A Michael Jackson tribute in sushi. Photo: alainalele/flickr
Don't stop till you get enough!
It was only a matter of time, as our friends at Cake Wrecks pointed out, before the Michael Jackson cake tributes would start to roll in at neighborhood grocery stores. But it is the great state of Iowa that surprised us this week with the announcement that the State Fair would honor the King of Pop with a tribute in butter.
That's right, a Michael Jackson butter carving will sit in the 40-degree-F comfort of a cooler from Aug. 13-23, the Des Moines Register reports. Lori Chappell, the fair's marketing director, told the paper "we're just trying to pay tribute to his contribution to music and dance ... as opposed to giving any scrutiny of his life."
So you think you're out playing hooky from work on the promise of a lovely Southern lunch stewed up by your favorite cookbook authors and then all of a sudden, in strides Bobby Flay.
Matt Lee and Ted Lee and the rest of the assembled had been lured to a barge on the Hudson River -- Matt's preferred canoeing channel -- on the premise that the brothers would be filming a segment for a Food Network special called "Lowcountry Lowdown." They'd filmed the first half in Charleston, S.C., and reportedly, the duel would have gone down on their home turf, had Chef Flay not fallen prey to the vagaries of air travel.
Read more about throwing down with the Country Captain after the jump.
Politicians are used to getting grilled, but when Bobby Flay dropped by the White House for a private lesson, the tables were turned. The chef schooled President Obama on his corn technique and the importance of not flipping positions on meaty matters.
Itching for pictures from the Food & Wine Magazine Classic in Aspen? What's Mario wearing? Did Ilan Hall rock the Pee-Wee Herman tux again? We'll be posting red carpet and candid images throughout the festival, so bookmark, refresh and repeat as needed.
Spinning off the wildly popular "Top Chef," Bravo TV is pitting 24 of the best chefs around the globe against one another in a no-holds-barred knife fight for the chance to win $100,000 for charity in "Top Chef Masters." The show, which debuts Wednesday at 10 p.m. EST, comes complete with its very own Padma in Kelly Choi, a 33-year-old former model born in Seoul and raised in the suburbs of Richmond, Va.
She was cherry-picked straight from local access TV in New York, where, dressed in skimpy outfits and armed with an inquisitive mind, she gave New Yorkers an intimate view of some of the city's top kitchens. We caught up with her to talk about her rise to national stardom, how the best chefs in the world handle criticism and what the deal is with magicians acting as judges.
How did you get involved with the show? Someone from Bravo called me out of the blue and asked me to fly out to L.A. to meet the producers. What I do on ["Eat Out NY"] is pick a dish and cook it with a chef on TV. I pick all the restaurants that I want to feature and dishes that I think the readers would be into. This Bravo exec saw me on TV and flew me out and my dream came true.
Why do you think this show matters in this economy? Why not? Everybody loves food. The alternative is to cook at home and you can totally pick up tips. It's a fun way -- to be inspired by fun and passionate people -- to cook at home.
Another day, another list. This time, it's Anthony Bourdain's "13 Places to Eat Before You Die," which appears in the June issue of Men's Health. Bourdain's article shouts out restaurants and stores across the globe, from New York's smoked fish shrine Russ & Daughters to Spain's gourmand ground zero, elBulli.
Bourdain acknowledges that as "any seasoned traveler can tell you, the 'best' meals on the planet are the result of an ephemeral confluence of circumstances," and makes convincing arguments for each of his picks, which also include Kansas City, Kan.'s Oklahoma Joe's Barbecue, Tokyo's Sukiyabashi Jiro and London's St. John.
But even with the disclaimer and rationale behind Bourdain's choices, plenty are as likely to find fault with his logic (and apparently abundant frequent flier miles) as they are with a list proclaiming, say, the best pizza places in the U.S. We have the text of the article so you can weigh in on Bourdain's hits -- and misses -- after the jump.
Apologies to anyone dining in a marquee New York restaurant on Wednesday night -- we were hogging all your chefs and a restaurateur or 10 over at the Roseland Ballroom. And no, we won't apologize; it was all for a great cause.
Since 1988, the Share Our Strength organization has drawn together chefs, mixologists, volunteers and food fans in cities around the United States for Taste of the Nation events benefiting local food assistance organizations via funds generated by ticket sales, sponsorships and silent auctions. New York City's 2009 installment featured small-plate fare from more than 50 eateries and chefs, including newly minted James Beard Award winner Dan Barber's Blue Hill, Danny Meyer's entire armada of restaurants and the revitalized Oak Room as well as generously poured tipples from the likes of Audrey Saunders, Tony Abou-Ganim, Jim Meehan and many (many ... so, so, many ... ) more.
After the jump, read more about celeb spotting, volunteer opportunities and the best bite we had all night.
After battling cancer for more than a year, comedic actor turned chef Dom DeLuise died Monday at the age of 75. While many will remember DeLuise for his roles in a slew of Mel Brooks films -- or for his less lovable "Candid Camera" years -- others are mourning the loss of a member of the culinary community. If you couldn't tell from what the obits are calling his "roly-poly persona," DeLuise loved to cook, and even more than that, he loved to eat what he cooked.
Yeah, it's a teensy bit Inside Baseball for the fooderati, but we got a big kick out of seeing our favorite Gourmet staffers (Wuzzap, Terrebonne? Lookin' fresh, Knauer and Houghtaling!) in a cute 'n campy Gourmet.com video sending up Editor-In-Chief Ruth Reichl's '90s tenure as an undercover restaurant critic for the New York Times.
Reichl's penchant for wearing outlandish disguises to protect her dwindling anonymity was the underpinning of her 2005 memoir Garlic and Sapphires, but somehow we doubt even she would have the quenelles to stomp into the Four Seasons' Pool Room wearing quite this much codpiece.
Each Thursday, we round up a selection of scrumptious links from our friends over at YumSugar. Here's what they've got cooking this week.
Memo to the First Lady: That's the nicest-looking gardening outfit we've ever seen! Take this quiz and find out how well you know what the Obamas are planting this year.
A pretty dang delicious-looking milk chocolate and peanut butter cookie recipe.
Edamame in linguine? They make it look tasty over at YumSugar.
A writer is entranced by the simple charms of homemade tortillas. Have you tried it? Take their poll.
McDonald's joins the upscale burger trend with one-third pound Angus patties, coming this August.
Although the film adaption of "Julie & Julia" isn't coming out until August, Julia Child fans are already excited at the prospect of seeing America's most iconic cooking superstar served up onscreen. Following last weekend's sale of the film's props, your devoted Slashfood staff has been searching for images of the upcoming film.
Everything about Julia Child was outsized, from her flamboyant cooking style to her rich, fluttering falsetto, to her famously dry humor. This, after all, was the great chef who started her professional life as a purported spy in the OSS during World War II, became one of the few women to attend Paris' Le Cordon Bleu cooking school, and ended up spearheading a home-cooking movement that transformed American cuisine with her TV show "The French Chef."
Given Child's impressive height (she was 6-foot-2), it's perhaps unsurprising that the majority of her imitators have been men. The most famous was probably Dan Aykroyd on "Saturday Night Live." His repeated exhortation to "Save the liver!" captured Child's forceful personality and occasional tendency toward self-parody. An even better tribute was offered by John Candy, with a spot-on impression of Child boxing with Fred Rogers in "Battle of the PBS Stars" on "SCTV."
Another day, another list. Yesterday the good folks at San Pellegrino released their annual World's 50 BestRestaurants, a sort of Rough Guide for gastronomes with fat wallets and abundant frequent flyer miles. Sponsored by the sparkling water company, the list was decided by a panel of 800-plus judges comprised of food writers, critics and chefs from around the world. The judges were big fans of Spain, whose six restaurants on the list included Ferran Adria's El Bulli (coming in at No. 1 for the fourth year in a row). France also got some love with eight restaurants, and the U.S. did pretty well for itself with seven eateries including new-to-the-list Momofuku Ssam Bar at 31 and Alinea, whose Grant Achatz rose 26 places from 2007 to a No. 10 ranking this year.
The big loser was undoubtedly Gordon Ramsay, whose London flagship completely disappeared after ranking at No. 13 last year, and whose ex-friend Marcus Wareing won the Breakthrough Restaurant Award for Marcus Wareing at the Berkeley -- not without taking a swipe at Ramsay himself.
While you may never be able to own an actual kitchen gadget from Julia Child's kitchen (the Smithsonian has the complete contents of her Cambridge, Mass., kitchen on display here), you might be able to grab a set piece from the new Julia Child movie "Julie and Julia" -- if you happen to be anywhere near the New York metropolitan area this weekend.
The movie is Nora Ephron's melding of Julia Child's memoirs with those of Julie Powell, a Queens, N.Y., woman who blogged through "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" over the course of a year.
The prop masters for Columbia Pictures are liquidating the set for the film -- starring Amy Adams (as Powell) and Meryl Streep (as Child) -- from a warehouse in northern Brooklyn, N.Y. this weekend. Slashfood popped in this morning to peruse the gadgetry used to fill seven kitchen movie sets, including the famed cooking school Le Cordon Bleu.
More pictures and the sale location after the jump.
Any news about PETA usually makes me roll my eyes, but for once, I think they're on to something. Rather than lathering in terrible logic and alienating those they want to convert, they've grabbed the wonderful Cloris Leachman and gone fancy.
That picture to the right, courtesy of Entertainment Weekly, presents Ms. Leachman in a ball gown of lettuce with the catch-phrase "Let Vegetarianism Grow on You."
It's not really the sort of image that will inspire masses to put down the bacon and grab a head of lettuce, but it is a fabulous picture.
I think it's time to put the babies aside and dress more women in greenery ... as long as PETA is prepared for me to admire the pics whilst eating a medium-rare burger.
You do follow our Twitter @slashfood, don'tcha? The Food & Wine Magazine's Best New Chefs festivities commence at 6:30 p.m. on April 1, and Food & Wine Editor-In-Chief Dana Cowin has been dropping devilish little hints about the winners via Twitter all day long. First person to solve the mystery wins two tickets to tomorrow night's event.
Won't you Tweet with us? If we're really lucky, we'll even post some red-hot guest chef David Chang or "Top Chef" winner Harold Dieterle cell-phone camera action.
Twit-tip: Follow all Best New Chefs posts using #BNC
We can change the way we make eggs -- scrambled, poached, fried -- but what about changing the eggs themselves? Mix up your scrambling routine with quail eggs.
Spinning off the wildly popular 
Another day, another 
Second Helping of Slashfood - June 19
Competitive-Eating Contest to Pit Humans Against Elephants
The Backyard Boom - The Hungry Bride
