The Museum of Modern Art Store might not immediately pop into your mind as the perfect place to fulfill all your kitchen needs.
Makes sense - much of its items are pricey and elegant, and not appropriate for everyday use. But if nothing else, it's certainly fun to peruse the products and place them on your mental kitchen wish list.
From inside-out martini glasses to panda-shaped pink lunch bags, MOMA's got funky kitchenware covered. Check out some of the fanciful finds below.
In case you didn't know (I sure didn't), there is a Japanese ban on beef imports from Britain. That seems pretty straightforward, but it ended up causing some problems for an art exhibit traveling to Japan recently.
It seems that part of a retrospective of the British Turner Prize are works by artist Damien Hirst. Here's where it gets tricky. Hirst's art consists of preserved cows, as in whole dead cows stored in a formaldehyde solution. When presented with these preserved cows at customs, officials had to be convinced that these were not cows for consumption. Officials also had a problem with the possible fumes from the formaldehyde, but they were finally convinced that no one would be harmed.
I am all for art, but preserved cows? I also have to wonder what kind of bureaucrat would be so worried that someone would consider this stuff edible that they thought about denying it entry into the country. I guess a ban is a ban to some people.
There's a new magazine out of France, and it's kinda cool in that weird, hipster-y PoMo sort of way. It's called Yummy, and its calling itself a "JunkFoodDesignMagazine" (because spaces between words are so passé).
The magazine - and web site - are mostly en Français, but obviously, art transcends language, and all that jazz, so your lack of French-speaking skills will not hinder your appreciation - or revulsion - from the site.
The featured art runs the gambit from Whodonut?, Virginia Barre's slightly disturbing illustrations of people living in a fast food nation, to Show Her, which seems to be a big excuse for the artist to show photos of a half-naked woman in a rainstorm, occasionally holding a soda bottle (hence, the food connection, I suppose).
Go check it out - you might just be inspired to make some food art of your own. Or just be really grossed out.
I posted about edible landscapes yesterday, in reference to Carl Warner's photographs of happy broccoli forests and nifty Parmesan cheese villages.
Well reading more, I stumbled onto a site featuring English artist Gayle Chong Kwan, essentially Warner's darker twin. Kwan also makes and photographs edible landscapes, but hers are sinister, decaying. Think shadowy jungles of rotting lettuce, desolate icy wildernesses made of butter and lard. Kwan calls the project "Cockaigne," after a mythological glutton's paradise from the 14th century, where the streets are paved with pastry and the sky rains cheese. The photographs are intended as a critique of global tourism, consumerism and the quest for utopia. Heavy stuff, and startlingly beautiful.
Broccoli forests sprouting from powdered cumin soil. A cauliflower coral reef. A pea pod boat drifting on a sunset sea of pink salmon.
London photographer Carl Warner constructs elaborate landscapes made completely of food, from mozzarella clouds to an entire village sculpted from chunks of Parmesan. There's a photo gallery of his work up on the BBC website. It looks look ultra-time consuming and amazingly cool.
We clearly have a deep-seated fascination with edible landscapes - think about the candy testing room in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, with its lollipop plants and chocolate river, or the lunch pail trees in Return to Oz. Or remember the town of Chewandswallow, where it rained juice and snowed mashed potatoes in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, a seminal text for the (4-year old) budding foodie?
Anyway, check out the photos. They'll have you gnawing on the nearest tree limb.
If you ever happen to find yourself with 7,200 -- that's 600 dozen -- bananas, you could bake a year's worth of banana bread for you, your family, friends, neighbors, and probably people you don't know, or you can create a work of art like Stefan Sagmeister's.
The artist's work, which includes this banana wall thing (I have no idea what to call it -- a sculpture?) are on display at Deith in NYC. All 7,200 of the bananas are real, and according to Make, "it smelled like 7,200 bananas too, slightly rotting." There are more pictures on flickr.
You remember: she's the chewing gum fanatic in Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory who broke a world record by chewing one stick of gum for three months straight. And we're guaranteed that Maurizio Savini would be her hero.
Savini's chewing gum sculptures have getting a ton of press lately, probably less for artistic merit and more for pure gawking value. For the record, all of the gum he uses is un-chewed, and according to a bio on nonprofit art foundation Pastificio Cerere's site, Savini chose gum as a medium for its barrage on our senses and because it reminds him of childhood.
Check out more of his sculptures here, and then give us your opinion.
The traditional English breakfast includes most (or all) of the following foods: bacon, fried eggs, baked beans, sausages, tomatoes (often fried), mushrooms (also fried), toast, juice and tea or coffee. The breakfast is known as a "full" breakfast not only because it starts with a full plate, but because it leaves you with a full stomach. Despite its size, however, it is still only a meal and won't last forever no matter how you feel for the first hour or so after one.
For a never-ending breakfast, you'll have to consider what one man in Wales did. Dayne Gilbey, 19, volunteered to get a full English breakfast tattooed on the top of his head by tattoo artist Blane Dickinson. Dickinson put out a call for a volunteer because he wanted to do something different and because tattoos are often very personal, it can be hard to find interested parties for more unusual designs. Dickinson came up with the breakfast idea four years ago and has been waiting ever since. The tattoo took six hours to do and, if he had charged for it (which he didn't) would have cost £350 ($685).
Have you ever had to quickly run to your computer to use google or had to search through the indices of a few cookbooks to look for equivalent measure conversions? If so, you'll probably like this idea from a practical standpoint, and if not, you might like it from an artistic one. This Equivalent Measure wall transfer is easily applied to a kitchen wall or cabinet by rubbing the design with the included burnishing tool. Once on, it is permanent and can easily be washed without rubbing off, although it won't damage the wall in any way. It lists common equivalencies that most cooks will need to reference from time to time and has a graphic of lightly colored measuring spoons in the background, which gives it a slightly "country" feel and prevents it from looking like you simply decided to write on your wall. It measures 14" x 19" and comes in light or dark brown.
If you have neat writing or are reasonably artistic, you might want to consider skipping the $70 expense and trying to do it yourself.
There are some cooks who will tell you that pork fat is the most flavorful fat for cooking and frying. Others will swear that duck or goose fat will produce the best results. Chilean artist Marco Evaristti has a different idea about what sort of fat will prodce great tasting results. Evaristti underwent a liposuction procedure and used his own fat to prepare a meal, a meal that merged shock art and haute cuisine.
The artist made 48 meatballs and fried them with the fat and served them to guests - a combination of friends and patrons of the arts - along with a serving of agnolotti pasta at a dinner at the Animal Gallery in Santiago. If any of the guests had second thoughts about digging into their plates, Evaristti reassured them by saying "You are not a cannibal if you eat art."
The remaining meatballs, since not all of them were served at the dinner, were canned in groups of 10 and will be sold for $4,000 per can.
Instead of fussing with steamed milk and trying to perfect the very difficult skill of making good latte art, which is very tricky to practice unless you have access to a good espresso machine and work in a coffee shop or drink a lot of coffee, a good way to decorate your drinks is with a stencil. Aerolatte sells a Cappuccino Art Set. The art set comes with a collection of stencils that can be placed on top of your drink and dusted with cocoa powder or cinnamon using a fine duster, similar to the type used for sprinkling powdered sugar. The six stencils are made of sturdy plastic, are dishwasher safe and come with a small storage tin. There is only one downside and that is the fact that you are limited to the designs that are provided. As elegant as the premade stencils are, if you want to make your own, you can use the exact same technique (perhaps even the same stencils) that we used for making cupcake stencils a few weeks ago.
The theme for the last month's Sugar High Friday, the popular sweets-based global food blogging event, was Sugar Art. Hosted by Habeas Brulee, the theme required that participants work with sugar in some capacity beyond just sprinkling it on top of things or stirring it into batter and use it to create a dessert that was a real work of art. As usual, bloggers stepped right up to the challenge and created a round of very impressive desserts. Danielle, the hostess, made some Cardamom Meyer Lemon Creme Brulee Bubbles (pictured), airy mouthfuls of sweetness that would make any molecular gastronomist proud. Other entries included Cranberry Mousse from Seriously Good, Bouche De Noels from Tsokolate!, A Finger in Every Pie and Vers l'absurde. El Bulli's Frozen Chocolate Air was submitted by Hungry In Hogtown and Riana, from For The Love Of Baking, made a standout Gingerbread House. Check out all the entries in the roundup. And save some room for the next round of SHF!
When it comes to Christmas trees, the big debate is usually "live" versus "artificial," with both sides having pros and cons. Live trees can be expensive and get needles everywhere, but they have a wonderful scent and a look of freshness. Artificial trees are easy to put up and are less expensive in the long run, but very few actually look realistic. This year, we can add a third category to that discussion: chocolate. La Maison du Chocolate has a chocolate Christmas Tree for sale. The base is made of dark chocolate pralines infused with mandarin orange and milk chocolate praline infused with winter spices. Decorating the exterior of the tree with a cubist bent are circular and square chocolates in dark, white and milk. It costs $138, but is only available in cities where there is a Maison du Chocolate boutique - New York, London and Paris - because it is too delicate to be shipped.
Gingerbread houses are fun to make but because they require very hard, sturdy cookies that will hold up to several weeks of display, they are not necessarily the dough used to make them will probably not produce the tastiest holiday cookies that you'll have. If you bake smaller gingerbread cookies, you can get a better consistency and flavor, but you have to give up on the idea of having a three-dimensional cookie showpiece. Unless you use the holiday storybook cookie cutters from Williams-Sonoma, of course. These cookie cutters give you the chance to play with your food without having to worry about finding a recipe will produce a sturdy enough cookie to support the weight of a whole house. They have notches on the pieces so that after they are baked, the cookies can be fit together to form three-dimensional holiday shapes. The 8-piece set allows you to create a perfectly seasonal scene on a small, managable scale and the cookies can still be stored in an airtight container if you want to keep them fresh.
Must a sandwich be a construction of two slices of bread and some sort of savory filling? No. We have seen scores of sandwiches of all kinds, including dessert sandwiches, and are bound to see many more for our upcoming Sandwich Day, but none, as of yet, have been as inventive as these are. These sandwiches almost defy words with their fun and creative constructions, made with a variety of lunch meats, vegetables and cheeses, supported with bread and pretzel sticks. The downside, of course, of something like this is that you might be reluctant to eat them once you've put them together, no matter how tasty they look.
It sits alone and untouched at the end of a long buffet table -- a bowl full of apples and bananas, maybe a seedy orange tossed in as an afterthought. Don't let your fruit salad meet this awful fate, spruce it up instead!
The Museum of Modern Art Store might not immediately pop into your mind as the perfect place to fulfill all your kitchen needs. 
In case you didn't know (I sure didn't), there is a Japanese ban on beef imports from Britain. That seems pretty straightforward, but it ended up causing some problems for an art exhibit traveling to Japan recently.
The 
There are some cooks who will tell you that pork fat is the most flavorful fat for cooking and frying. Others will swear that duck or goose fat will produce the best results. Chilean artist Marco Evaristti has a different idea about what sort of fat will prodce great tasting results. Evaristti underwent a liposuction procedure and 
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