Alt-SlashFood

Circus Animal cookies were one of my favorite types of cookie when I was in school. Not only were they sweetly addictive, but they were covered in frosting, decorated with sprinkles and shaped like animals. When combined, those traits make up a combination that is irresistible to kids. The fact that the "animals" were next-to-impossible to identify was not an issue, since my primary objective when faced with the cookies was to find the white ones with the most sprinkles and eat them first.

Adults rarely seem to buy these cookies for themselves, which is unfortunate because they're still fun to eat. Instead of going out and buying a bag, try making them at home, as Peabody from Culinary Concoctions by Peabody did. They look just as good as the originals and, since they're homemade, they probably taste even better. They'd be a great thing to take to a party because they're something that no one would expect you to be able to make at home, not to mention that they're just hard to resist in general.

Source

Not all video games are horrible. Just try out the simulation called Food Force, in which players take on six missions to help feed millions of hungry people in a place called Sheylan in the Indian Ocean. 

The game, freely downloadable off of Yahoo, was created by, of all groups, the United Nations. The UN has a sub-organization called the World Food Programme (WFP) whose mission is "halving the proportion of hungry people in the world." The game is mostly educational, representing to players what the day to day tasks of the WFP are: from determining a what a balanced diet for the people of Sheylan would be to figuring out they best way to distribute aid. No guns, no shooting, but there are a few helicopter rides.

Of all of Nature’s gifts, nothing is dearer to the hearts of drunks and gluttons than the slider. The slider! So named because of the ease with which it enters, and exits, the gastrointestinal system. Glorified in film and in literature. The end of a thousand loveless nights, and the start of a million melancholy days. I love the slider, and can't get enough of the little fellows.

The hamburger, you see, is a paradoxical creature. It is most itself when small, so that the basic proportion of surface to interior is 1:1,  ideally with a browned coarse surface that yields to oozing interiorities within. But people like to eat hamburgers with more meat; and most restaurants are only too happen to appease them. So the hamburger, as it becomes more popular, loses its soul, like a rapper who spends so much time quaffing Cristal in nightclubs that he forgets the mean streets.

Source

It’s kind of cute actually, this little fugu. A tiny, embryonic-looking fish with huge eyes and an enormous forehead, barely a tail, and miniscule gimpy-finding-nemo fins, it looks quite innocuous. But oh, mortality! for the predator who pisses little fugu off. The fugu explodes into an enormous ball, armored with deadly spikes, and looks like those military mines planted at the bottom of the sea. The amount of fugu poison that can fit onto a pinhead is enough to kill a man, and all the poison in a single blowfish could kill 30 men. Scary. Well, even in its military form, it’s still kind of cute. In a fish tank.

So leave it to those crazy Japanese (and I say that with the utmost respect,) to make fugu a highly-prized delicacy.

For email, I use Gmail. One of the greatest things about Gmail is that it is pretty good about sequestering all spam email into a separate folder.

It would be lovely if the spam emails were automatically deleted instead of filed away, but that's a rant for another blog. So for now, I must click into the spam folder, click "all" and "delete forever." At the rate I get spam email, I have to do this about 5 times a day before it gets scary in there.

I just saw that Gmail has added a lovely feature to the top of my spam folder. Every time I go in there to delete spam email, a new recipe that includes the real Hormel Spam appears! You can even scroll back and forth through them right there in the top bar. My spam email folder is now a recipe box for Spam!

So far, I've seen a Creamy Spam Broccoli Casserole, Spam Breakfast Burrito, and the best of the lot, Spam Vineyard Salad. The recipes come from recipesource, so I'm not sure if these are "sponsored" recipe links, or just a lovely new feature that those kids over at Google thought would be fun(ny).

It's rare that I'm stymied when I call upon my meaty muse, but it has happened two weeks running. No cause for alarm there, I'm sure. But first I was unable to come up with anything good to do about turkey, despite knowing a guy who was cooking one in a specially-made Caja China box. And this past week, after days and days of lying around my Castle of Carnivorous Consumption, making different kinds of Siberian dumplings, I couldn't even get together to produce an emotional essay about same. So I apologize to you, Slashfood reader. You expect better free content from your browsing.

Call me an armchair general, but I really am enjoying this year's flu. Maybe it has something to do with missing three straight days of work right after Thanksgiving. Maybe I was one of the lucky ones who got to be healthy through the four day weekend of Thanksgiving, then miraculously catch the flu the following Monday morning, and get the flu only where it's bad enough you have to take cold medicine but not so bad you can't enjoy your own suffering. Of course there's been flu food posted within the hallowed halls of slashfood already this season, but I thought I'd present a wrap up of the best folk remedies as A) overheard at the East Village's "Flower Power" herb store while I quietly helped my hottie friend Dana stock up on passionflower last weekend and B) told to me over the phone by garlic advocate Heidi Ferrell, and C) what I already know from years of sickliness.

Of course one of the keys to calling in sick to work if you are a faker from your high school days is that you have to sound a lot worse than you feel, otherwise you might not be able to cancel your scheduled engagements so easily. Thus I don't necessarily want to stop the symptoms of sneezing and coughing up phlegm, rather I want it to be less constant, more violent and loud, like a SWAT team raid. Sudden expectoration is the key. Therefore the good herbal tea to drink will always have ginger in it. It's a heat generator, as is cinnamon and nutmeg, both of which are fine additions to any flu remedy.

Source

Last year, Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake told Engadget that her favorite Flickr group was the squared circle group, which contains thousands of images of round things in the square frame of a photograph. Many of these things, naturally, are food (just ask Saveur, king of the round image).

A recent discussion thread shows dozens of gorgeous "squircled" food images. A few of my favorites: pie; exotic fruit; chile peppers; sausages; dosa; caramel apple cupcake; apple; pain aux raisins; artichokes; and more sausages, with eggs.

Join the square circle group to upload your own photos, and be sure to add them to slashfood's Flickr group, as well - we periodically select images to be featured as Food Porn or to win fabulous prizes on theme days.

Source

Now that Thanksgiving is over, the question is, did you get to eat cranberries? And weren't they great, and they're good for you so don't you think this is a good time to keep the trend going, and keep eating them on a regular basis? Words cannot describe how good they are for you -- acidic enough to cut a mile-wide path through your clogged urinary tract. Girls prone to urinary tract infection take cranberry extract supplements all the time, and so do savvy boys with bad prostates. Recent studies show cranberry could fight tooth decay, lower cholesterol, even heal your twisted, broken heart. No berry has more anti-oxidants, except maybe the blueberry, which has got his brother cran's back when the heat's on.

 The cool thing about cranberry sauce is it comes in a can, and it is even allowed to retain its pleasing can shape when served, as is the anti-pretentious American tradition (if at the Thanksgiving table, someone insists on mashing the sauce up, you are required, according to the original tenets of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, to pelt them with bits of balled up bread and accuse them of pretension.) I didn't get out to an actual turkey day this year, and that made it about the best Thanksgiving ever, wandering the deserted New York streets muttering to myself. But a special someone did bring me a tupperware container full of leftovers from the party she went to, and man, the cook really laid on the garlic, but the cranberries were awesome. I had to take three alka seltzers and it made me realize, you can ruin a turkey by letting it get too dry or cramming it full of too much salt and garlic, but you can't screw with cranberries. They rock.

 See, cranberries got proanthocyanidins (PACs), which prevent E. coli bacteria from sticking to the walls of the urinary tract and other sensitive areas. This stops you from getting all sorts of nasty things that bacteria would like to cause you with all its sticking. They are laden with anti-oxidants, more so than any other fruit, with blueberries maybe in second place and that pomegranate stuff in the funny bottle that costs four dollars.

Now there are many ways in which to keep the cranberry habit going. Many will tell you that the stuff is far too bitter to take straight, but don't believe the hype and go drinking Ocean Spray juice cocktails thinking you're going to really get healthy. Anything that calls itself a cranberry juice "cocktail" is going to be basically Hawaiian punch with a couple of cranberries thrown in. It's better for you than, say, Kool Aid, but it's not exactly the healthiest choice. Ocean Spray also makes good juice blends that mix cranberry with other juices, such as grape and raspberry, in the misguided assumption that we strong Americans are afraid of a juice so tart and bitter that it causes our eyes to pop out and our tongue to curl back inwards on itself like a rolled up newspaper.

Source

Thanksgiving is synonymous with turkey, of course -- a depressing fact no amount of boiling oil, salt water, or heritage breeding can disguise. Turkey is bad. Even as the self-appointed “majarajah of meat,” I find it impossible to work up any enthusiasm for this bland bird -- and I make a living from feigning fascination, especially during the holiday article-assigning season.