Here's something vampire fans didn't have to wait an eternity for -- a "Twilight"-themed restaurant is slated to open in Forks, Wash., the real setting for the fictional teen vampire romance novels.
Annette and Tim Root plan to open the "Twilight" restaurant next year, the Peninsula Daily News reports. The family restaurant, tentatively named Volterra after the Italian city where all the powerful vampires live in Stephenie Meyer's series, will serve breakfast, lunch and dinner. No word on whether blood will be on the menu.
What do you think? Dumb idea or good marketing strategy?
Taking on the Bistro Burger. Photo: Jennifer Lawinski
What do "dessert nachos" made of cookies and cakes, deep-fried dumplings and a loaded double cheeseburger have in common?
They were all on the menu for the This Is Why You're Fat "Eat and Tweet" challenge to celebrate the launch of the popular blog's new book of the same name (tag line: where dreams become heart attacks).
This Is Why You're Fat tweeted the locations of six Manhattan food trucks and the first person to send in pics of all six fattening treats won a party for 25 friends from the food truck of their choice and a copy of the "This Is Why You're Fat" book by blog founders Jessica Amason and Richard Blakeley.
'Savory Baking: Warm and Inspiring Recipes for Crisp, Crumbly, Flaky Pastries'
by Mary Cech
Photography by Noel Barnhurst Chronicle Books -- 2009 Buy it on Amazon
Baking doesn't have to be a sweet thing, as Mary Cech proves in her new cookbook "Savory Baking." The veteran pastry chef turns traditional pastries upside down with recipes for seafood strudel, Yukon gold brown betty and caprese-salad-filled profiteroles in this mouthwatering book.
You don't have to throw out everything you know about baking to feel at home in Cech's kitchen. Instead, you'll use your skills to whip up creative twists to the classics.
See what we tested and find out whether the book's worth buying after the jump.
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."
Not sure which new cookbooks are worth investing in this year? Take the guesswork out of your decision and follow along with food52'sTournament of Cookbooks. The competition -- run by this new home-cooking Web site's founders (former New York Times food editor Amanda Hesser and food writer Merrill Stubbs) -- pits 16 of this year's best books against each other, to be cooked from and judged by 17 venerable chefs and food writers.
Tournament rounds will play out over the course of 4 weeks, with a decision announced every weekday beginning Wednesday. For the first challenge in the bracket, "My New Orleans," by John Besh was bested by "Real Cajun," by Donald Link, as judged by Daniel Patteron. The winning book will take home the first Piglet trophy and be feted at the Astor Center in New York City on Nov. 9, 2009.
After the jump, see list of the cookbooks and judges in play. ...
For me, it's cured fish or perhaps cold, leftover dark-meat chicken, gnawed bare-handed and shared with my minimally patient dogs.
For my husband -- who can't tolerate the smell of the pickled herring I down like a rabid porpoise -- it's almost inevitably the nearest Chinese joint's chicken and mixed vegetables sauteed in brown sauce, chased by a bourbon Old Fashioned, muddled from the unpretty orange that tags along in the delivery bag. The cocktail, I can fully support. The gloppily sauced crinkle-cut carrots have featured prominently in several of my nightmares.
Deborah Madison: People eat what their spouses don't like a lot of the time. A number of men said of blood sausages, 'My wife doesn't like blood sausage, so when she's gone that's what I cook.'
Slashfood: How did you get started on this topic?
DM: Many years ago, I was invited to go with Oldways Preservation and Trust -- which is a food think tank out of Boston -- to a lot of Mediterranean countries. I got to bring my husband, who's an artist, and he was just a little awkward, I think. He didn't really know people but knew of them so he started asking this question kind of as a way of breaking the ice. He kept a little notebook and I never knew about this until I found it when we were moving a few years later.
SF: So many of the people you interviewed have common experiences -- they'll make a big steak or have herring. And then there were some that didn't fit the mold. What was the strangest thing you heard?
Read more about solo toast, herring and margarita mix after the jump.
On the heels of the release of the Michelin Guide's roundup of New York's best eateries, Zagat has unveiled its diner-chosen picks for the best of Gotham eats.
Zagat compiles its listings through surveys submitted by diners in New York. This year, the guide found New Yorkers dining out less because of the current economic climate (about 3.0 times per week now versus 3.3 to 3.4 times a week last year).
Michelin's "New York City Restaurants 2010" dining guide was released this week, bumping up Daniel Boulud's Daniel restaurant to three stars while stripping Mario Batali's Del Posto of a star.
Daniel is in small company in the three-star category of "exceptional cuisine and worth the journey." Masa, Per Se, Jean Georges and Le Bernardin also retained their three-star ratings.
Del Posto dropped from the two-star category ("excellent cooking and worth a detour") to one star ("a very good restaurant in its category").
Other restaurants that saw significant changes include the Italian restaurant Alto, with a bump up to two stars and Corton, which also won a double star.
What do you think of guidebook ratings? Let us know in the comments below.
The cookbook shelf of a former vegetarian. Photo: emdot, Flickr.
Whether you're a full-fledged veg or a pro-greens protein fiend, vegetarian cookbooks are the door to a world where beans, greens and grains are celebrated. These books will introduce you to a whole new pantry of ingredients. Just as a meat eater might strive to make use of the entire animal, vegetarian cooks grab inspiration from far and wide and turn every bit of edible, natural earth into a grand culinary experience.
What follows after the jump are five vegetarian cookbooks that any veggie lover must have, covering the staples of meatless cookery -- secret recipes from restaurants, classic culinary bibles, respected names and haute vegetarian food. Which do you think will reign supreme?
"This is a complete vindication of Jessica's creativity," Orin Snyder, a lawyer for Jessica Seinfeld, told the Daily News.
The judge said the only similarity between the books was their goal of hiding healthy food inside kids' meals, the Associated Press reports.
Swain declined to rule on defamation claims against Jerry Seinfeld, saying they should be filed in state court. Last year, the funnyman appeared on "The Late Show with David Letterman" and joked that people with three names like James Earl Ray and Mark David Chapman turn out to be assassins, the AP said.
Lapine's lawyer told the AP that claim and one against HarperCollins -- the publisher of the Seinfeld book -- "are still very much alive."
'Mario Batali Simple Italian Food: Recipes From My Two Villages' By Mario Batali Photographs by Mark Ferri Clarkson Potter -- 1998 Buy it on Amazon
More than a decade ago -- long before Del Posto, Otto and road trips through Spain with Gwyneth Paltrow -- Mario Batali had two restaurants, Pó and Babbo, and was just beginning to grow his rock-'n'-roll, orange-Croc-wearing legend through the Food Network.
It's there that we find him with "Mario Batali Simple Italian Food," his first cookbook, which takes readers through the tastes of Borgo Capanne, where Batali worked in Trattoria La Volta on the border of the Italian regions Emilia-Romagna and Toscana, as well as his other "village," New York.
Batali divides the recipes of these villages by color: The orange-titled ones are those he invented in New York; the brown titles are those he learned in Italy.
See what we tested and whether it's worth buying after the jump.
"Born Round," the new Frank Bruni memoir. Photo: Amazon.com.
Mark your calendars, fans of "Garlic and Sapphires" and other food critic memoirs. Frank Bruni, the outgoing critic at the New York Times and the man behind the upcoming memoir "Born Round," will be blabbing to the press -- ABC News' "Nightline," to be exact -- about his history with food, including a childhood eating disorder this coming Wednesday night at 11:35 EST.
Choice quotes from a press release reveal that Bruni was on the Atkins diet at age 8 -- "Mom bought it in hardcover ... I remember leafing through it and learning about ketones and ketosis and you know, having no idea what that meant, I was 8 years old, but I thought, 'Oooh that's profound stuff. If I can get into this ketosis thing I'll be home free. I'll be skinny.' " Even later, in college, "I threw up a lot of my meals. Whenever I would eat a meal that would get out of hand, I would throw it up." Now Bruni has an incredible workout routine and -- perhaps most astonishing to those of us who write about food for a living -- is the same weight as when he started his gig five years ago.
We know we'll be watching, and we'll post our deepest thoughts about the interview online the next day.
For healthy ways to stay slim, check out our sister site, thatsfit.com.
"First let me introduce myself. I'm Craig Claiborne, and this is Julia Child." Photo: Scanned from A Feast Made for Laughter
"And to tell the truth, I was bored with restaurant criticism. At times I didn't give a damn if all the restaurants in Manhattan were shoved into the East River and perished. Had they all served nightingale tongues on toast and heavenly manna and mead, there is just so much that the tongue can savor, so much that the human body (and spirit) can accept, and then it resists. Toward the end of my days as restaurant critic, I found myself increasingly indulging in drink, the better to endure another evening of dining out. I had become a desperate man with a frustrating job to perform." -- from 'A Feast Made for Laughter' by Craig Claiborne, New York Times Dining editor and restaurant critic, 1982
While there have thus far been no reports of departing New York Times restaurant critic and newly-minted memoirist Frank Bruni tipsily pressing ham against the windows of the Second Avenue Deli, rolling members of the Cipriani family for spare change and Bellini drippings, or skulking through the catacombs at Ninja New York, randomly alarming the goofily hooded servers, it's not as if he's going silently into that last bite.
"What happened to the rats on your property?" someone asks urban farmer Novella Carpenter.
"I have a theory that my pigs ate the rats," Carpenter says. Realizing that her audience has been munching on slices of said pig's hindquarters, she laughed. "So enjoy some delicious prosciutto!"
Farmers are reputed to have a tough streak. They step over piles of excrement, battle gargantuan hogs and, of course, have to earn a living. Carpenter, author of "Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer," seems no exception. She lives in the city, not the country, "so I can get Chinese food at 2 a.m."
The two 300-pound hogs she raised in what she calls the Oakland, Calif., "ghetto," also enjoyed Chinese takeout. She read about her adventures in urban farming on a Brooklyn, N.Y., rooftop adjacent to a 6,000-foot, 30-crop rooftop farm built by Goode Green and tended by farmers Annie Novak and Ben Flanner.
Dumpster diving, fish guts and the cost of rooftop farming, after the jump.
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