"model" news and stories

This is Liz. She's an artist who works in a very delicious medium; Jell-O.

In this particular clip, she shows how she fashions San Francisco's entire Mission District out of the gelatin dessert.

The process is simple, but tedious: Liz takes pictures of the District, and then uses the photos to build molds out of balsa wood and foam core. Then, she builds silicone rubber molds around the sculptures, and when they dry, she makes the Jell-O and lets it set in the molds.

(Oh, and Liz makes Jell-O the way us normal people do, but sometimes she adds additional coloring to make the sculpture more vibrant). She also sprinkles dry Jell-O around the model to represent streets and parks).

One caveat about working with Jell-O (besides the overwhelming urge to consume your sculptures, of course) has to be the fact that eventually, it gets moldy.

But instead of letting that ruin her work, Liz uses the moldiness as a metaphor for change and adaptation within urban areas.

If you haven't heard by now, there has been a lot of controversy in the fashion world about extremely thin models lately. Some shows have banned girls from the catwalks if their BMI is too low and other designers are refusing to use them to show their collections. In an effort to aid those poor, overly thin models on their quest to bulk back up and get back to strutting their stuff on the runway, the trendy Bumpkin restaurant in Notting Hill in London is offering free food to them. Any model with a BMI (Body Mass Index) of less than 18 - which would be the BMI for a 5'8" woman weighing 120-lbs - can get all the free food that they want. The manager recommends the hearty charter pie, which contains leeks, chicken and bacon and is "enough to keep you warm and energized all day."

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Easy Exotic: A Model's Low-Fat Recipes from Around the World is the cookbook by Padma Lakshmi, the new host of Bravo TV's Top Chef series. The book was originally released in 1999, and features recipes that Padma cooked or ate when she traveled the world as a working model. For the home cook, this translates into healthy dishes that are easy to prepare - not always completely "authentic," but with enough flavor to spice up your daily cooking routine. It includes about 60 recipes, some of which are more traditional, and some of which are simply influenced by the traditional. All are easy to prepare and make liberal use of fresh herbs and spices. The countries touched on are Spain, France, Italy, Morocco and India, and there is also a generic Asian category, which is more about general flavors than specific dishes. Some of the other dishes include Chicken Tagine (Morocco), Chole (India), Rajma (India), Spanish Tortilla Cake, Sauteed Steak in Red Wine (France) and Penne all' Arribbiata (Italy). A half-dozen or so dessert recipes wrap up the book, because models have sweet-tooths, too.

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We closely followed Bravo's culinary reality show Top Chef all through its first season earlier this year, and when we heard that Katie Lee Joel would not be back to host the upcoming season, we were quite sad. Just kidding. We couldn't wait to see who they brought in as a replacement.

The new host is Padma Lakshmi, an Indian supermodel, actress and fashion writer, as well as the author of two cookbooks (one is still pending release) and host of a now-defunct show on the Food Network. She has more presence and perhaps more culinary experience than Katie Lee, but hopefully she will prove to be a bit more expressive in her delivery of her lines.

The new season is already filming and it is set in Los Angeles, as opposed to San Francisco. The episodes are scheduled to begin airing in October of this year.

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