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.
A couple of months ago, I wrote a post in which I tried to touch bottom in the pantheon of disturbing cuisine. While I stopped short of nightmarishly horrifying food, like rotten cheese and duck embryos, I explored what I imagined were the worst fried foods imaginable.
In retrospect, I was incredibly naive.
At the end of the post, I asked my readers to submit their own choices for worst possible food, promising to do a little more research and write longer pieces about them. I got a fair bit of responses, which led to a fun post about beer floats. However, Guinness and vanilla ice cream only represented the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, and it seemed inevitable that I would return to further explore the wonders that make up the culinary wasteland.
Many of my readers shared tales about their favorite fried food joints. Museum Mouse, for example, turned me on to the joys of Scottish fried cuisine. Having had my fair share of haggis and cock-a-leekie soup, I thought that I had experienced everything that Scotland had to offer. I was wrong. For example, one popular treat is the Stonner, which is basically a sausage wrapped in gyro meat, battered, and deep fried. In Scotland, "stonner" is a euphemism for an erection, which seems ironic, given that coronary occlusions can lead to impotence. Still, I guess we all find our excitement in different places...
While I wouldn't describe myself as a complete sardine junkie, I have to admit that I have a definite appreciation of canned fish. My favorite is probably salmon; when I was a kid, we'd fight over the chalky bones, and I still get a smile out of crunching down on them.
Still, sardines are a lot of fun. While the bad ones tend to taste like cat food, the good ones offer a rich, subtle flavor that is delightful. In some cases, I've even had sardines that I would describe as transcendent, with a mild taste and a silky mouthfeel. Even in the worst of circumstances, sardines are cool to look at, and are a cheap meal.
Even if I'm not a sardine fanatic, I have a very warm space in my heart for mildly obsessive-compulsive behavior; for this reason, the Society for the Appreciation of Sardines blog definitely gives me a smile. With sardine reviews, recipes, and lore, it contains everything that a fan of the oily canned fish could possibly want.
For a foodie, thrift is all well and good, but the primary concern usually is quality. After all, there is something of the sybarite in a true food lover and, as nice as it may be to save a buck or two, the most important thing is that food be delicious and enjoyable.
Even so, there is something interesting about trying to eat for only pennies a day. Jeffrey Steingarten tried it in The Man Who Ate Everything, where he spent a chapter exploring subsistence cooking, even going so far as to try MFK Fisher's recipe for "Sludge," a ground beef-based Depression era meatloaf. For that matter, urban locavores and "freegans" have explored the wonders of harvesting free, if somewhat wilted, produce from backlots and dumpsters.
Even so, attempts at extremely low-cost eating have usually been characterized by an impressive lack of culinary savoir faire. For example, in One Dollar Diet Project, a blog in which two California high school teachers documented their month-long attempt to eat for only $1 a day, the focus was on subsistence living, with oatmeal and PB & J's occupying center stage.
With that in mind, Rebecca Currie's attempt at thrift, documented in her blog, Less Is Enough, is particularly interesting. Normally a frugal shopper (she spends an average of $80 a month at the grocery store), Currie has only spent an average of $1 per day on food for the last few weeks.
Currie's blog is interesting reading, and it demonstrates that a $1 a day diet doesn't necessarily have to translate into uninspired or unhealthy food choices. Over the last sixteen days, Currie has prepared a broad selection of meals, including pasta with spinach and marinara, chicken fried rice, and black beans with rice and jalapeno. While her diet has skewed heavily toward high-protein legumes, whole grains, and eggs, it has also displayed a reasonable amount of flavor, a tendency toward fresh, healthy ingredients, and a pretty impressive amount of flavor. In short, while it may not be an ideal diet for everyone, Currie has shown that most of us probably have a lot of room to reduce our food expenditures!
Late Thursday night, a security guard at Bally's Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey noticed an unknown man emerging from a restricted kitchen area. The man wasn't a hotel employee, and there was something strange about his appearance, so the guard decided to investigate. As he got closer, he realized that the man had stuffed his clothes with what later turned out to be 91 frozen lobsters. The perpetrator, 38-year-old Anthony Jones was subsequently arrested.
When I first read this story, I imagined that it had to be something of a fluke. First off, there was the impressive number of lobsters; how does one hide 91 spiny crustaceans in one's clothes? Second, there was the simple improbability of the crime. It's hard to imagine that a lot of criminals have attempted to steal lobsters through concealment in clothing.
When one googles "stealing lobster," the vast majority of hits focus on lobster poaching. Even a brief perusal will convince one that this crime is very serious, at least for the denizens of Maine, and the punishment is pretty severe. If the police catch you, you're looking at serious jail time. If fishermen catch you...well, let's just say that you'd probably prefer that the police catch you.
In a recent marketing campaign, Oscar Meyer proclaimed that its "Deli Creations" flatbread sandwiches were "blogworthy."
I beg to differ.
Nobody likes to be manipulated, and I would argue that bloggers like it less than most. There's something about spending a few lonesome hours a day cranking out content that really ups the curmudgeon quotient and makes us a mite persnickety about our production process. While other blogs, including Gawker, might not be too picky about where they get their tips, I tend to get mighty cranky when multimillion dollar corporations tell me what is and is not blogworthy.
With that in mind, here's something that really is blogworthy: fried bologna sandwiches. For anybody who hasn't tried this backwoods delicacy, the concept may sound a little questionable. However, the combination of bologna and heat produces a dish that is incredibly delicious and startlingly different from a basic bologna sandwich.
While my mother was something of a gourmet adventurer, the Northern Virginia suburbs in the 1970's weren't exactly a hotbed of culinary experimentation. To find new, unexplored foods, Mom spent an inordinate amount of time driving around to small markets and out-of-the-way eateries. To her credit, she also tried a lot of weird things that might have frightened lesser adventurers. In terms of wine, for example, we had to travel to Washington DC to find a decent wine store, so she worked her way through the meager offerings in our local grocery stores. From Ernest and Julio to Lancer's, Mateus Rose to Almaden, she gave everything a shot. One day, she came home with what my sisters and I immediately dubbed "Astronaut Wine": bright red Franzia in a handy cardboard box. While she and my father were dubious about the taste, I loved the cool mylar bag and the convenient container. Maybe it wasn't the best wine, but Franzia definitely had the coolest package.
I don't consider myself a wine snob, but I have long since banished Franzia to the ranks of wines that I wouldn't even use to de-grease my engine. Still, I can remember the wonder of those cool boxes, and have often imagined how great it would be if a vintner came out with a top-notch wine in a really cool box. With this in mind, I was excited to learn that a box wine, Corbett Canyon's 3-liter Premium Cask Merlot, won Best of Class for Merlots under $15 in the San Francisco Chronicle's Wine Competition.
Priced at $10, Corbett Canyon's boxed Merlot is well within my price range; unfortunately, the wine shops in my area have yet to stock it. Has anybody given it a shot?
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.
We've had 
Second Helping of Slashfood - June 19
Competitive-Eating Contest to Pit Humans Against Elephants
The Backyard Boom - The Hungry Bride
