Caroline from Japan makes little sweets that look like cats. Sometimes they nap in pancakes. Other times, they curl up around eclairs. But they're always cute and delicious. For this project, they're struggling to get at the fish trapped inside the gelatin (translation) --all the while ignoring a more convenient mouse.
This isn't McMurdo Station, which can house over a thousand residents, but the tiny Palmer Station. Only about two dozen people live there. It is, by Antarctic standards, out in the boonies. But that doesn't stop Mike Heller, the station chef, from developing impressive meals with limited ingredients that arrive only every three months.
Sometimes it's hot dog soup, which is precisely what it sounds like. But Heller can also get creative and whip up some impressive deserts. Pictured above is his mocha semifreddo. Sky Moret explored Palmer Station cuisine in a fascinating article in Roads & Kingdoms. She writes:
“I would challenge you to buy three months of produce at your grocery store … and then not go shopping again for three more months,” he tells me, pointing to 50 large cans of tomatoes stacked in his dry-goods storage room that he’ll transform into roasted tomato bisque, spicy pizza sauce, and black bean chili. […]
To add some variety, our science support crew makes exotic dishes as well. On the other U.S. Antarctic ship, the Nathaniel B. Palmer, I enjoy making liquid nitrogen–cooled ice cream with our excess supply. Scientists clad in cryogenic gloves and safety glasses stir cream, milk, sugar, and flavoring in large stainless steel bowls while I pour the super-cooled liquid into each, and a midday treat is served.
-via Marilyn Terrell
Aren't they adorable? They look just like cartoon versions of little pigs. But these delicious entrées aren't made of pork.
They're made of squid! Rocket News 24 followed a recipe by a Russian YouTube user to craft fresh whole squids into artistic piglets ripe for eating. They're hollow squid cores with spicy stuffing inside. You can see more process photos here.
(Photo: Potlicker Kitchen)
When she ran out of fruit to make into jelly, Nancy Warner of Vermont decided to make beer jelly. To her knowledge, she's the only person to develop and method to make sweet jellies from beer. Each flavor from Potlicker Kitchen is made from just three ingredients: beer, cane sugar, and citrus pectin. Warner spoke to the tabloid The Mirror:
“I set about making a jelly with all beer, no fruit. I have made all of my own recipes and can find no record of anyone else make a pure beer jelly before I did.
“I make beer jelly much the way I would make fruit jelly, but instead of kid juice (like fruit juice), I use adult juice.
“Each jar of jelly is approximately half full of beer or wine, but, for better or worse, the jelly is non alcoholic.
“The alcohol is removed during cooking and by dilution of sugar.
“There are only three ingredients - beer, cane sugar and citrus pectin. Because there is no added fruit or flavours, it tastes like a sweet version of the beer it is made with.
“You can actually taste the hop and malt characteristics of each flavour of jelly.
-via Oddity Central
’Tis the season to roll out the most imaginative takes on the pumpkin spice craze. The latest is M&Ms. The candy company is rolling out two seasonal flavors: Pecan Pie M&Ms and Pumpkin Spice Latte M&Ms. Both use artificial flavoring; I suppose a lot of it if you’re going to make chocolate taste like not only pumpkin pie spice but latte as well. The Pecan Pie flavor seems even weirder, like ruining two great ideas by combining them. Both flavors will be available soon at Target stores. -via Uproxx
If you couldn't tell by now, we here at Neatorama love bacon. That being said, these crazy bacon treats are almost too extreme even for us...of course, notice that I said almost, because these are all going to end up on the menu for our next Neatorama office party.
Arguably the most outrageous pork creation of all time, the Swineapple consists of a hollowed out pineapple stuffed with boneless, country-style ribs, wrapped in bacon and slow cooked on a grill. Josh Bush of It's All About Da Bacon made the original, and has since reworked the recipe multiple times to incorporate sausage, jalapenos and more.
If you've ever had a whole roasted pig, you know they can be beyond delicious, but there are a lot of problems with making these yourself -they are huge, don't fit in the oven, take forever and they have too many bones with too little bacon. If you like the idea of putting a whole roasted pig on the dinner table, but don't like the hassle, try this Pork E. Pigskin instead. Grillocracy can explain how to make what they call the "cutest meal you'll ever enjoy," but the basic composition involves a hot pork sausage body, spicy sausage legs, ham ears, a pork rind tail and skin completely made of bacon.
How do you make a bacon burger low-carb and beyond delicious? Cut out the bun and replace it with bacon. Grillocracy's crazy bacon bun burger adds a whopping 3 pounds of bacon to the mix, giving "bacon burger" a whole new meaning.
And it's completely intentional! No, this loaf of bread did not miraculously emerge from the oven looking like the famous photo of David Hasselhoff naked except for two shar pei puppies. The great baker/artist Lou Lou P of Leeds, UK made this wonder on pain rustique.
This, like many of her recent baking accomplishments, was in a response to a challenge. She seems like the sort of person who won't turn down a dare. Take advantage of this tendency.
There was a time when women’s magazines were filled with Jell-O recipes, enough that you could serve breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert, all containing Jell-O. It seems strange now, but the history of the food can shed some light on the craze. Making gelatin was once a labor-intensive project, and was served to flaunt how many servants one had. Then at the turn of the 20th century, the Industrial Revolution gave us two trends that collided successfully: processed foods and the rise of the middle class. Housewives were eager to show off their domestic skills. Lynne Belluscio of the Jell-O Gallery Museum and food historian Laura Shapiro explain how Jell-O made that a breeze.
Instant gelatin fit the bill. It was fast, unlike the traditional method of making gelatin. It was economical: a housewife could stretch her family's leftovers by encasing them in gelatin. And, since sugar was already included in the flavored mixes, the new packaged gelatins didn't require cooks to use up their household stores of sugar. It was also neat and tidy, a quality much valued by the domestic-science movement as well as its Victorian forebears, who were mad for molded foods of all kinds, says Belluscio. Jellied salads, unlike tossed ones, were mess-free, never transgressing the border of the plate: "A salad at last in control of itself," Shapiro writes. Cooks in this era molded everything from cooked spinach to chicken salad, with care to avoid the cardinal sin of messiness.
But that was just the beginning. Wartime food rationing, the Great Depression, and the culture of postwar suburbia all fed the Jell-O salad craze. Sometime in the late 20th century, chefs figured out that no one was eating their savory Jell-o salads with vegetables, fish, and mayonnaise in them. In the 21st century, those recipes are mainly a source of comedy. Read the history of the Jell-O salad at Serious Eats. -via the Presurfer
(Image credit: the Kraft Heinz Company)
(Photo: 21st Amendment)
Finally! If, like me, you've been waiting for breakfast (and lunch and dinner) pastries to be turned into an alcoholic beverage, then I've got great news: the brilliant brewmasters at 21st Amendment (that's the amendment that repealed Prohibition) have made Pop-Tart flavored beer. Fortune magazine reports:
The beer will be released at the opening party for the brewery’s new facility in San Leandro on Aug. 29 – and the flavor is an homage to that facility’s former focus. Long before 21st Amendment moved in, the former Kellogg Co. factory was used to make Frosted Flakes and Pop-Tarts.
After its introduction at the brewery, the beer, which comes in at 7.6% alcohol by volume, will be available in 19.2 oz. cans – a new (and permanent) size for the brewery’s seasonal offerings. Samples aren’t yet available, so I can’t yet testify to the taste (a shame, given my passion for all things Pop-Tart).
-via Foodiggity
Australia is currently being consumed in a milkshake arms race as cafes and bakeries try to one-up each other in increasingly extreme and bizarre milkshakes. You want a milkshake with a huge Nutella-filled donut on top? You got it. You want a milkshake topped with 4 different types of brownies? Dig in.
These chefs were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.
Which leads us to this creation. It's 1 of 3 preposterous milkshakes made by food photographer Alana Dimou. She warns us:
Here are three flavours of my own: S’Mores Chicken, Bacon Burger and Coles Baked Fresh Today Bakery Aisle. Be inspired. Eat marshmallows and chicken. Milkshake flavours are irrelevant now, the duty falls upon whatever lies on top. May God have mercy on us all.
-via That's Nerdalicious!
Cheese straight from the refrigerator is pretty good, but cheese melted over a hamburger, hot dog, pizza, or inside a grilled cheese is awesome. That is, if it melts correctly. Some cheeses just don’t, or the results aren’t what you expected. Serious Eats explains melting cheese in detail, starting with the chemical bonds that make cheese what it is, followed by the chemistry of cheese falling apart in your favorite recipe.
Technically speaking, cheese is an emulsion of dairy fat and water, held together by a network of proteins. In cooler temperatures, that dairy fat remains a solid; let it warm to around 90°F and the fat reaches a liquid state and the cheese becomes more pliable—you may even notice some cheeses begin to bead with "sweat" if they're left out at room temperature. Raise the temperature by another 40 to 90 degrees and all the bonds that joined your caseins together start to break, allowing the entire protein structure to sag and stretch into an increasingly loosey goosey, lava-like puddle.
What determines a good melting cheese from a bad one has a lot to do with how well it can maintain its emulsion when that protein network begins to collapse, which in turn has to do with the ratio of water to fat, as well as the strength of that protein network.
The easiest way to make sure your cheese melts perfectly is to select the right cheese. But there are ways to make some poorly-melting cheeses work for you, too. When you understand how it all works, you can go crazy creating your own cheese recipes. -via the Presurfer
(Image credit: Vicky Wasik)
What’s more American than a hamburger? Maybe apple pie, which we’ll have after our hamburger. But the American hamburger is a symbol of the States all over the world. It wasn’t always so.
It’s easy to guess the hamburger’s geographic origin; after all, it’s right there in the name. But the original version of the now-iconic dish looked almost nothing like what’s served at drive-thrus across America.
Motz says the Hamburg steak plate was one of the most popular dishes in its native city, a major port that hosted many German immigrants on their way to the States. Consisting of “chopped beef that was turned into a patty and then, of course, pan-fried,” the dish was rounded out with onions, potatoes, and gravy, making it a cheap and easy meal for would-be Americans stuck in immigration limbo, sometimes for months.
It’s these immigrants who brought the Hamburg steak across the Atlantic, setting up carts in lower Manhattan that catered to new arrivals in search of comfort food. The vendors preserved the steak plate in its original form—an actual plate of food, served with a fork. Authentic, but as Motz notes, “not very portable at all.”
It was Americans who turned it into a sandwich, and even then there were ups and downs for the burger. Read the whole history of the hamburger at First We Feast.
Sometimes you have to think outside the box and make do with what you have. Ralph Roberts made a meal last night that you may want to remember when you’ve got an odd assortment of foodstuffs.
Creativity Unleashed: The Waffle Dog! ... came in late for dinner tonight. Had some gourmet Boar's Head hot dogs which fit the bill for my quick supper but, alas, no buns nor even sliced bread in the house. However, I DID find some frozen waffles in the freezer. Using the waffle as the bun (they folded up nicely after baking it all with cheese on top in the toaster oven), I had an enjoyable repast. I now claim credit for inventing the Waffle Dog. ;-)
A commenter pointed out that there is a previous recipe for waffle dogs, but it’s much more complicated, involving pancake mix and a waffle iron.
If you drink tea, you know how delicious the different brews can be -and how unique one flavor profile is from another. That's why these amazing tea dragon illustrations by New Zealand artist Strangely Katie so perfectly capture the spirit of different tea varieties.
As a tea drinker, it may seem strange to see your favorite brews portrayed as dragons, but when you look at the pictures, you'll likely notice just how strangely accurate the artist's depictions of each blend really are. Oolong should be a wise, mellow friend and Jasmine is refined, beautiful and serene.
Spanish Tarta de Santiago
Some things in life are universal, such as the love of sweet treats. It doesn't matter where one travels on Earth, finding a friend with whom you share a love of sweets is inevitable. Just as the cultures of man across the globe are diverse, so are their offerings of desserts. This article has a sampling of that vast array. Read it at the risk of craving sugary self-indulgence immediately afterward. 
Japanese mochi
Argentinian pastelitos
