Bratwurst. Photo: Keaggy.com.

A few of the best stories spied elsewhere on the Web this week:

Grillwalkers are the newest street-food trend in Germany. Vendors with propane canisters strapped to their backs and grills suspended from their necks sell freshly grilled sausages to passersby.

U.K. man finds an apple that's perfectly split, half green and half red. Experts say that the odds of finding an apple with such perfect symmetry are more than 1 million to one.

Nationwide, restaurants participate in Share Our Strength's Great American Dine Out to benefit child hunger through Sep. 27.

Someone left a bacon bookmark in a U.K. library book; it was found by a librarian/artist who added it to his collection of quirky items left in returned books.

Coming to an office near you: Del Monte has a new line of fresh-cut fruits and vegetables specifically designed to work in vending machines.

Bacon-wrapped dates. Photo: YumSugar.

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:

The salty-sweet pleasure of bacon-wrapped dates.

Honey cake is a sweet way to ring in the Jewish New Year.

Spain can now boast the honor of the world's longest restaurant table -- over three quarters of a mile long!

Bratwurst is a must when throwing an Oktoberfest celebration.

In a bid to waste less food and energy, college cafeterias prep to go tray-less.

That classic steak and potato dinner can be turned into a tasty salad.

Do you care if your dining companions order the same dish you're having?

Did your favorite frank lead the pack? Read on.

Photo: marilyn819/Flickr

So Fourth of July has come and gone again. Lest you already be feeling nostalgic, here's one last photo to make you feel a bit misty. Grilled and photographed by marilyn819 at Flickr, these fat brats, with their artful tan lines, are for many people the sight and smell of the Fourth, as well as the approximately two remaining months of summer. They're a reminder to go out and buy some sunscreen and lighter fluid, drop a lit match through the grates and wait attentively for dinner to be ready, as yet another summer afternoon disappears into the realm of lightly charred memory.

[Via Flickr]

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You know what I love most about America? The way that we have a holiday for everything. And even when we run out of holidays, we just make up more holidays and continue using them as excuses to glut. And when it's a food holiday, we are officially permissed to double-gorge! So here's a heads-up for my favorite August food holidays -- y'know, so you can get your shopping done early and beat the mad holiday rush.

• August 1 - Raspberry Cream Pie Day: This shortcut Chilled Raspberry Cream Pie recipe from Rachael Ray can be whipped up in a jif. It'll be just like one of those No-Bake commercials when your friends and family are fawning over you for spending the day slaving over the stove while you're secretly sniggering to yourself, "Heh heh, it was no bake, you fools!"
• August 2 - Ice Cream Sandwich Day: Sure, you could wade through the freezer case, or you could man up and make your own. Consider these decadent peanut-butter-'n'-honey-flavored "Bee-Nut Butter Ice Cream Sandwiches" from Domestic Goddess.

• Eat your vegetables!
• Forget all those other sauces. Red, tomato-based sauces are the way to go.
• Pastrami gets all fancy.
• What does your city taste like?
• When I was in grade school, everyone was saying I had to learn the metric system because that's what we'd be using in the future. I didn't, and we don't.
• Karl's Sausage Kitchen is a legendary place around Boston. It was even mentioned in one of the Spenser novels.
• What is Katylyst Kombucha?
• This week's recipes: Winter Cake, Seattle Salmon Dip, Bratwurst in Beer, and Coq au vin.

One Johnsonville Bratwurst weighs about 85 grams (3-oz. or 0.2-lbs.). We already know that Takeru Kobayashi set a new world record by eating 58 brats, sans buns, last weekend, but how does this compare to what a real person - i.e. a non-competitive eater - can eat? The St. Paul Pioneer wondered the same thing. Instead of taking the boring route and surveying people around the office, they tracked down some big eaters and asked the Minnesota Vikings' offensive line how much they thought they could eat. Even with an average weight of 245.8-lbs, compared to Kobayashi's 160-lbs., and the appetites to match the amount of energy they use on the field, most of the players said that they could eat fewer than a half-dozen of the sausages. The tackle, Mike Rosenthal, joked that he could eat 60, but every player said that there was no way they could do it in that time limit of 10 minutes.

Say what you will about competitive eating as a sport, but it clearly takes a specific set of skills to do it.

Already the master of hot dog eating, competitive eating superstar Takeru Kobayashi set a new world record with a different kind of sausage: bratwurst. He ate 58 bratwursts in 10 minutes, smashing the previous record of only 34 1/2 brats. He said that he really liked the brats, but they were a little harder to eat than hot dogs are, most likely this is because the dogs are eaten with buns, while the brats involve more chewing. Joey Chestnut, considered to be one of the up and coming stars of the sport, came in second with only 45 brats. The IFCOE has a breakdown of the prize money from the contest, revealing that Kobayashi took home $8,000 for his work.

And for anyone who's counting, the 160-lb Kobayashi ingested 16,820 calories, 1,450 grams of fat, along with 19 days' worth of the recommended (minimum) daily amount of sodium.

The New England Patriots have started their own line of meats. Along with "Academy Award winner Rob Schneider," that's a line I never thought I'd see in print.

The football team is going to start selling their own meat products at Gillette Stadium this upcoming season, which starts in a few weeks. Not only hot dogs, but also bratwurst and sausages too. The foods will have cute names like "Patriots First Down Beef Frank" and "Patriots Sack Attack Mild Sausage." Of course, those two names make no sense whatsoever, either in food or football terms. One of the names that was turned down was "Patriots Pigskinz," and I think that's the best name in the bunch.

What, no Brady Brats? No Seymour Sausage? Come on!