In the month that houses the nation's premier evening of gluttony -- the average American consumes some 4,500 calories every Thanksgiving Day, not to mention seemingly endless leftovers -- it's no wonder November is a dreaded month for dieters nationwide. But despite its most famous celebration, the month also ironically serves as the healthy host to National Pepper Month, Vegan Month, National Pomegranate Month, and National Peanut Butter Lover's Month.
Excuses for culinary celebrations range from tame (National Sunday Day, Nov. 11), to obvious (National Turkey Day -- you guessed it, Thanksgiving Day), to practical (National Leftovers Day follows Turkey Day), to downright bizarre (Cook Something Bold and Pungent Day, Nov. 9). So get cooking -- if only for the holidays that you can stomach.
Notable national food holidays for the month of November, after the jump...
Community service has gone to the birds. Or, for some critics, at least the Chicago legal system has after a judge told a defendant he could either do 100 hours community service or bring him some jerk chicken.
When Darrius Logan plead guilty to misdemeanor battery and criminal trespass charges in August, he told Associate Judge Robert Livas that he'd already worked 100 unpaid "community service" hours at Uncle Joe's Jerk Chicken, a South Side Chicago Jamaican restaurant chain. The judge told him to come back in two months with proof he'd completed the community service elsewhere or to bring back enough chicken to feed the court room, the Chicago Tribune reports.
"If you walk in with enough chicken to feed everybody, I'll accept these community service hours," Livas said, according to court transcripts from Aug. 4 obtained by the Tribune. "If you don't, I'm not taking any of them."
Apparently rap has a bad rep at McDonald's drive-thru windows.
In yet another bizarre fast-food fable-turned-reality, four Utah teens received disorderly conduct citations following their ordering manner at a McDonald's drive-thru in American Fork, a small town south of Salt Lake City.
The teens apparently mimicked the popular YouTube jingle, which features rhymes to the likes of "Don't be frontin', son; no seeds on the bun!" They initially vocalized their order at a musical pace, then repeated it again slowly.
Culprit Spenser Dauwalder, 18, said the employees warned them that they were holding up the line, and they needed to order clearly or depart. Although he claims no one else was lined up behind him and his three 17-year-old friends, after the manager came out, the teens simply left -- but the store's manager took down their license information and contacted the police.
The police caught up with the teenagers at a high school parking lot and issued the citations -- which, according to Dauwalder's mother, are being contested.
In ancient times, food was marketed primarily by "hunger." But in the modern era, it's not enough that we eat our food, we must also emotionally bond with it. This partly explains the enduring appeal of food mascots, those bright, colorful, affable characters who beckon us to consume.
In many cases, we choose a product simply because we have a bizarre attachment to the cartoon that represents it. There is no shame in trusting, say, a paranoid Leprechaun with a powerful marshmallow lust more than one's own family. These 10 icons are the awesomest in the pantheon of cheap food branding.
We've long been fans of Jen Yates' fantastically funny food blog, Cake Wrecks, so we were mighty pleased to find the she's finally assembled enough disastrous misspellings, ill-conceived concept cakes and just downright nasty icing snafus to fill a whole book, "Cake Wrecks: When Professional Cakes Go Hilariously Wrong."
Some celebrities are perfect for the food they promote -- Florence Henderson and Wesson Oil seemed made for each other like Popeye and spinach.
But not all stars are a natural match for the products they endorse. (Like that former Soviet premier who went on to do Pizza Hut ads?) Here are Slashfood's picks for the 10 Weirdest Celebrity Food Commercials of All Time.
We can't swear to it, but we suspect that this Momofuku Milk Bar Volcano was sent here from Planet Chang either to teach us or to enslave us. We can't be certain of its purpose, but what we do know is that all the breakfast food bravado we've flaunted up to this point -- Brooklyn deli egg and cheese bombs, full-on Irish black and white pudding spreads, Meatnormous® BK sammies and half-sow Bellagio Buffet crepes laid waste to in short order -- meant diddly squat as we stood at the Volcano's lip and by God, were afraid.
Chef David Chang's co-conspiritor Christina Tosi works the sweet end of the Momofuku Ssam Bar's East Village space at Milk Bar, turning out scrumdiddilyumtious sun-dense cornflake-chocolate chip cookies, dentist-scoffing Crack Pie and soft-serve cereal milk ice creams by the bucketload. We thought we had her all figured out, and there she had to go tossing out double-dog-dare words like "savory" and "volcano." Dang.
Turns out the steaming, softball-sized item is essentially a knish stuffed to rumbling with potato gratin, Gruyere, Benton's bacon, caramelized onions and a good 20 or so minutes off the average human's lifespan. No worries -- contrary to today's New York Times' $25 and Under assessment, we found its hefty, tangy slather of Mornay sauce to be more than adequate compensation for the latter.
We're not ashamed to admit that we were bested and could not conquer the Volcano in one sitting, or even without assistance from concerned colleagues, but we learned and we grew as people (or perhaps that last part was just our thighs.)
No matter. What we'd like to know is this -- how much can you manage to chow down in the morning? Are you after daybreak fare that sticks to your ribs or does coffee alone keep you fueled until lunchtime? Take the poll, and as always, comment away.
You might already know that the word "salary" comes from the Latin word for "salt" and that being "worth your salt" or "worth your weight in salt" was once among the highest possible compliments.
You might even know that "the cream of the crop" references the fact that cream, like the finest workers, rises to the top. However, you probably didn't know that the term "cool as a cucumber" references the vegetable's high water content, not its ability to tame spicy food.
Aphorisms are always a lot of fun, and the joy is doubled when they're related to food. If you're interested in checking out a few more, take a peek at Neatorama's list of twelve food phrases explained. It's the greatest thing since sliced bread!
WC Fields once said "I love children ... if they're cooked properly." As a dedicated meat eater, I tend to have similar feelings about vegans.
While some of my best friends deny themselves the joy of animal products, I simply can't imagine completely divorcing myself from cheese, honey, milk and all the wonderful foods that come from animals. On some level, the idea of approaching life from a tofu haze seems almost suicidally self-abnegating.
In fact, while I have occasionally practiced vegetarianism, I am, at heart, a true carnivore. For health reasons, I try to limit my consumption, but I believe, both philosophically and sensually, that meat is an important part of my diet, if not everyone else's.
But which meat is the best? For health reasons, I'd probably go with chicken or turkey, but if it came to richness, my answer might be duck or veal. In terms of flavor, the answer could be lamb or beef, but for extravagance, it's hard to top a nice big buffalo filet mignon. Then again, in the summer, nothing beats a good grilled swordfish steak ... except for maybe a piece of lightly seared tuna.
This bacon teacup is from Meat After Meat Joy, an exhibition of artists who work in meat (yes, there are more than one!), now running at the Daneyal Mahmood Gallery in New York. If you think bacon art is a contemporary phenomenon, you'll find it interesting to learn that artists have been using meat in the work since at least as far back as 1964, when Carolee Schneemann staged a "happening" involving chicken, sausage, raw fish and several semi-nude performers at the Festival of Free Expression in Paris. Other works at the Meat After Meat Joy exhibit include an animatronic meat shoe that twitches with electricity and a lard and meat flag that is already swarming with maggots. Mmmmm.
As I've mentioned once or twice in the past, I have a pretty wide-open definition of palatable food. I've had my fair share of headcheese, blood pudding, cow-face tacos and other unpopular meat products. More to the point, I often go out of my way to find bizarre things to eat. That having been said, Culinary Schools' list of disgusting delicacies gave me some serious pause. For that matter, the pictures were enough to seriously haunt my dreams.
The thing almost reads like a list of urban food legends. Maggoty cheese? Check. Grilled dog? Check. Soft-boiled duck fetus? Check. Some, like sheep's heads, jellied moose snout, and octopus, are on the list simply because they are conceptually a little difficult to deal with. Others, like blowfish sushi and boiled bat, are potentially life-threatening.
All in all, I don't know if this list is a compendium of "must trys" or a compendium of "must avoids"!
We've had Obama Pez dispensers, Obama sushi, Baracktoberfest Beer, now this: A portrait of our 44th president rendered entirely in breakfast cereal. Click through to CerealArt.com for a larger image. Though the artists, Hank Willis Thomas and Ryan Alexiev, don't specify which cereals they've used, I think I spy Cheerios, Cap'n Crunch, Honeycomb, Lucky Charms and Froot Loops.
What kind of statement is the portrait trying to make? Thomas and Alexiev have this to say: "The sugary sweet mosaic, made of thousands of cereal bits, depicts idea of what a healthily balanced breakfast (democracy) might look like when considering the role that marketing plays in myth building around corporate and political brands."
As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm in the process of working my way through my family's cookbook. One of the contributors was my neighbor and babysitter, Edie. In addition to teaching me how to make a mean gin and tonic, as well as the basics of ceramic sculpture, Edie also took it upon herself to ensure that I had a strong education in the essentials of gourmet cookery. Among other things, this meant keeping a jar full of dried mushrooms in the kitchen, as she felt that it signaled to all visitors "that one was a true gourmet."
This title of this recipe might lead one to believe that it's some sort of meat and cheese mix; in reality, it lands somewhere between a quiche and a quick bread. The original recipe used mild chiles and cream cheese, but I found that increasing the heat and reducing the fat made it even tastier. I've seen other versions of this dish on the internet, but none of them are as light and delicate as this one. It's a snap to make, and keeps beautifully in the refrigerator.
For the chiles, I used La Morena escabeche-style jalapenos, but almost any kind will work.
My Culinary Degradation post, which ran in February, inspired a fair bit of competition among my readers. While I managed to come up with a few moderately-disturbing food choices, my readers really ran with the idea, suggesting outrageous beer and ice cream combinations and fried foods that bordered on blasphemy. Last, but not least, they also suggested some monster burgers that strained the imagination, not to mention the digestive system.
I'm no stranger to big burgers, having worked my way through Red Robin's entire menu, but the Heart Attack Grill's Quadruple Bypass Burger is far, far out of my league. With four 1/2-pound patties, four slices of bacon, three slices of cheese, lettuce, and tomato, it is estimated to contain 8,000 calories. While I can't think of a lot of reasons to visit Chandler Arizona, I may still have to make a visit.
One reader, Astin, recommended Dangerous Dan's, a restaurant in Toronto. Their "Colossal Colon Clogger Combo" contains 24 ounces of beef, a quarter pound of bacon, a quarter pound of cheese, and two fried eggs. For $23.95, it comes with a large shake and a side of gravy and cheese curd-laden fries.
Recently, as I was dipping through a copy of my family cookbook in search of one of my mother's favorite recipes, I took a good, long look at the book itself. In addition to being a nice resource, it is also something of an heirloom: in the early 1980's, flush with the joy of culinary experimentation, my mother and my aunts compiled their favorite recipes into the slim volume. Titling it Beyond Rice Krispie Treats, they dedicated it to my grandmother Ida, who famously "couldn't cook, but loved to eat."
The cookbook is heavily influenced by Seventies-era foodways. The recipes are full of fat, sugar, and sodium, and their seasonings tend to be a little mild for contemporary tastes. On the other hand, they also reflect those days immediately after the release of Julia Child's The Art of French Cooking, when average housewives began to explore the wonders of gourmet cookery. In some ways timid, in other ways bold, Beyond Rice Krispie Treats is a hell of a lot of fun.
Flipping through the book, I decided to do my own version of Julie and Julia, trying out some of the Carter-era cooking that my mom's family compiled. When I ran the idea by my Aunt Evie, she was immediately helpful, sending me almost 30 years worth of notes and updates. With Evie's advice, and my own experimentation, I'm hoping to resurrect some seventies classics.
As I've mentioned once or twice in the past, I have a pretty wide-open definition of palatable food. I've had my fair share of headcheese, blood pudding, cow-face tacos and other unpopular meat products. More to the point, I often go out of my way to find bizarre things to eat. That having been said, Culinary Schools' list of disgusting delicacies gave me some serious pause. For that matter, the pictures were enough to seriously haunt my dreams.
We've had Obama Pez dispensers, Obama sushi, Baracktoberfest Beer, now this: A portrait of our 44th president rendered entirely in breakfast cereal. Click through to CerealArt.com for a larger image. Though the artists, Hank Willis Thomas and Ryan Alexiev, don't specify which cereals they've used, I think I spy Cheerios, Cap'n Crunch, Honeycomb, Lucky Charms and Froot Loops. 
As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm in the process of working my way through my family's cookbook. One of the contributors was my neighbor and babysitter, Edie. In addition to teaching me how to make a mean gin and tonic, as well as the basics of ceramic sculpture, Edie also took it upon herself to ensure that I had a strong education in the essentials of gourmet cookery. Among other things, this meant keeping a jar full of dried mushrooms in the kitchen, as she felt that it signaled to all visitors "that one was a true gourmet."
My Culinary Degradation post, which ran in February, inspired a fair bit of competition among my readers. While I managed to come up with a few moderately-disturbing food choices, my readers really ran with the idea, suggesting outrageous beer and ice cream combinations and fried foods that bordered on blasphemy. Last, but not least, they also suggested some monster burgers that strained the imagination, not to mention the digestive system.
Recently, as I was dipping through a copy of my family cookbook in search of one of my mother's favorite recipes, I took a good, long look at the book itself. In addition to being a nice resource, it is also something of an heirloom: in the early 1980's, flush with the joy of culinary experimentation, my mother and my aunts compiled their favorite recipes into the slim volume. Titling it Beyond Rice Krispie Treats, they dedicated it to my grandmother Ida, who famously "couldn't cook, but loved to eat."
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