"nintendo" news and stories

Nintendo is going to try to convince you to throw out your cookbooks. The game company just cooked up "America's Test Kitchen: Let's Get Cooking," which offers electronic step-by-step instructions for hundreds of recipes from the how-to TV show America's Test Kitchen.

Compatible with the Nintendo DS, DSi and just-released DSi XL, the software has cooks-in-training use its touch-screen technology to choose dishes to prepare, then divvies up tasks among family members or friends. Cartoon chefs talk you through each step of every recipe, and the program includes instructional videos on kitchen basics like chopping an onion and mincing garlic.

Homemade candy corn. Photo: NoshWithMe, Flickr.

A few of the best stories spied elsewhere on the Web this week:

Why buy bags of Brach's when you can make your own gorgeous Halloween candy?

A chain of Spanish-American restaurants in Brooklyn and Queens offers seafood-loaded and tequila-spiked "Viagra" soup.

A recent study published in the Journal of Neuroscience is the first to show that eating and drinking act as painkillers by way of distraction.

The new "Hell's Kitchen" Nintendo game requires players to chop food and drop it into pots, but surprisingly does not involve swearing and smoking.

Move over Starbucks, Wolfgang Puck is introducing bottled Culinary Iced Coffees made with organic ingredients.

In the latest Todd English news, his former fiancée, Erica Wang, turned herself in to the police today, after he filed assault charges against her.

Now that the kids are going off to school, it's time to tear the little monsters away from the video games and force them to buckle down on their studying, right?

Right. As in "Yeah, right, like you're really going to get them to stop playing video games."

Be not discouraged, parents. Instead of banning video games completely, you can turn it into a family activity. You still have to do family Quality Time during the school year, right? Cooking Mama, the video game we've mentioned before that lets you cook without having to get into the kitchen, has a new version out for the Nintendo Wii called Cooking Mama Cook-off. What a great way to train your kids so that in a few months, they can cook dinner for themselves. Of course, when they head off to class, you can use the Wii to do a little workout before you have to rush out to pick them up from soccer practice.

P.S. Nintendo Wiis are hard to get a hold of, but you can win one from CoolHunting and ThisNext.

I must have video games on the brain. First it was gamer food porn, and now I'm intrigued by London-based food blog Jam Faced's current fascination with Cooking Mama, which we mentioned here on Slashfood last year when the game was coming out.

What is it about Jam Faced's post I love? It's the fact that Jam Faced isn't afraid to admit that 1) "when I'm not cooking or eating, I'm probably to be found playing a game," but more charmingly, 2) his game of choice is not some all-night binge on World of Warcraft, but cute little cartoon-like Cooking Mama. Yes! Cooking Mama, which allows you to roll gyoza under the watchful eye of the pink-bonneted Mama. But perhaps best of all is that Jam Faced has "even found myself pondering a few of the recipes for future real life cookery."

Awesome.

These video-game inspired cakes from Glitter Pissing seemed to fit right in with the other strange (some have said "geeky") series of cakes we've featured recently on Slashfood. There were the Stargate cupcakes, the sysadmin cupcakes and then the meat cake. According to blogger r4kk4, these cakes, which include the Nintendo you see here, arcade versions of Centipede and Ms. Pacman and a Gameboy with Tetris pieces, were created for a cakewalk to benefit the nonprofit youth literacy group 826 Seattle. From the looks of the dozens of comments, there could definitely be a market for cakes like these.