Todd English and Erica Wang. Photo: David X Prutting, PatrickMcMullan.com

What do you do when you and your celebrity chef husband-to-be call it quits just days before your extravagant wedding at an upscale New York City hotel?

If you're Erica Wang, the recently ex-ed fiancee of Todd English, you put on a chic black dress and party it up with your family and friends, the New York Post reports. English is the previously married 48-year-old owner of the Olives restaurants and star of season three of the reality-TV show "Top Chef."

Wang and English called off the wedding days before it was to take place at the St. Regis Hotel, and since several guests had already made the trip to New York for the event -- which gossip blog Gawker reports English had already paid for -- the would-be bride and "about 150 of Wang's closest friends and family packed into the posh party space 20 stories above Fifth Avenue," the Post reported.

"Everybody is having a fantastic time," a source told the Post. "People are dancing their butts off."

Grilled lamb chops with olive tapenade. Photo: Erica George Dines Photography

It is hard to believe that summer is officially coming to an end and football season is here. We always enjoy grilling in the fall -- cooler temperatures set in and you can bring the party outside once again.

Fall temperatures generally mean heartier meals, but that is all the more reason to keep your grill out until winter sets. Take advantage of fall's ingredients and keep the grill going.

Richer meats like lamb chops become some of our favorite weekend meals and are surprisingly easy to grill.

Learn more about Jennifer Iserloh at skinnychef.com, and read her exclusive Slashfood blogs every Monday and Friday.

Last Saturday morning, after coffee, and in search of inspiration, I opened the cabinets where I store odds and ends from second-hand stores and little shops I've encountered on my travels. A smooth wooden olive spoon from California caught my eye. I admired its delicate handle, topped with a round perforated scoop to lift olives from their brining liquid.

Olives, a staple of ancient Greece cuisine, are tasty eaten on their own but they can also be a healthy and delicious way to add flavor to old American standbys like sandwiches and pasta. I love olive spread or tapenade since it's flavorful and full of nutritional benefits like iron and Vitamin E. You won't find those in mayo or ketchup. I make this tapenade with extra virgin olive oil since nothing can beat the fruity, rich taste that comes from the first cold press of the fruit of the olive tree. "Light" olive oils go through additional processing, such as filtering and refining, and tend to be lighter in flavor, but it still has the same fat content and calories -- 14 grams per tablespoon at 120 calories -- as extra virgin.

Get Jennifer's Orange Olive Tapenade recipe after the jump.

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.

Happy Halloween! This bento with a thousand eyes from Los Dragonnes' Reiko's Bento Lab is the most excellently creepy boxed lunch I've seen yet. The bloodshot eyeballs are tuna and rice with olives, the grim greyish ones are tofu-turkey balls and the alien-looking orange eyes are smoked salmon.

I look at the no-knead bread recipe, created by Jim Lahey of the Sullivan Street Bakery and printed by the New York Times in the fall of 2006, as one of those recipes that will be with us for all time to come. People went crazy for it when it first came out and folks all over the world continue play with it, innovating new ways to make beautiful, flavorful, bakery-quality bread in their very own ovens. In January, Cook's Illustrated devoted an entire issue to no-knead bread, doing their level best to make an already-good recipe even better.

Today's image, from Timothy Gerdes, is a loaf of nearly no-knead bread with olives, rosemary and parmesan made from the Cook's Illustrated version of the recipe. Looks delicious Timothy, thanks for adding it to the Slashfood Flickr pool.

Europeans are crazy about labeling where a product is from. In some cases, wine for instance, it is more common for the product to be named after its originating region than it is to be named after what's actually in it. From now on, olive oil will have more specific labeling requirements as well.

The Coldiretti farmers union pressed the Italian government to pass a new law to include information on the label about where the olives were actually picked and pressed. They were upset about olive oils which claimed to be Italian but used olives from other country's around the Mediterranean. The new labeling information must also include what percentage of different olives were used in each product.

A consumer group called Codacons has endorsed the new law. They say that it helps to protect the consumer from fraud and poor quality olive oil. I say the more information on a label the better. Just make it clear and easy to read. Just because I want to know as much about the product I'm buying as possible doesn't mean I want to spend all day doing it.

[Via ColdMud]

Last night, my mom called me just as I was sitting down to eat some dinner. She asked me what I was having and I rattled off the food sitting in front of me, "a big salad, a pear and some olives." Sounding shocked, she said, "But I thought you didn't like olives!" I confessed that I crossed over to the olive loving side several years ago and have no intention of going back. She was so pleased to discover that I could now be counted among the olive loving crowd, as she has never met an olive that she didn't like and had been afraid I had inherited my father's dislike of the cured fruit.

These days, my favorite olives for straight eating are these Cerignola olives that I buy at DiBruno Bros. (their huge, gorgeous store is only a block from my apartment, which is both wonderful and extremely dangerous). I have also gone through phases where I prefer the tiny, salty Nicoise olives or the painfully sharp pitted Calamata olives.

So which camp are you in? Do you love or hate olives? If you love them, what's your favorite variety? Have you ever tried home curing olives?

Last Friday, students at CalTech put away their high tech pursuits and joined forces to harvest all the olives that grow on the school's 130 olive trees. This is the second year they've been picking the olives and the first year that they school went all out to throw a campus-wide harvest festival, complete with three-course family style Italian meal.

It got started last year when the university president spotted two students picking some of the olives. He promised them a home cooked meal if they could devise a way of making oil from the olives. They came up with a mechanism and the campus interest grew. The rest, as they say, is history. For those of you live in the area and want to try out some of the CalTech olive oil, it will be available in their bookstore in about three weeks.

[via Metafilter]

After pointing you to Wendy's new Design A Burger contest, I figured I'd point you to this site, since many of you eat pizza and not burgers.

It's the Random Pizza Generator, and it automatically chooses your crust, the types of cheese and all of your toppings for you. It's sort of like that idea Kramer had on Seinfeld, only you won't burn your fingers. The webmaster doesn't suggest you actually make the pizza you get, but if you do, take a picture of it and he'll post it.

The one I got was Smoked Gouda, Provolone, Cauliflowers, Salsa, Wurstel, and Spam. For the record, I am never making that.

Have you ever eaten an olive straight from the tree? Doesn't sound like it would be so fabulously fresh and delicious, like a fresh-picked apple?

Wrong. Olives taste like (excuse the language) crap when they're fresh from the olive tree.

Olives have to brined, or cured. Sean Timberlake, one of my favorite Bay Area food bloggers, went home with a bin of fresh olives and went to the trouble of doing this at home. Basically, the fresh olives sit in water for seven days, then in a salt solution for the next 10-15 days, then store them in olive oil or whatever other flavoring agents you want. Read Sean's details of how he cured these black pearls on his blog.

Looks like more food is being recalled, this time the kind humans eat.

The Food and Drug Administration is recalling olives by the Charlie Brown di Rutigliano & Figli. The Italian company bottles the olives under the names Borrelli, Cento, Flora, Roland, Vantia, Bonta di Puglia, Corrado's, Dal Raccolto, and other names. The codes start with the letter G and have 3 or 4 digits after the G.

No sickness has been reported yet, but the olives could be contaminated with a bacteria that could cause botulism. Here's more info for the U.S. and Canada.

Rachael Ray will never again have to explain to her viewers what "EVOO" stands for because it is the name of her very own brand of extra virgin olive oil. The olive oil is being "specially produced in Italy for Rachael" and is almost guaranteed to turn "dish from so-so to 'Yum-o' in no time," so not only can you use in all of Rachael's recipes, but you can look at her smiling face on the bottle's label. Rachael's site notes that the oil is a certified Product of Italy, made from only Italian olives (just in case you were wondering if they imported theirs before processing for some reason). It is sold in 17-oz. ($8.95) and 34-oz. ($17.95) bottles.

Of course, she may not have to spell out "extra virgin olive oil" every time she mentions EVOO anymore, but don't be surprised if she starts including the web address of her online store in its place.

This is the perfect drink for a Halloween party (or if you just feel like scaring some friends a little bit). It is called a Bloody Eyeball Martini and starts out as a straight martini, with gin and vermouth. The "bloody eyeball" accent is made by carving most of the red peel from a radish, leaving a few strips of color to look like veins. Once it is peeled, a small hole should be carved at the top and stuffed with a pimento olive, which represents the iris. After your eyeballs are ready, just store them in the freezer until you're ready to use them. If you don't mind watering down your drink a bit, you can actually freeze the eyeballs in an ice cube tray filled with water, which would be a great way to prep them for use in punch, where you don't necessarily want radishes and olives floating around on their own.

Yeah, it might be September, but it nowhere near sweater-weather, unless you're somewhere in the southern hemisphere. As such, these are still our "salad days" of summer, and one of the easiest salads to throw together is the Greek salad.

Simply chop red, ripe (but still firm) tomatoes, cucumbers, and bell peppers. Add thinly sliced red onion, pitted Kalamata olives, and Feta cheese (some lay a block of Feta on top of the salad; I crumble it in). The dressing is nothing more than olive oil, lemon juice, minced garlic, chopped oregano, and salt/pepper, all to your taste.

But be ye forewarned. A true Greek salad, the one that is called "horiatiki salata," does not have lettuce in it.

NPR's Kitchen Window recently featured a story (and recipe) about olive Ascolana, green olives stuffed with ground meat and nutmeg, then breaded and fried. The preparation is apparently widely available in Italy's Marche region. The recipe sounds a little tedious however, asking you to do the following to 50 unpitted olives: "cut the olive away from the pit in a spiral, as if you're peeling an apple." The idea is that you maintain the olive's shape, then stuff it, dip it in egg and breadcrumbs and then fry it. I may just have to give it a try. Has anyone out there made these at home yet?