"judge" news and stories

Community service has gone to the birds. Or, for some critics, at least the Chicago legal system has after a judge told a defendant he could either do 100 hours community service or bring him some jerk chicken.

When Darrius Logan plead guilty to misdemeanor battery and criminal trespass charges in August, he told Associate Judge Robert Livas that he'd already worked 100 unpaid "community service" hours at Uncle Joe's Jerk Chicken, a South Side Chicago Jamaican restaurant chain. The judge told him to come back in two months with proof he'd completed the community service elsewhere or to bring back enough chicken to feed the court room, the Chicago Tribune reports.

"If you walk in with enough chicken to feed everybody, I'll accept these community service hours," Livas said, according to court transcripts from Aug. 4 obtained by the Tribune. "If you don't, I'm not taking any of them."

Designboom, a mod blog devoted to the latest and greatest in product design, recently came out with the winners of its 2006 Dining in 2015 contest. The challenge was exactly as it sounds: to design a food-related product that would be useful in 2015 at work, in travel, or at home.

Chefs and designers from Italy and Japan judged the entires and came up with the top three and an honorable mention.

Let's start from the bottom and work up. The honorable mention [ed. note: shown in photo] was an eco-friendly solution to dinner prep: silicone and nylon triangle-shaped buckets that allow the cook to boil three different foods all in one pot, thereby saving energy, time, and water. I totally expect it to be selling out on QVC in no time.

Third place? A creative ceramic salt and pepper shaker that forces you to physically break open the canister to access the spices inside. The goal of the project? There isn't any, really, but we bet it's really, really fun to break open. Save it for a day when you're really pissed off at someone, and then smash away. (But don't get carried away - - then you'll just have a mess of salt, pepper, and white ceramic shards to clean up).

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A judge in Worcester, Massachusetts has ruled that a burrito is not the same thing as a sandwich.

Why is this important? Well, Panera Bread tried to keep a Qdoba Mexican Grill out of the White City Shopping Center in Shrewsbury because it would violate an agreement the shopping center owner made to keep another sandwich shop out of the mall. They not only got a USDA official to testify, they called Boston chef Chris Schlesinger, who said, "I know of no chef or culinary historian who would call a burrito a sandwich...the notion would be absurd to any credible chef or culinary historian."

Other things that aren't sandwiches:

• Tacos
• Quesadillias
• Tortillas
• Price Is Right host Bob Barker

Although the results of the 12th annual Great New Zealand Sausage Competition won't be in until later this week, the most interesting thing about the judging isn't finding out who the winner is (unless you were participating, of course) but who was doing the judging in the first place. In addition to the Beef, Pork, BBQ, Flavored, Flavored BBQ, Saveloy/Polony/Cocktail, Traditional, International, and Gourmet categories that were evaluated by experienced judges, there was also a second judging of a selected group of entries to see who would win the Kids' Choice Award. All the entries, selected from those participating in other categories in the competition, were scrutinized by two groups of kids: seven judges under the age of five, and a group under the age of nine.

Perhaps some will bristle at the idea of their product being judged by kids, but most children love sausages and while they may not be able to pick out the same points as a life-long professional food critic would, they certainly know the difference between a good one and a bad one.

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