"metafilter" news and stories

USA Today recently collected a list restaurants with high Zagat ratings near major U.S. airports. Their top pick was Chez Nous, less than 15 minutes away from Houston's George Bush Intercontinental. While the list offers one or two recommendations for about 20 U.S. airports, Zagat was stumped for good places near the terminals in Philly, Orlando and Detroit. On a similar note, Ask Metafilter today featured a thread about which airports around the world have the best food. So far, it doesn't look like anyone has mentioned Miami International's La Carreta, an excellent Cuban cafeteria in Concourse D.

Source

Back in October, I posted about sculptures of Darth Vader and Yoda made from roughly half a ton of butter. Today, boingboing featured a post about food sculptor Jim Victor. I don't believe that Victor is the one responsible for the Star Wars butter sculptures, but his portfolio of sculptures made from butter, as well as cheese, chocolate and pasta, is pretty impressive.

MetaFilter also has several links to other butter sculpture sites, including some great photos of butter sculptures done by Tibetan monks (right). Butter, a noble medium indeed.

Yesterday there was an Ask Metafilter thread about the differences between regular, kosher and sea salt. Although the thread did, at times, degrade into discussion of surface area and human origins in the sea, it did produce a few useful resources.

Slate ran an extensive review of several types of salt, from Morton to Maldon, last spring. Gourmet Sleuth also has a great rundown of different types of salt, as well as a salt FAQ. In print, there are some good salt discussions in Jeffrey Steingarten's It Must Have Been Something I Ate and Robert Wolke's What Einstein Told His Cook. And, of course, here's a transcript of the Good Eats episode about salt.

Perhaps the most definitive and useful thing to come out of the discussion: coarse salt is better for margaritas.