Julia Child's 10 best bon mots. Photo: Chow

Chow sums up its 10 favorite Julia-isms in time for tonight's release of "Julie and Julia". Our fave? "When a sommelier asked her to name her favorite wine, she replied, 'Gin.'"

Holy adorableness, Batman: Bakerella's pie pops.

Bill Keller, editor of the New York Times, jumps on the Diner's Journal blog to weigh in on the non-anonymity of new critic Sam Sifton.

Freakishly beautiful Meneghini refrigerators, via Apartment Therapy.

Speaking of John Hughes, over at sibling site Moviefone they've summed up the 10 best cinematic moments in eating.

BoingBoing finds a great Snopes article about Van Halen trashing a concert venue after finding forbidden brown M&M's in the backstage area. Apparently David Lee Roth used the candies as a litmus test of a venue.

I have found that the more storage space I have for the food, the more food I'll keep socked away. For example, we got a new refrigerator last summer. I was giddy with excitement when we bought it, thrilled that I would finally have a fridge that wasn't stuff to the gills. However, in very short order, it was just as packed with food as the previous fridge had been despite being a full 1/3 bigger.

Recently, I've been trying to be more diligent about using up the things we have instead of purchasing food on a whim, and this week, there are a number of home cooks and food bloggers specifically endeavoring to do the same thing. A Mighty Appetite's Kim O'Donnell is keeping things organized and she has more than 100 households across five countries participating in the Eat Down the Fridge Challenge (there's even a honor roll and a Facebook group devoted to the effort).

If you've got a number of things tucked away in your fridge, freezer and pantry, consider playing along this week and see how many meals you can make from the food that you already have.

Your fridge consumes about 8 percent of a home's electricity, reports Planet Green, but there are plenty of ways to keep its energy use down - cleaning the coils, covering food, etc.

Here's a new one: install carpeting. A new book, Carbon-Free Home, suggests covering the fridge with insulation boards which are in turn covered with carpet or corkboard. Apparently this can reduce energy use by about 50 percent.

Check out the Planet Green site for the (very simple) four-step instructions. Or take a look at the Chelsea Green site for much more detailed directions. Neither site, however, suggest whether shag or pile would look better next to your ketchup bottle and Chinese takeout cartons.

Have any of you tried this?

In the interest of diminishing their carbon footprints, a few hardy souls on the frontier of the sustainable living movement have decided to ditch their refrigerators, reports The New York Times. Although 99.5 percent of American homes have at least one fridge, anti-fridge advocates say they make do just fine without.

One couple lives with just a small freezer and a cooler, kept chilled by two frozen soda bottles of water, which are rotated back to the ice chest when they begin to melt. I guess this would work OK, assuming you're home enough to rotate the bottles regularly - that might but a damper on your social life ("Oh, I'd love to stay, but I've got to go home and rotate the ice bottles!"). They say fridge-free living makes them more conscious of what they eat, relying less on packaged foods and planning ahead more so that meat from the freezer has time to defrost.

Wondering why your refrigerator and freezer or using so much energy? Follow some quick and easy instructions to keep these machines running more efficiently, even during a power outage.

While I am typically not particularly picky when it comes to food or drink. However, when coffee is concerned, I am pretty darn selective (my coffee addiction has been well-documented here, here and here). I love coffee, and don't have a whole lot of tolerance for weak, burnt or stale coffee. However, even I sometimes get tangled in the "how to store you coffee bean" debate. For years I fell firmly in the camp that believed that coffee should live in the freezer. But then I read somewhere that it was best to keep it at room temperature and so I begrudgingly switched. These days I keep my coffee out on the counter, in large part because I go through it fast enough that I don't worry about the oils in the beans going bad.

Over at the Unclutterer, Erin has put together a helpful guide with tips on how best to store coffee. According to her research, my storage technique seems to be okay (room temperature is acceptable, as is the freezer for beans that you want to keep for the long term). She does stress that coffee beans should not be stored in the fridge, as it is far too moist in there.

How do you guys store your coffee beans? Fridge, freezer, room temperature or some combination?

The refrigerator in my apartment is a very bare-boned model. The shelves are bare wire racks, which means that if something leaks on the top shelf, it very quickly saturates the entire fridge. There isn't a cheese drawer (I have an old clear plastic shoe box on the bottom shelf that corrals the cold cuts and cheeses) and the space on the door is slim. The one thing I do have is two crisper drawers and I use them as much as possible, often stuffing them beyond a comfortable capacity. This does sometimes mean that I lose a green pepper or a head of broccoli, only to find it again when it is soft and brown.

Over at the Unclutterer, Erin has a similar problem with her crisper drawers and began to wonder if the crisper drawer was the best place to store her fruits and veggies. She has put together a list of produce and the storage recommendations for each item. It's a helpful resource and one that may save you a lot of money and pain, as it will teach you how to keep your apples crisp (keep in bags punched with holes on the shelf for good air circulation) and your corn fresh (keep in husk if you're going to use it immediately, otherwise remove the husk and silk, vacuum seal and freeze). She also says that bananas can go in the fridge to slow down their ripening, that onions should go someplace cool, dry and ventilated (not the refrigerator) and that potatoes can be stored in the crisper drawers, but should be given a day to warm up to room temperature before you use them.

Where I live it is (finally!) starting to feel like Spring, so my refrigerator is getting stocked full of fresh fruits and vegetables just waiting to be sliced and diced for some summer salads. Some of them are more difficult to handle than others though, and I'm often asked what the best way is to handle a particular fruit or veggie.

I ran across this blog entry by Rachel at Coconut & Lime, which provides complete, detailed, step-by-step instructions (including pictures) on how to cut up a mango with minimal waste. This may seem a bit elementary for seasoned cooks - but for those who are just learning their way around the produce aisle it is an excellent guide. Once you have them all cut up, Rachel also follows up with a recipe for Mango Chicken which sounds absolutely delicious.

Is you dream refrigerator a giant Subzero or a colorful, retro Big Chill? Designers are already thinking outside of the box when it comes to restyling refrigerators and, if they get their way, we might be looking at a totally different appliance in the future. This is the Tree House Fridge, a design concept from the team of Chuan Shi, Wenying Lu, Chuan Shi & Yu Li at Yanko Design. Its unique layout presents an interesting possibility of what fridges could be like in the not-too-distant future. Each of the branches will be specifically designed to store a certain type of food - cheese, produce, etc - and will have a slide-out compartment in the trunk for larger things and drinks. To take advantage of the tree shape, the branches will have holders on the doors where fruit can be stored and "picked" at will.

A tree, of course, seems a bit extreme, but it is not so far-fetched to imagine separated, specialized compartments that will keep food fresher than the salad drawers that many refrigerators are equipped with now.

We're becoming more and more aware of food safety, even in our own homes, and though we will never forget to scrub everything that has come into contact with fresh poultry and now, to wash all our produce, we should also remember that the safest way to thaw frozen meat is quickly. In other words, don't take out a couple of frozen T-bones in the morning and leave them on the counter all day.

According to Engadget, this Sharp refrigerator has a warming drawer that allows you to quickly thaw your frozen foods. However, we can't tell for sure because the original site is in Japanese. A few of the commenters on the Engadget post have tried to help with the translation, but if there's any one of our Slashfood readers who knows Japanese, let us know what we're missing!

Of course, if our interpretation of the what the fridge actually does is off, at least we were reminded to always quick-thaw our frozen meats!

Generally, to keep foods fresh longer, we wrap them up and place them in the refrigerator. Sometimes, we don't give much thought to how things should actually be stored or whether we're doing it properly. As a result, you are more likely to get food poisoning at home than when eating out at a restaurant where health codes are strictly enforced. Some of the biggest food safety violations have to do with the refrigerator, the catch-all of food storage. Here are a few tips to keep you, and your family, a little safer.

• The refrigerator should be kept at, or below, 40°F. Keep in mind that the temperature can rise when the door is opened frequently and if the fridge is overcrowded and air cannot circulate.
• Store raw meat that you won't be eating right away in the freezer, not the refrigerator. Defrost it in the fridge.
• Milk is good for about 10 days past its "sell-by" date, although if it is left out to warm up, it can go bad before that time. It is better to keep it in the main part of the refrigerator than on the door.
• Fruits and vegetables can be stored at the same temperature they are stored in the store, though cut produce should be refrigerated and eaten within a few days.
• Hard cheeses can be stored, wrapped, for several weeks. If mold develops, the affected area and about 1/2-inch around it should be removed; the rest is safe to eat. Do not eat soft cheeses or dairy products, including cream cheese and yogurt, that have molded.
• Fresh eggs will last at least 3 or 4 weeks in the fridge, but hard-cooked eggs will only last one week. You can always check your eggs for freshness if in doubt. Eggs blend better with other ingredients in recipes for baked goods and get more volume when beaten if they are held at room temperature for 20 or 30 minutes before using.

Earlier this week, Nicole posted about recipe searches using Google itself, or Cooking with Google. Along those same "help me with what's in my fridge," life-gives-you-lemons kind of lines comes Snacksby.com. Admittedly still in its infancy, Snacksby describes itself as "like MacGyver, but for food." A search for "chicken, cucumbers, corn," which is what's in my fridge now, returned "Don't really expect anything, we've only got like 3 recipes and 12 ingredients here right now anyway. You should totally add a recipe or an ingredient." That may be a bit of an understatement, and some of Snacksby's features-tag clouds, food photo sharing-could be a lot of fun if/when more people start to contribute to the site. It's definitely worth a look. 

Speaking of things staying good in the 'fridge, someone on FARK recently posted a link about Timestrips, "smart-labels" with built in timers that can count down days or weeks. The idea is that you slap one of these labels onto something open in your refrigerator, activate it and then have a better idea of how long it's been around. A dye inside the label creeps across at a consistent rate. As RealTechNews noted, the sniff check is probably all you'll ever need. Still, if for some reason you had a lot of different things to keep track of in your fridge, maybe something like this would help you keep your sanity. If that was the deciding factor of your sanity though, maybe you're the type of person that already has a neatly drawn chart with dates for what's in your icebox. At any rate, they're about $9 for a pack of 50.

In almost every refrigerator in every home, there is a package of old, mysterious food. It could be furry, smelly or have actually developed into a new life form by the time you find it and dispose of it. There is one place that contains food more frightening that the home refrigerator: the office refrigerator.

To say that this appliance is the black hole of food is inaccurate only in the fact that some of the food eventually resurfaces.

There are a variety of standard food items in office refrigerators. Most of them contain some form of creamer, often the non-dairy varieties, as well as variously dated cartons of milk. There are always a few jars with condiments like mustard, mayonnaise and jam. The number of condiments is directly proportional to the number of people who work in the office and have access to the fridge, so despite the fact that no one can recall ever adding anything themselves, a fridge in an office of 50 people will have a dozen bottles of salad dressing, a few jars of mayonnaise and at least 3 different mustards, in addition to pickles, soy sauce and ketchup - none of which anyone can find when they want to use it, of course, which leads to the addition of even more condiments.

Gorenje is already one of the leading European appliance manufacturers, but they are aiming to become the most innovative, as well. The company is releasing two lines of Swarovski crystal-encrusted refrigerator/freezers. The first is known as "the Eye-Catcher" and features 7,000 hand-embedded crystals in a high-gloss, black background. Only 10 of this model will be produced. For the slightly less outrageously inclined, the alternative to the Eye-Catcher is Gorenje's commercial line crystal fridge, which only has 3,500 crystals in a black and silver refrigerator/freezer.

Getting past their very unique look, the 2-meter high fridges are controlled with a touch screen mounted on the door, allowing the user to control settings and the appliance temperature very easily. From the same screen, users can access a built-in radio, recipe book and a voice memo recorder/player. Both models will be available exclusively at Harrod's, in England, later this month.