Slashfood

"When Irish eyes are smiling... they steal your heart away" -- those lyrics probably bring to mind serious St. Patty's celebrations. I'm big into entertaining and any excuse to host a party works for me – especially if there is a theme, color or food involved.

But St. Patrick's Day has always been much more to me than just a day for late-night bashes and green beer, because it also happens to be my Granny "Patricia's" birthday too.

I'm starting a new tradition in celebration of the wonderful cooking legacy she passed on to me, growing up in her kitchen. Every year, along with the gift and birthday card I send, I'll include a brand new recipe and photo from my blog, only it will be delivered the old-fashioned way, via snail mail. (Granny certainly knows her way around the kitchen but isn't as savvy when it comes to the computer.)

Find the Skinny Chef's recipe for a Shamrock Shake after the jump.

• Even garlic is going green -- and adding nice mellow flavor as it does.
• "Zinfandel's like Beyonce"... and these wines are Zin's sexy backup singers.
• For the Vegas-bound, here are tons of great new restaurants.
• If you're thinking more about China than Vegas, try out Yu Garden -- a taste of Shanghai without the 12-hour plane trip.
• What is this, chopped liver? Why, yes, it is actually.

What's worse than having to endure a long, hard winter? Enduring a long, hard winter as a crawfish.

Crawfish hate the cold. When the temperature dips, they respond in kind, burrowing into the mud and refusing to eat. That means the few critters that have wriggled into farmers' traps this season are too puny to impress the many Louisianans who traditionally feast on crawfish during Lent.

"Mother Nature's throwing us a curve ball, and the trouble is she keeps throwing them," says Stephen Minville, director of the Louisiana Crawfish Farmers Association.

Minville's 2010 harvest stands at about 30 percent of his typical year-to-date haul, with the most successful farmers topping out at 40 percent. "Optimism is running out," Minville says.

Go on. Fuss a little. Make breakfast in bed for somebody this weekend. Grind the best coffee you've got, bake these over-the-top eggs and mushrooms in Black Forest ham crisps, stick a flower in a vase, throw it all on a tray and it could lead to the best Saturday morning you've spent in a while.

I don't know where blogger Frim-fram-sauce served her eggs, but she added a little cheddar to the original Gourmet recipe to make it even more creamy. I do know, however, that cooking up a breakfast like this is akin to offering up a love potion, so serve it wisely and well.

Become a member of the Slashfood Flickr pool to get a shot of having your photos featured in Feast Your Eyes.

The Countess. Padma. Tabatha. If you're on a first name basis with these gals, chances are you're a Bravo junkie (like us). The cable channel just announced a new slate of shows in production and it sounds like they're going to pull us back into their clutches yet again.

In development is 'Around the World in 80 Plates.' Contestants fly around the globe to test their culinary skills in some of the world's most famous restaurants. (We're pretty sure El Bulli and The Fat Duck are getting called right now.) Of course the contestants have to adapt to local cultures and food tastes.

The newspaper business isn't exactly stable these days, but still, the departure of Wall Street Journal restaurant critic Raymond Sokolov is somewhat of a surprise. According to the New York Times, Sokolov, who's been a critic for The Journal for four years, was recently asked to cover food trends instead of writing reviews. He opted to leave the paper instead. "We certainly parted amicably," he told the Times. "The conversation was as friendly as it could have been."

But here's where things get a little bit confusing: Sokolov says he was told that the Journal was discontinuing restaurant reviews altogether, but Ashley Huston, the paper's director of communications for the paper, says otherwise. "We are not abandoning restaurant reviews and are still committed broadly to food coverage," she told the Times.

While it might be OK to eat horse in Europe or Japan, slaughtering horses for human consumption is a no-no in the United States.

But if one Missouri lawmaker has his way, horse-slaughter facilities could re-open in the U.S., a move that has both its supporters and its vocal critics, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and USA Today reported.

Missouri state Rep. Jim Viebrock, R-Republic, introduced the bill earlier this year to allow horse processing plants to open in the Show-Me-State, the papers reported. Pro-slaughter advocates say the move will help the equine industry, hurt by the closure of the country's three horse slaughterhouses. But anti-slaughter groups say it's the recession, not the absence of slaughterhouses, that is hurting horses.

But even if the ban were lifted, would Americans dig in?

Rising out of the permafrost like Superman's fortress of solitude, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault stores every kind of crop seed imaginable. The official mission of the vault is to protect biodiversity and help reduce hunger, particularly in developing nations. But as its foreboding nickname ("the doomsday vault") suggests, it could also come in handy in case of, say, apocalyptic global warming.

A fairly new project, the vault -- which is located on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen in the Arctic Svalbard archipelago -- received its first seed shipments just over two years ago, from more than 100 different nations. This month the vault hits a new milestone: The collection now tops 500,000, making it the most diverse seed collection on earth. There's a ways to go before it's full, though. The vault has the capacity to hold 4.5 million samples, and each sample itself holds 500 seeds, so a maximum of 2.25 billion seeds can be protected and preserved.