(Photo: Romero y Azahar)

Bill Esparza is a food critic and taco scholar in Los Angeles. He says, “I’ve tried tacos in 27 states in Mexico, and every time I go to a new town I see something I’ve never heard of.” The vast variety of regional food traditions in Mexico offer more options that most Americans are familiar with. He’s narrowed his essential list of tacos down to 10.

Among those 10 is this temptation: the bone marrow taco. Esparza writes:

In the state of Nuevo Leon, one of Mexico’s steak capitals, you can get roasted marrow bones and a stack of tortillas for making your own tacos. These have become a trend at fine dining Mexican restaurants in Baja California and Mexico City, following in the footsteps of the great chefs of Monterrey, Nuevo León. If you’ve ever indulged in a hot tortilla slathered with a little butter, this is a whole other level of richness. The marrow gives it a concentrated flavor of seasoned, buttery beef. It’s a simple and powerful taste requiring a quality corn tortilla.

Food artist Mike Kravanis (previously at Neatorama) makes delightful bento versions of Disney and other characters out of lunch foods. When the New Horizons probe passed by Pluto, he was inspired to whip up this rice and nori illustration, which he posted to Facebook. You can see more of Kravanis’ bento artworks at his blog OMGiri.

Dan Charles at The Salt was doing research on cottage cheese and was sent this photo of cottage cheese and canned pineapple on a presidential plate. It was the lunch President Richard Nixon ordered just before he resigned from the office. It was never a custom for the White House photographer to take pictures of meals, so you have to wonder what was going through photographer Robert Knudson’s mind at the time.   

The discussion on this meal at Metafilter covers Nixon and his crimes, the best way to eat cottage cheese, and the demise of ordering milk with a meal.

By the way, the original article he was researching is The Fall Of A Dairy Darling: How Cottage Cheese Got Eclipsed By Yogurt. 

(Image credit: Robert Knudson/Nixon Library) 

Hannah of the food blog Bitter Sweet came upon some very high-grade baking chocolate and decided to put it to good use in this novel experiment. These inverted mint patties have a mixture of chocolate and corn syrup in the center with cocoa butter, sugar, and peppermint oil on the outside. She waited for the centers to harden, then dipped them in the coating twice to create this unusual and eye-catching treat.

-via Tasteologie

Rhik Samadder has a column in The Guardian called Inspect a Gadget. Today he looks at an appliance called the Egg Master. It’s a vertical grill that extrudes cooked egg from the top. If you think that’s horrifying, wait until you read the review.

“Spray non-stick agent into container”, the box advises, which definitely gets the tummy rumbling. As instructed, I crack two whole eggs into the hot tunnel, trying to ignore the gurgling sound from within. It’s impossible to see what’s going on – but it smells bad. I squint into the dark opening. A bulging yellow sac peers back at me. Minutes pass; the smell does not. Then, without warning, a flaccid, spongy log half jumps from the machine, writhing like an alien parasite in search of a host body. It’s horrifying, like a scene from The Lair of the White Worm.

Samadder has plenty more to say about the Egg Master, with pictures and video to prove he really used it. Do not read while eating or drinking. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Sarah Lee for the Guardian)

Image: Half Baked Harvest, Damn Delicious

French fries: who doesn't like them? I frequently fall prey to the call of their salty goodness, how about you? July 13 was National French Fry Day. And, although I probably wouldn't be above such a thing, I'm not just making that up to justify some french fry lovin'. 

This article features recipes that look as if they would live up to the "drool worthy" description in the headline. Two are restaurant french fry knockoffs: one for McDonald's and one for In-N-Out. So check it out, grab some potatoes and Make The Magic Happen. 

(Photo: Rakuten)

Rocket News 24 calls this marvelous cake a Baumkuchen. It’s popular in Japan, but originally from Germany. From the inside and outside, it’s a remarkable facsimile of a real watermelon, complete with seeds in the pulp.

(Photo: dareyanen23)

It’s made on a spit. The baker adds layers of batter onto a spinning rod until it becomes a thick mound of cake. It has rings like a tree, which is why the German name for it means “tree cake.”

(Photo: Christines2)

That’s what the bakery Pâtissez in Canberra, Australia calls its extreme milkshakes that are as big as your head and filled with everything they can think of to stuff inside. If it’s in the bakery, why not shove it into the milkshake? Sure, add ice cream and syrup as well. But don’t stop there. I want a chocolate fudge milkshake with an entire Boston cream pie as a garnish, followed by whipped cream and a single cherry.

You can see more pictures of people enjoying the “Freakshow” at BuzzFeed.

Lou Lou P's Delights is a bakery in Leeds, UK. When carefully shaped and decorated, its loaves of bread look like cats!

Looking for a cool way to cool down on your next fifty-state road trip? Then you won't want to miss this great Delish article that features the strangest flavor of ice cream available in each state. As you might expect, not every state has particularly kookie flavors (Alabama, is black walnut really the wackiest you can come up with), but even so, there are plenty of outrageous tastes worth trying. 

Personally, I'd love to try Louisiana's champagne and violet or Kansas' pineapple cilantro sorbet, but I admit that I'm a little terrified of New York's horseradish flavor and Maine's lobster ice cream served with real chunks of lobster.

I'm willing to bet that you've never sat back, sipped on a nice beer and thought, "you know, this could really use some milk." Amazingly though, someone in Japan did, which is why Bilk is a real thing you can buy -featuring 70% beer and 30% milk.

Of course, I would drink a six pack of Bilk before I ever touched Placenta 400,000, which, as the name suggests, is made with real swine placenta. These terribly terrifyinig drinks and more were included in InventorSpot's list of the weirdest drinks in Japan, and believe it or not, this is actually the second such list -the original included such specialties as salad-flavored water and beer made for children.

YouTube Link

The pack of Tums marketers that KFC has locked in a basement somewhere churning out new menu items has struck again: this time with the Chizza, a fried chicken "crust" coated in tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese, and all manner of pizza toppings. Get your passport dusted off: the Chizza is only available in the Philippines for now. -Via Uproxx

Chopping onions often brings a tear to the eye and a knife wound to the fingers, leaving us feeling like there's got to be a better way.

People make products they peddle on TV, but those don't properly chop onions either. What we need is a better way to turn that bulb shaped vegetable into a bunch of tiny rectangular pieces without shedding a tear.

(YouTube Link)

Well, here comes the harshly named YouTube channel You Suck At Cooking to show us not one, not two but seven new, and totally ingenious, ways to chop an onion.

You can dice it, electrify it or simply throw it against the wall! They're all guaranteed to work, but don't hold me to it...

-Via 22Words

(Photo: Torben Hansen)

That’s according to Roberto A. Ferdman of the Washington Post. He writes that in the past few years, Oreo has come to dominate the cookie marketplace:

Since 2005, Oreo sales have grown by more than 60 percent, which is easily the largest increase among any of the top cookie brands sold in the United States. For context, consider that cookie sales market-wide rose by only 10 percent over that period, or that more than 7o percent of that growth is directly attributable to increased demand for Oreos.

Ferdman writes that Oreo’s popularity can be attributed to simultaneous but contradictory marketing strategies: it’s both innovative and stable. The company offers variants, such as Oreo Thins and key lime pie. But these are clearly labeled as different from the standard, which has remained constant for decades. If people want to eat an Oreo, they know exactly what they’re getting in the package.

-via Joe Carter

Move over kale and almond paste, tortillas are about to become the new superfood, but not because they’re great for your body.

They're a superfood because you can use them for more than just wrapping, chewing and swallowing- tortillas can make sweet music if you use a laser cutter to etch grooves into the smooth, floury surface.

Behold the power of the almighty flour tortilla!:

(YouTube Link)

This tasty project was cooked up by YouTube user Rapture Records, and it proves what Latinos have known all along- tortillas are the most versatile food product on the planet!

-Via Tastefully Offensive