Blogs : Food Media
Food Media CHOW's roundup of food-related news from blogs, newspapers, magazines, cookbooks, and film.
Chocolate Sex Sells
In this very creepy deodorant ad, a guy sprays on Axe Dark Temptation and is turned into chocolate man, irresistible to chicks. I like the part where he melts his hand off to make hot chocolate. Yes, amputation means love, wouldn’t you agree, Julian Sands and Sherilyn Fenn?
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God Save the Cream
Regardless of whether “Sex Pistol” is the best name for anything you’re supposed to put in your mouth, a pop-up food cart in the London department store Selfridges will soon be serving this new ice cream flavor to paying customers. According to the Telegraph:
“The ice cream contains natural stimulants including ginkgo biloba, arginine and guarana and is served with a shot of La Fee Absinthe poured over the top. Creators of the green and white dessert claim it enhances blood flow and increases energy levels and the results are so electric that customers are limited to just one serving per person.”
Dangerously amazing or not, the Sex Pistol doesn’t come cheap. A portion will cost £12 (about $20).
Image source: Flickr member dullhunk under Creative Commons
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Name That (Bizarre) Restaurant Theme
If your idea of a good read is scattershot list of “bizarre” items, WebUrbanist has a treat for you: a new collection of oddly-themed restaurants, which follows its presumably traffic-grabbing original round-up of weird eatery ideas from around the world.
The latest set includes a prison-themed restaurant, an airplane-themed restaurant, a café with freely available cuddly cats for the petting (in Japan, naturally), and Ninja, the NYC restaurant that critic Frank Bruni famously told people to turn around and leave before entering, as that way “you will be spared an infinitely larger measure of tedium, a visually histrionic smorgasbord of undistinguished food and a discordant bill that can easily exceed $100 a person with tax, tip and drinks.”
Note to WebUrbanist: Saying that some of New York’s “most creative fusion food” is served at Ninja seems a little generous.
Here’s footage of Japan’s Cat Café Calico, where there are kitties around for customer enjoyment:
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The Perils of Buying Plants at Walmart
Wondering whom to blame for the scarcity of organic tomatoes in the stores? It’s a late-season blight caused by a fungus like the one responsible for the Irish potato famine. But in the New York Times’ weekend opinion section, Dan Barber goes further: The blight was kicked off by the resurgence of home gardening:
“According to plant pathologists, this killer round of blight began with a widespread infiltration of the disease in tomato starter plants. Large retailers like Home Depot, Kmart, Lowe’s and Wal-Mart bought starter plants from industrial breeding operations in the South and distributed them throughout the Northeast. (Fungal spores, which can travel up to 40 miles, may also have been dispersed in transit.) Once those infected starter plants arrived at the stores, they were purchased and planted, transferring their pathogens like tiny Trojan horses into backyard and community gardens. Perhaps this is why the Northeast was hit so viciously: instead of being spread through large farms, the blight sneaked through lots of little gardens, enabling it to escape the attention of the people who track plant diseases.”
Whoa! It’s your fault, backyard gardeners! Barber goes on to suggest that gardens should be sourced locally. Buy local seeds or starter plants from nearby growers. “A tomato plant that travels 2,000 miles is no different from a tomato that has traveled 2,000 miles to your plate,” he writes.
Though Barber perhaps comes down a bit heavy on home gardeners, his point is valid: Once you start growing, you’re part of the country’s agricultural network. What you do can affect other people, in ways good and bad.
Image source: Flickr member visualdensity under Creative Commons
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It May Be an Offal-Stuffed Sheep Stomach, but It's Ours
In a move akin to announcing that the hamburger with ketchup, mustard, and sesame seed bun was originally invented and served in France, food historian Catherine Brown has attempted to take away one of Scotland’s few (if unsavory) gastronomic claims to fame: the offal-based dish called haggis. Brown states: “It was originally an English dish. In 1615, [cookbook writer] Gervase Markham says that it is very popular among all people in England.”
She then adds insult to injury, as the Telegraph reports:
“Ms Brown believes that Scottish nationalists may have appropriated haggis as a symbol of their nationhood in the decades following the Act of Union with England in 1707. ‘It seems to be that there’s an identity thing there. We’d lost our monarchy, we’d lost our parliament and we gained our haggis,’ she said.”
So, in essence, Scotland traded its independence for a guts-and-oatmeal belly bomb? A dubious trade. (For the record: If you’ve never tried haggis, it can, if prepared well, taste much, much better than you feared. Note the conditional statement, though.)
Image source: Flickr member Biology Big Brother under Creative Commons
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New Cookbook Roundup
A quick look at some of the most interesting cookbooks being released about now.
Phaidon is known for publishing big coffee table books—now comes this 704-page tome by Vefa Alexiadou on Greek food. The variety is huge: bean, spinach, and sausage casserole; braised salt cod with onions; Cretan barley rusks; and glistening syrup-soaked pastries.
A collection of recipes from the Barcelona Wine Bar and Restaurant mini-empire in Connecticut. While the cocktail recipes are pretty weak (come on guys, sour mix?) the food recipes like crispy fried whitebait, warm octopus salad with fingerling potatoes and smoked paprika, and cauliflower and fennel cazuela look good.
You’ve got to love the story behind this book. Francis Mallmann got sick of “making fancy French food for wealthy customers in Buenos Aires,” so he went back to basics: cooking over open flames. The book would be perfect for anyone wanting some grilling inspiration; beautiful pictures and techniques for whole animal roasts, “burnt” cooked polenta, and crisp sweetbreads are just the beginning.
Subtitled “200 Unforgettable Recipes for Entertaining Every Guest at Every Occasion,” this book isn’t the typical no-duh roundup of quinoa salads and fake cheese pizzas, nor is it stuffed with overly complicated raw food preparations. Instead, it contains sophisticated-yet-simple recipes, like pan-fried asparagus with lime juice, red velvet cake with butter cream frosting, and red lentil, artichoke stew.
This year-in-the-kitchen cookbook offers recipes both sweet and savory from the well-loved restaurant in this northern California paradise. The new American recipes aren’t particularly innovative (yam and sweet potato pie; blue cheese stuffed figs with a balsamic reduction; roasted chicken) but they’re tasty sounding, and the groovy pictures of hippie farmers and jewel-like produce really take you there.
Like an art exhibition about Ferran Adrià of El Bulli in book form, this is a thick, beautifully produced product. It contains pictures of his dishes, along with essays written by fellow chefs and critics, graphs, musings, and other ephemera. It would make a great gift, not just for a chef or aspiring chef, but anybody who cares about culture and art.
Make your own dairy-free vegan ice cream (which relies primarily on soy milk) in interesting flavors like sweet potato basil, dark chocolate acai berry, sweet cucumber, and black sesame. A third of the calories, 100 percent of the fun!
Check out Chowhound’s Cookbook of the Month and join the discussion.
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