanksgiving dinner is about more than just desserts- it's about side dishes that are as sweet as dessert, that is, when you don't burn them to a crisp.
Making a cake look pretty can be a bit difficult, and sides actually require the cook to check the oven every once in a while, but the turkey is foolproof, right? Therefore barbecuing the bird should be especially easy, and a real time saver.
It'll save time alright, because you'll just end up pitching the bird in the trash and ordering a pizza!
Instructables member Carley Jacobson, who previously showed us how to make a bath pouf Halloween costume, knows how to set a great Thanksgiving table. This centerpiece showing the traditional horn of plenty is completely edible.
It's made of canned breadstick dough wrapped around an aluminum foil form. Jacobson glazed it with egg, then baked it for half an hour. After removing the form, she filled it with fruits and vegetables and presented it as a table centerpiece.
Crown Jewel Turkey for Dummies | Image and Recipe: The Crepes of Wrath
Has someone communicated a late request for you to bring a dish to Thanksgiving? Or are you planning to accept a last-minute invitation to a pot-luck style dinner? Even if you have the task of hosting and discover you need another side, dessert or drink, all is not lost.
Snickerdoodle Peanut Butter and Chocolate Chex Mix Bars | Image and Recipe: Half Baked Harvest
This article at Bustle has you covered in terms of throwing together something tasty for T-Day on the quick. Some of these dishes look so tempting, you might want to whip one up as a surprise. There's nothing like that delicious, unanticipated bite that adds spice your spread.
Bacon and Roasted Garlic Brussels Sprouts | Image and Recipe: Damn Delicious
When you go to buy potatoes you generally just have to pick a color or a name, because whether they're red, russet or fingerling they're all called potatoes in the end.
But their tuberous root cousins are named sweet potatoes and yams even though they seem to be as similar to each other as two different kinds of potatoes. So what's in a name?
Watching this helpful animated short created by Eva Hill should clarify all the differences between sweet potatoes and yams you need to know, but at the end of the day if it's baked then covered with butter it's all good!
-Via Huffington Post
Ask Americans what they’re eating on Thanksgiving, and the overwhelming majority (82% here) will say turkey, usually with dressing and gravy. Sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie are pretty universal, too. But there are regional differences in what people select to put on the table, especially in side dishes. FiveThirtyEight held an online poll, crunched the numbers, and came up with a map showing which side dish is disproportionally popular in various regions of the U.S. These aren’t the only dishes that show regional variance.
Going deeper, the Southeast is the definitive home of canned cranberry sauce; respondents from the region are 50 percent more likely to pick that over the homemade variety. The Middle Atlantic states disproportionately have cauliflower as a side — 17 percent in the region versus 9 percent nationwide — while Texas and central Southern states see cornbread as far more necessary than the rest of the country, with 40 percent of respondents from those regions having it at dinner, compared with only 28 percent of the nation.
It makes sense to me, because Thanksgiving is all about food tradition. Cornbread was once a staple of every meal in the South, whereas fresh cranberries were hard to find down here before modern food transport methods were in place. So we eat what our grandparents ate 50 years ago, more so on Thanksgiving than other days. That said, I only serve macaroni and cheese at Thanksgiving when there are little children around. Read more about the various regional Thanksgiving side dishes at FiveThirtyEight. -via Marilyn Terrell
While Americans are usually introduced to figgy pudding by way of the song “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” few ever actually consume it, much less make one. You might be surprised to find that it’s not even what we know as pudding.
It’s really not pudding, at least by American standards. The cake—which contains figs and is topped with brandy—has been an English Christmas dessert since the mid-1600s. Around that time, it was banned by English Puritans because of the large amount of alcohol content. Some believe that a Medieval custom dictated that pudding could only be made on the 25th Sunday after Trinity Sunday and that it was originally comprised of 13 ingredients to represent Christ and his 12 apostles.
Now you know. You might be more familiar with holiday dishes like sweet potatoes with marshmallows, green bean casserole, gingerbread, latkes, etc. but you might not know where they came from or why we eat them during the winter holidays. Find out by reading The Origins of 15 Holiday Foods and Drinks at mental_floss.
(Image credit: Flickr user Meal Makeover Moms)
Food artist Michelle Wibowo (previously at Neatorama) has just blown all gingerbread competition away this year with her project for this weekend’s Taste of London food festival. HBO has a room set up at the festival called Taste of HBO that focuses on the fantasy series Game of Thrones. They have an Iron Throne for visitors to sit on, Winter Wild Beer to sample, and a huge gingerbread replica of King’s Landing! Just looking at it makes that theme music pop into your head, doesn’t it? Check out more pictures of Wibowo’s gingerbread city at Mashable. -via Uproxx
It's hard to imagine urban life without a supermarket nearby, and knowing that mega food mart is always there to provide you with any foodstuffs you might need gives us a false sense of security.
I say false because these giant chain food stores are simply not built to last, and when giant retailers like Walmart and Target start carrying groceries the supermarkets start closing.
So it's no surprise that supermarkets are built to keep customers shopping for hours, with no clocks to remind us how long we've been there and a counterclockwise layout meant to make your trip take twice as long.
While we're stuck in the supermarket we're treated to mountains of meat with expiration dates that have no meaning, showcased "special" items on the ends of the aisles, and a well lit stage for those beautiful bananas.
Read 6 Behind-the-Scenes Secrets Of Supermarkets at mental_floss
