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?

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?

I've become sort of the appetizer guy in my family when it comes to Thanksgiving and Christmas. While my sister cooks the main meal, others in the family always offer to bring something over: desserts and other pies, soda, wine, etc. I've been doing appetizers and snacks the past few years, and here are a few tips.

I think appetizers and snacks should be low stress and easy to make/set up. One of the best is a cheese and cracker platter. All you have to do is go to your supermarket and go to the cheese section (you know, the stuff beyond Kraft) and choose several good looking, nice cheeses. I usually go with a cheese nut roll (I've been buying a Port Wine cheese roll that everyone seems to like), a good aged cheddar, and maybe some Boursin. For crackers, it's amazing what is available, and I usually grab several different varieties: pepper crackers, rosemary crackers, and also plain ol' Ritz, which you can't go wrong with. Get a nice platter or tray, put the various cheeses in the middle, each with their own knife, and then spread the crackers all around the edge. Looks great.

I've heard of people eating ants, crickets, and even larvae, but wasps? Not until today.

In Omachi, Japan, a village 120 miles northwest of Tokyo, 80-year-old hunters catch digger wasps in nearby forests. The wasps are boiled, dried, then sprinkled over a cracker dough, which is cut with hot iron stamps to create the cracker shapes. The crackers are called jibachi senbei and are sold in packages of 20 for a mere £1.60.

Wonder if you can feel a sting.

Keebler has been on quite a roll with their TownHouse line of crackers (the Bistro crackers are quite good). They're releasing several different flavors of their Toppers crackers, the latest being Garlic & Herb.

How are they? They're OK. The problem I have is that the garlic and herb flavors aren't quite strong enough. They have a really strong flavor of their regular buttery Toppers and then the mild garlic and herb flavor kicks in. I wish the flavor was stronger, like the garlic and herb crackers that you can get in the Ritz line and the Triscuit line and various veggie-flavored crackers.

Toppers are so named because they are a bit thicker than typical crackers and have a little curved "bowl" so you can put toppings on them without stuff fall off. According to the back of the box, you can "top 'em," "dip 'em," "serve 'em," or have them "stand alone." That last one sounds kinda odd. What, you don't eat them at all, you just let them sit there untopped and alone? Weird.

We always make general resolutions like "eat better" or "exercise more," but what about specific food resolutions? Here are five of mine I hope to keep in 2007.

1. Drink more wine. I drink a lot of wine anyway, but I want to learn more about it and drink it on a more regular basis. Oh, and get into white wines more. I never drink any because I've tried some white wines in the past and didn't like them. But I gotta find something I like.

2. Cut down on cookies, cakes, and crackers. Yeah, they all say "0 Trans Fats!" on the boxes now, but they can't be that great for you, especially the amount I seem to eat.

3. Stop eating after midnight. When you're a writer, you work a lot late at night. Which means you might eat later too. And when you add in television and the fact that there are several pizza places near my apartment...ugh. And then the next day you were up so late you want to sleep in and not run in the morning. I gotta stop eating so late, staying up so late, so I can get up early and exercise.

4. Eat out more. I get into these long ruts where I don't go out to restaurants, especially new places that have opened. But there's a lot of great stuff out there and I really should explore a lot more than I do.

5. Actually make some of the food I see in magazines. I think I accumulated around 40 issues of various food magazines in 2006, but I don't think I made anything in them. I keep seeing great recipes and I keep saying to myself "that would be great to make, I gotta try that!" And then the magazine sits on my coffee table for three months and then gets put on the bookshelf with the rest of them. Do you do this too?

If you don't hesitate to regift a bottle of champagne or a fruitcake, you shouldn't hesitate to rewrap some ordinary snack foods into sweet holiday treats. All you really need is chocolate - white and dark/semisweet - and some sprinkles to liven things up. Joe, from Culinary in the Desert Country, made the batch of White Chocolate Dipped Mini Peanut Butter Ritz Bits sandwiches that is pictured above, which have a wonderful combination of sweet and salty to them that makes for great snacking. WellFed also has a few suggestions for chocolate-coated goodies. Their selection also includes chocolate-covered peanut butter sandwich crackers, although they opted for what appears to be a semisweet chocolate rather than Joe's white chocolate, chocolate covered graham crackers and chocolate dipped pretzel sticks.

Marshmallows, Oreo cookies, shortbread cookies and (if you happen to come across any) strawberries also make fantastic candidates for chocolate-dipping.

Clearly, the "flavor experts" at Ben & Jerry's are not Slashfood readers because if they were, they would know that everyone wanted either Italian Renaissance or Wackie Chan to win the new flavor contest. It was one of our most commented-on posts of all time because just about everyone likes ice cream and we don't get the chance to design a really fantastic new flavor every day. We'll have to wait until a future round comes up for our next shot at Wackie Chan because Puttin' on the Ritz is the new flavor.

The ice cream is vanilla based with swirls of caramel and Ritz crackers, studded with chunks of chocolate-covered, caramel-filled Ritz cracker sandwiches. It's safe to say that the "cracker swirls" are made from crushed crackers, though how they'll stay crunchy in the ice cream is anyone's guess.

As it turns out, in a twist that wasn't clear before, the company is only going to make the flavor available to the Florida woman who invented it and her family and friends for the time being. Whether the rest of us will even get to taste the concoction remains to be seen.

Come on, you know you eat it. Even if you're a health food nut, you love this too. Maybe you convince yourself that if you put it on something healthy, like crackers that have no trans fats, or maybe rice cakes, you're still eating healthy. Maybe you think it's not too bad (after all, it's cheese!). But, really, it's cheese shoved into a can, after all, so how natural can it be?

Wired Magazine takes a look inside the can (and a look at the can itself) to see what exactly it is we're eating. The ingredients are whey, canola oil, salt, sodium citrate, sodium phosphate, calcium phospate, lactic acid, sodium alginate, and apocarotenal. If you're wondering, that last one helps make it the color it is. And sodium alginate? This seaweedy extract is derived from brown algae (this just gets better and better), and increases viscosity. Motor oil for our intestines? Whatever.

And did you know it's not really an aerosol can? The cheese doesn't come into contact with the propellant. You learn something new every day.

I like my Easy Cheese on Triscuits.

(Thanks to Adam!)

We already got some advice on which white breads were the best tasting (although you can always opt for homemade if you want to avoid store-bought entirely) but what about whole grain breads? There are so many different varieties to choose from, it's actually quite a feat to narrow down your criteria to the point where you can compare similar breads. One glance at the shelf in the grocery store shows whole wheat, honey wheat, oat bran, oat nut, multi-grain, 8-grain and dozens of other "whole grain" breads. Rather than trying to work out which might be the best, Food & Wine magazine picked out a few of their favorite whole grain products as a jumping off point, a benchmark that you can work from to find your own favorites. They selected De Cecco Whole wheat pasta, Pepperidge Farm Natural Pepperidge Farm whole wheat bread and Keebler Wheatables.

It's worth noting that the Pepperidge Farm bread did well in the white bread tasting, too, but I would choose Kashi's Tasty Little Crackers over F&W's choice of Wheatables for a whole-grain snack any day.

I guess I had s'mores on the brain after writing about them yesterday, since I was inspired to look up the record for the world's largest s'more. The Guinness Book of World Records lists a s'more made in 2003 as the largest. It was constructed in California from 20,000 marshmallows, 7,000 Hershey's chocolate bars, and 24,000 graham crackers. All totaled, it weighed about 1,600-lbs.

The Guinness category was retired, however, which means that an even larger s'more made this year went unrecorded!

The current largest s'more measured 1,936-sq feet and was constructed to celebrate the 70th anniversary of Virginia State Parks. It was made with 8,000 Hershey's chocolate bars, 40,000 marshmallows and 55,000 graham crackers - nearly double the size of the previous record holder, though it didn't use quite as much chocolate.

See a close-up of the s'more's construction after the jump.

Just when it seems that we'll never get any decent food on an airplane again, Southwest Airlines has introduced a special on-board snack. Produced by Nabisco, "golden airplane-shaped crackers" mark the airline's 35th anniversary. The unique crackers come in commemorative packaging.

Since Nabisco makes Ritz crackers, which already come in various non-circular shapes, Southwest's crackers will probably be very similar to them. The last time I flew Southwest, they were serving mini-pretzels, which I quite liked for an airplane snack. I'll be sad to see them go, even though Ritz are tasty, too. I'm just hoping that they decide to go with mini-airplanes, because the only thing sadder than not getting a snack on a plane is getting one lone Ritz cracker.