Hacking Food

In some ways, it's probably not a great time to be Zagat. Although the review service covers a wide range of restaurants, it's pretty much a requirement for fine dining. After all, while one might be willing to take a chance on a $10 meal, when it comes to spending serious bucks, it's a good idea to get some insurance. At the end of the day, Zagat is a pretty good tool for ensuring that the big meal isn't a big disappointment.

The thing is, when the economy is down and everybody is trying to cut back on expenditures, expensive restaurant dinners are often the first things to go. As the restaurants go, so do the restaurant guides, and one has to imagine that Zagat is feeling the pinch. Luckily, the publisher has had an online site for a few years; for a small fee, users can take advantage of pretty much every scrap of information in the Zagat universe, including thousands of restaurant reviews from cities across the country.

To sweeten the deal (and help some fine eateries weather the recession) the company now offers Zagat Presents, a series of discussions, tastings, and previews at several of the guide's rated restaurants. The events, which are often priced at below market rates, offer Zagat.com members the opportunity to enjoy a night on the town even when they are watching their pennies. Moreover, Zagat ensures that the evenings will be unique by working with chefs and restaurants to design off-menu meals that showcase the restaurants' versatility and potential.

Take a good look at this reproduction of the Mona Lisa. Don't worry, you're eyes aren't playing tricks on you. Those are slices of various sausages and luncheon meats in the background. In fact, the whole painting is made of meat. It was part of a show put on by six Russian artists to celebrate the 100th birthday of Tavr a meat processor located in southern Russia.

The artists spent three days fashioning the meaty museum of classic paintings, which also includes reproductions of Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers and Pablo Picasso's Girl on a Ball. They used 40 pounds of meat to create these canvasses fit for a carnivore. Visitors to the show were offered fresh Tavr sausages.

What's it like for artists to work with meat? Well, Aleksandr Solomko likes ham as a medium because it's soft and flexible. "The biggest trouble was to stick the sausages to the canvas. Gelatin turned out to be the best solution. It's perfectly natural and doesn't affect the taste. However, we had to rework some parts of the picture, when it started to darken after the meat spent some time in the air."

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Those of us who follow food blogs are well acquainted with Elise of Simply Recipes. Her recipes are always dependable and she seems to have cooked just about everything in creation, which means that her website is something of a definitive resource.

However, if you haven't been following her for a long time, you might have missed a particularly useful blender tip she offered nearly three years ago. Lucky for all us internet readers, those eagle-eyed editors at Lifehacker found this particular tip and have brought it to prominence for our edification.

She suggests using a canning jar in place of your blender carafe when mixing up small batches of things. Apparently, most blenders are designed so that their bottom blade contraption will screw onto a standard sized canning jar. This way you can blend or chop inside a jar, remove the blender blade and store easily by popping on a regular old jar lid. It's like the predecessor to the Magic Bullet.

[via Lifehacker]

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Remember the bacon mat that swept the interwebs last summer? That intrepid food/craft/knitting blogger Megan at Not Martha has taken the basic idea of the bacon mat (it is the premise that bacon, if given the proper support, will bond to itself and hold shapes as it cooks) and turned it into bacon cups! Is there anything that bacon can't do?

She designed them as a breadless BLT, using them to hold small salads of lettuce and tomato. The commenters on her site have run with the idea, suggesting other uses for the crisp, porky vessels. How would you fill them?

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Ever since discovering The Ernie Kovacs Show on video, I've been a fan of this 1950s comedic genius who Jack Lemmon characterized as "always 15 years ahead of everyone else." Thanks to poking around YouTube last night I learned that he was ahead of his time in other ways. The chicken puppetry set to music that leads off the brilliant Kitchen Symphony predates Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer video by more than 20 years. Granted Gabriel's chicken was raw and danced to decidedly funkier music.

Kovacs' roasted chicken sets the stage for a musical meal in which every item in the kitchen, including water taps, sardines, cutlery and egg slicer dance to a lounge lizard rendition of Cherokee by Juan Esquivel. Vegetarians may wish to turn away during the explosive salad sequence.