B52 on ice. Photo: quinn.anya, Flickr

• Ice isn't solely a drink chiller. It's also a fine art for bartenders concerned with chilling rather than diluting.
• Farm vacations hit stateside. Would you pay hundreds for the chance to work on one?
  
• Frank Bruni's final column notes his (often underrated) favorites around New York City.
  
• After nearly half a century, Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" has finally topped the best-seller list.
• The Minimalist dips into peanut butter.
• Hot baths and other treatments to keep your berries from growing mold too quickly.
  

There is a whole slew of cooking shows on the web that showcase newbie cooks that can show off a good meal, but can't necessarily give you some great background information that a chef can. Above you can watch Dallas' Master Chef David McMillan prepare halibut and clams with chorizo and black bean sauce -- and he not only discusses the dish, but the particulars of what is going into the meal. For example, he explains the different flavors that can be coaxed out of garlic, and the differences between curly and flat-leaf parsley.

It's the debut show, so I imagine there will be lots of great cooking info to come in the future. Enjoy!

In the New York Times Magazine, chef Daniel Patterson, owner of Coi in San Francisco, admits to a massive kitchen taboo - he doesn't like garlic. Well, he doesn't like eye-stinging, cutting-board ruining radioactive garlic, that is. What he does like is green garlic, the young stalks of the garlic plant plucked before they reach maturity. Also known as spring or new garlic, it goes perfectly with springtime dishes like lamb, peas and fava beans. Patterson likes to turn it into a aioli-like sauce by pureeing it with egg, oil and vinegar and using it as a sandwich spread and an artichoke dip.

The story includes a great-looking recipe for linguine with green garlic sauce, which I'll have to try next time I get my hands on four pounds of Manila clams. If you try it, please let me know how it is!

Our sister blog, Luxist, picked up the story of a Florida couple who received an unexpected year-end bonus, a rare purple pearl.

While enjoying some steamed clams at Dave's Last Resort & Raw Bar with his wife, Leslie, George Brock suddenly bit down on something hard. By now you've guessed that what stopped him midslurp was the aforementioned pearl. It's safe to say that the couple didn't expect anything from their $10 investment other than fresh seafood. Turns out they got much more than that: A gemologist's appraisal pegged the pearl's value at $25,000.

I'm no gemologist, but the last time I checked pearls, purple or otherwise, are found in oysters. I've eaten my share of oysters and clams both raw and cooked. Heck, I've had conch freshly plucked from the clear blue waters of Nassau, and I'm always game for giant clam at the sushi bar. Some might say that I've been lucky to have found only grit and stray bits of shell in my mollusks and not a nasty bug. However, the Brocks' purple pearl and the arrival of 2008 have given me hope. I resolve to eat more mollusks this year, if only for health reasons.

This might be just because I'm not a big seafood fan in the first place (except for some fish, clams, and scallops), but I find oysters a rather odd food to even think about eating. The way it must feel when it's going down your throat...gah. I wouldn't eat one for a million dollars.*

But I know that a lot of you out there love them, and Esquire has everything you need to know about buying and eating them: what they are, the difference between East Coast and West Coast oysters, how to shuck them (including the equipment you'll need), and a few companies where you can buy the best oysters in the country.

Oyster lovers, rejoice!

* This is a lie. I actually would eat one for a million dollars.

We already heard about the warning against eating raw oysters from the Pacific Northwest, but the USDA has recently extended the warning to include clams. So far, 72 illnesses have been directly linked to the shellfish, with another 105 cases suspected of originating from contaminated seafood. All of the cases have been in Washington, Oregon and New York, where the oysters and clams from the Puget Sound area are widely available.

Symptoms include "diarrhea, abdominal cramps, nausea, vomiting, fever and chills, [and] usually start within 24 hours and last no more than three days." Cooking can kill the bacterium, Vibrio parahaemolyticus, that is linked to the sickness and the symptoms are unpleasant enough that you would be better off not taking any chances until the warning is lifted.

The web's first Japanese pizza page, as this web site proclaims itself, shows your the truly odd pies they're creating over there. Now, I'm all one for a little adventure in food, but come on, mayonnaise and octopus on a pizza? Gah.

I also love the design of the site. I said to myself, "wow, that's very 1996," and then I scrolled to the bottom of the page and found out that the page was created in 1995. OK, so I was a year off. I love how it looks like they haven't changed it since then (no kidding here, I'm actually serious).

But that still doesn't mean I'm going to throw scallops or crab legs on top of my pizza.

We've been making our way around the sushi bar here at slashfood, and preparation for Valentine's Day simply begs for a study in bivalves - clams, scallops, and those ever-so-aphrodisiac-al oysters.

"Gai" is a general Japanese term that refer to most of the clams. I very rarely see the kind of smaller clams that we put into chowders or batter and fry on a sushi menu. However, mirugai and hokkigai are regular offerings. Oysters are called "kaki."