"tinfoil swan" news and stories

Need a way to spruce up those turkey leftovers? Top the traditional day-after open-faced turkey sandwich with a decadent mushroom and white wine gravy.

Get this turkey recipe along with many others after the jump.

For once, the government listens to New Orleans. On Friday, the FDA agreed to hold off on a warm-weather ban on raw Gulf oysters till the agency can fully study the issue. But in the Atlantic, it's getting harder to find cod on Cape Cod.

The International Vegetarian Union goes cannibalistic with this anatomical vegetarian advertisement. Keep it away from the woman afraid of vegetables.

Jamie Oliver, who's been hard at work trying to slim the waistlines of Huntington, W.Va., residents, is also peddling high-sodium pasta sauces in Britain.

If you like to slather it on, you can see all those Stephen Colbert-inspired Miracle Whip ads online here and here.

And finally, a Chicago Tribune sports columnist ate his own words -- the whole column in fact -- after admitting a basketball player drafted by the Bulls wasn't so bad after all.

Some of the most notable "Gourmet" recipes never made it to the magazine. Through its 69-year run, the magazine's food editors and test kitchen staff developed hundreds of adventurous, experimental, personal and just plain luscious recipes that for one reason or another escaped the print edition. With Gourmet.com's 2008 launch, multimedia supplements to magazine features, test kitchen video throw-downs, staffers' favorites and perusals of family archives afforded the opportunity to showcase Web-exclusive content, and a chance to serve up these recipes to their more cyber-savvy readers.

Though an Oct. 13 Tweet by the magazine's Executive Editor John Willoughby advised followers to "Go to gourmet.com, copy Web-exclusive recipes that will disappear: strawberry dumpling, banana upside down cake, curried pork noodles, etc.", Slashfood has been told by other Condé Nast insiders that after the magazine's recent, sudden shuttering, the future of Gourmet.com content remains uncertain, save for mag-published recipes that will be migrated to sister site Epicurious.com.

We're not taking any chances. We've clicked our way through 300-plus Web-exclusive recipes from October 2005 to September 2009 to find the 25 you simply must copy, paste and collect before they're (possibly) lost to the ages.

1. Frozen Peanut Butter Pie with Candied Bacon
Recipe by Andrea Albin

2. Potted Stuffed Squab
Recipe by Edna Lewis

3. Confit Gizzard with Honey Mustard
Recipe by Ian Knauer

4. Savory Duck Fat Doughnuts
Recipe by Ian Knauer

Get more recipes -- including Dijon ice cream and zucchini whoopie pies -- after the jump.

Photo: dan4th, Flickr.

The debate this column fueled last week concerning the standard baseline tip isn't the sort of thing most servers spend much time considering: We'd all like our patrons to leave us lots and lots of money, thanks.

But that doesn't mean there aren't service issues upon which front-of-the-housers may never agree. I'm thinking here of doggie bagging, a practice that I've seen pit close friends against one another. The contentious question is who does the boxing.

At the white tablecloth restaurants where I've worked, it's understood that the task of wrapping a guest's half-eaten food in foil – ideally sculpted into a graceful swan – falls to the server (although since foie gras and lobster tail make for notoriously bad leftovers, many diners opt to have the vestiges of their five-star meals scraped straight into the trash.)

That's not always the case at slightly more casual restaurants, where many servers routinely plop Styrofoam boxes onto their guests' tables. As a veteran of fancy dining rooms, I always figured those servers were lazy. Turns out, they're looking out for their guests' interests.

Tennessee whiskey. Photo: Flickr / jpenglert

Before we dive into the whiskey barrel and swim to safety, let's raise our glasses to the week that was.

Slashfood's barista pulled a hearty cappucino, the head sommelier uncorked some serious steals, our badass bartender ran afoul of the law, the brewski boys swilled Seattle and got hoppin' happy about a new Colorado IPA while our head blogger was caught in the crossfire of some cinematic Beer Wars.

We showed off our can-do attitude toward food preservation and gentleman farmers, then got snappy about food photo settings and crabby with 1970s-style dip and lingering customers until the Skinny Chef got us to chill out with summer soups and rooibos tea.

Julia Child's editor weighed in on her famous client's online Mini-Me, folks raised a kerfuffle over sodium levels, salmonella, felonious franks, free pastry and secret spices but really -- we just wanted to focus on our tacos.

Speaking of -- let's raise a toast to our dearly departed spokeschihuahua. Say perhaps, in Summit, N.J.? All-weekend-ish?