We told you Thursday about the seven-patty Burger King Windows 7 Whopper, but now you can see the price of eating this special one-week-only promotion to celebrate the launch of Microsoft Windows 7 in Japan.
CheapAssGamer bought two of the burgers in Akihabara, Japan, and did their best to down 'em. Check it out in the video above.
Forget Godzilla. Beginning Thursday, Burger King fans in Japan can get a mega-sized Whopper.
Microsoft is teaming up with Burger King to release the Windows 7 Whopper, our sister site Engadget reports. The burger features lucky-number-seven stacked beef patties and stands 5-inches tall.
Keeping with the seven theme, the sandwich will sell at 777 yen (or approximately $8.50) to the first 30 customers and will be available for seven days. For customer No. 31 and beyond, the tower-o-meat will sell for 1,450 yen -- almost double the promotional cost.
Cooking has always been considered more than just a practice of necessity. The craft, the aromas, the flavors -- all of these particulars have made it a beloved art form, whether we're talking about a fried egg or a carefully created tray of sushi. But forget all that! Why hit the kitchen when you can leave it up to robots?
Always blazing the trail for robotics -- headed by visionaries like Hiroshi Ishiguro -- the Japanese are hitting the kitchen. The above video, from this year's International Food Machinery & Technology Exhibition in Tokyo, features the coming wave of kitchen robotics. So far, they've created pancake and sushi chefs, plus a rolling drink waiter and one maniacal robot slicer.
Tomio Sugiura, President of Sugiura Kikai Sekkei, declares in the video that robots are our future, and just as we have cars now, soon we'll have machines to help out at home.
While we'd love ourselves a wiggling slicer to take care of more tedious tasks, would a real foodie want to hand it all over to robots?
It's amazing what a couple of rabbit ears will pick up, and it pays to do a little futzing around with the remote to sample the bevy of weird and wonderful channels and sub-channels blazing through the airwaves in all their pixelated glory.
Case in point: "The Dotch Cooking Show." This little gem of Japanese pop culture may have ended in 2007, but it lives on thanks to Los Angeles' KSCI-TV channel 18.2 -- not to mention online, in countless YouTube clips and less-than-legal downloads.
America's cook-off shows seem downright sleep-inducing by comparison. As TV spectacles go, Dotch occupies a space somewhere between the loose, tipsy fun of the celebrity-studded '70s staple "The Match Game" and the free-wheeling nuttiness of "Peewee's Playhouse."
It's practically impossible for me to decide what I like best about this video: The fact that it features both clothcoffeefilters (sustainable!) and a handcoffeegrinder (retro!), that the robot appears to let the coffee bloom before starting the proper brew, our little friend's deadpan expression, or the two-second outtake where the poor gal pours coffee all over the counter before a set of friendly human hands sets it right.
Actually, this little automated lady looks like she seriously knows what she's doing -- storing coffee in an air-tight container, grinding fresh, making coffee to order... She's a barista-bot after my own heart -- even if she's more likely to rust than over-caffeinate.
Meet Chef Robot. It's the latest invention in food service, showcased on Tuesday at the International Food Machinery and Technology Exhibition in Tokyo. According to the Associated Press, Chef Robot can gently grip fragile items like sushi and move them from Point A to Point B without ripping them to shreds.
One small movement for Chef Robot, one giant leap for sashimi? Who knows? But it did get us thinking about kitchen gadgets. Got a favorite?
Strawberry milkshakes and juice boxes shaped like fruit: Two things that make us grateful for April heat waves.
Food & Wine's own Dana Cowin alerted us to this luscious milkshake on the Saveur Web site, accompanied by a recipe that calls for an ingenious combination of strawberry ice cream, strawberry sorbet and strawberry jam.
The juice boxes, meanwhile, are the brilliant invention of Naoto Fukasawa, a Japanese industrial designer who designed the boxes to mimic the look and texture of the fruit they contain: pictured here are banana and strawberry, along with soy, which rather uncannily mimics a block of tofu. We can't help but feel that these boxes blow the Capri Suns of our elementary school days out of the water, or at least the sandbox.
The point of fast-food franchises is instant familiarity--every outlet serving the same food under the same sign in essentially the same building. But McDonald's has been messing with that paradigm, opening new restaurants that are hard to recognize as the home of Ronald and the Big Mac. Viva McDonald's recently opened on the Las Vegas Strip, tearing down a 25-year-old golden arches to rebuild a slick new restaurant. The arch is still there--at least one, anyway--stretched as a marquee above a row of 20-foot wide video screens. Inside, there's something of the Quonset hut design of a Chipotle, along with even more screens, all broadcasting McDonald's own in-house TV channel. You can even get a latte and use wi-fi!
Not enough change for you? How about the McDonald's with no branding at all, not even the name. In Tokyo, the fast-food megalith has opened several small restaurants named, simply, Quarter Pounder. There's not an arch in sight--the black-and-red decor looks more like a bar or nightclub and even the wrappers are redesigned, streamlined and logo-free. However, don't get your hopes up about a chic new shame-based No-I-Am-Not-a-McDonald's: The stores are open as part of a promotion for the quarter pounder, which was not previously available in Japan.
For your lunchtime pleasure, I'm presenting a series of my favorite bento boxes. Bento are Japanese home-prepared meals served in special boxes, usually eaten for lunch at work or school. These days, bento enthusiasts from all over the world share their creations on Flickr.
Japanese anime enthusiasts tend to go in for elaborate bentos in a major way. Big surprise, right? This lil' guy (ten points for whoever can name the character), from Narurto Gallery, is rendered in nori, cheese, lunch meat and surrounded by various vegetables and a skewer of edamame.
Next week, we'll get to see the best of the best try to best each other.Iron Chef Japan, one of our favorites, is having a civil war on Fine Living Network! It's Grand Battle Week!
Five Iron Chef Japan chefs, including Morimoto, will battle it out against each other every night at 11pm Eastern for Grand Battle Week, December 8-12.
Fine Living Network is doing an excellent job of feeding our Iron Chef Japan addiction. Our favorite so far was Attack of the Vegetables week when they aired "Cooking Japanese Like Morimoto," an ingenious cover of "Turning Japanese" by The Vapors.
Here's how the Google translator says Grand Battle Week in Japanese.
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And here are some other things it says:
Slash Food: ???????
I Haven't Changed My Facebook Status in Hours: ???????Facebook???????????????
For your lunchtime pleasure, I'm presenting a series of my favorite bento boxes. Bento are Japanese home-prepared meals served in special boxes, usually eaten for lunch at work or school. These days, bento enthusiasts from all over the world share their creations on Flickr.
Here's another example of a Japanese mass-produced bento, from Payton Chung's photostream. We've got a nice fat shrimp, a small fish, bits of carrot and greens, shredded radish, noodles and a nice slice of hard-boiled egg. Seriously, could this not catch on in the United States? I'd take something like this over a turkey wrap any day.
Yesterday I posted about the annual release of Beaujolais Nouveau--and why I think you should try a Cru Beaujolais instead. Some commenters told me that they'll stick with the Nouveau version, and that's totally cool. Especially if you live in Japan, where you can get Beaujolais Nouveau with a Hello Kitty logo. As if that's not a sweet enough deal, the bottle is also plastic, a much more environmentally friendly shipping container, especially for an inexpensive wine meant to be drunk immediately like Beaujolais Nouveau.
It may surprise some to hear that plastic is greener than glass--after all, glass is 100 percent recyclable. But, according to research by Tyler Colman, aka Dr. Vino, plastic is much less carbon-intensive overall because it's lighter to ship.
In a moment of "eat my words," I'll admit today what I wouldn't have yesterday: if I came across the Hello Kitty plastic bottle, I'd be tempted to buy it. It's pretty cute, no?
They're slippery. They're slimy. And they're alive.
This coming week, Fine Living Network will be airing episodes of our favorite Iron Chef Japanin which creatures of the deep are battled every night at 11/10 Central. Watch as these chefs attack and cook living sea creatures in a way that makes you wonder if you're a bad person for watching. This is an excellent week for anyone who hasn't had enough Halloween, or likes Animal Planet and wishes Japanese chefs could be involved.
Not for the squeamish, these squirmy seafoods do get slaughtered right in front of your very eyes. Mother nature would be proud watching the food chain established so aggressively, but your mother might think you need therapy. You be the judge!
When I think of my mom, two things usually don't come to mind: beer and Frank Zappa. Which made it odd earlier this week when I opened an email to find she had sent me the following quote: "You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer."
Now, I'm not a big Zappa fan and have never heard this quote. I'm guessing that puts me in Group A of two possible groups, with Group B consisting of huge Zappa fans who have heard this quote a million times. But the quote did get me thinking that there are a number of countries that I associate with one specific beer. Yes, I realize they have more than one beer, but every time I think of said country, one specific beer immediately pops into mind trumping all others.
Please don't get me wrong. I'm not saying these are the best beers each country has to offer, or even a list of my favorite international beers, but for this week's Slashfood Ate beer edition, I present the 8 countries that through experience and marketing I most associate with one specific beer.
The point of fast-food franchises is instant familiarity--every outlet serving the same food under the same sign in essentially the same building. But McDonald's has been messing with that paradigm, opening new restaurants that are hard to recognize as the home of Ronald and the Big Mac. Viva McDonald's recently opened on the Las Vegas Strip, tearing down a 25-year-old golden arches to rebuild a slick new restaurant. The arch is still there--at least one, anyway--stretched as a marquee above a row of 20-foot wide video screens. Inside, there's something of the Quonset hut design of a Chipotle, along with even more screens, all broadcasting McDonald's own in-house TV channel. You can even get a latte and use wi-fi!
Yesterday I posted about the annual release of Beaujolais Nouveau--and why I think you should try a Cru Beaujolais instead. Some commenters told me that they'll stick with the Nouveau version, and that's totally cool. Especially if you live in Japan, where you can get Beaujolais Nouveau with a Hello Kitty logo. As if that's not a sweet enough deal, the bottle is also plastic, a much more environmentally friendly shipping container, especially for an inexpensive wine meant to be drunk immediately like Beaujolais Nouveau.
When I think of my mom, two things usually don't come to mind: beer and Frank Zappa. Which made it odd earlier this week when I opened an email to find she had sent me the following quote: "You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer."
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