"crackers" news and stories

• As the economy has gotten tighter, restaurants have gotten a whole lot friendlier and more solicitous, all in the hopes of getting and keeping your business.
• The show The Biggest Loser showcases the problem that most Americans don't know how to cook for themselves.
• The peanut butter salmonella scare has led people to wonder about the safety of nearly everything they put in their mouths.
• Frank Bruni reviews the Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel and finds that it's heavy on atmosphere and light on dependably delicious dishes.
• After experiencing a couple bad years, Eric Asimov declares that the barolo is back to its former glory.
• For inexpensive Indian food in Manhattan, you can't go wrong at Dhaba.
• Andrew Carmellini is teaming up with Robert De Niro to take over the restaurant in the Greenwich Hotel.
• Mark Bittman takes a standard cracker recipe and tarts it up with cheese, butter and cream for a richer result.
• Most recipes for braised rabbit require lots of fat to keep the lean meat moist. Melissa Clark has figured out a way to keep the meat tender without making it heavy.

If you think about it, it's rather amazing that in the year 2008 they're still coming up with new kinds of crackers. Haven't we already been through every cracker combo, chip/cracker combinations, exotic flavors and various shapes? Now Keebler has a snack that is cracker on one side and pretzel on the other., Flipsides. If you're in one of those moods where you don't know if you want something salty or something buttery (they also come in cheddar, but I've only tried the original so far).

Actually, they're pretty good. At first I thought they were going to be either a.) bland, or b.) a situation where one flavor overwhelms the other. But they're pretty tasty, and you can actually taste the pretzel side and the cracker side at different times as it moves around in your mouth.

I haven't tried any toppings on them yet, but they're good right out of the box.

Ah, the cheeseball. I always associate them with Thanksgiving and Christmas. I'm the guy in charge of cheese and dips and crackers on those holidays, and that seems to be the only time I eat cheeseballs. I never liked them as a kid, but I love them now.

Today is National Cheeseball Day. (Do you spell cheeseball as one word or two? I'm going with one.) Here's a recipe for Party Cheeseballs from CD Kitchen, and here's one for a Cheeseball from AllRecipes.com.

And let's not forget the recipe for a 'Lil Smoky Cheeseball from Amy Sedaris! That's a pic of it above.

I guess I missed this over the summer, though I can't imagine how something so strange could have slipped through my Google Reader! Apparently, a dairy farm in France offers cheese made from human breast milk.

I'm not entirely sure that I believe this, but a web site for the farm, Le Petit Singly, does exist in French. There's a post about it on Why Travel to France from last June, as well as a mentioning of that post here on Serious Eats -- but neither confirms the existence. According to a Wikipedia post, breast milk was sometimes consumed in the ancient world in fertility cults, and it's thinner and sweeter than milk from other mammals.

So if it does exist, there are certainly some questions to address. Firstly, would you taste it? And how would you eat it -- plain? On crackers? Would it mean an entire line of human breast milk products are on the horizon?

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Well here's something that doesn't happen every day. A British woman, Kim Stead, bit into a cracker (called biscuits in England), and a diamond fell out. Of course she was really excited about it at first, but quickly came to the conclusion that it probably wasn't worth that much.

The diamond was pretty small and had probably fallen out of a jewelry setting. She did notify the cracker company, McVitie, who at first suggested that it might be crystallized sugar. Once Mrs. Stead assured them it was a diamond, McVitie sent a package for her to return to them so they could start an investigation.

No word on if Mrs. Stead has returned the diamond yet or any results. What would you do if you found something like that in your food?

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