"travel food" news and stories

If any Foodie Flick could blow your mind, it's this one. British comedian George Egg recently posted a YouTube video in which he cooks dinner in his hotel room.

We're not talking about a quick salad and sandwich here. Without bringing any special tools from home, Egg sweeps aside the overpriced room-service menu and makes pasta and biscuits in his room -- from scratch. No hot plate. No microwave. If it wasn't captured in a video, we probably wouldn't believe it.

The entrée? A tortellini pasta with spinach, rocket and crème fraîche that he cooks in the room's tea kettle. This might not leave a desirable taste for the next poor sap who makes tea, but it's a rather ingenious way to boil noodles. (He adds a raw egg yolk in a nod to carbonara; emulate that at your own risk.)

Oh, but there's more: Egg ups the ante by making biscuits (kneaded, risen, the whole 9 yards), using a clothes iron. Color us a new shade of impressed.

Though Robert Irvine might be back on "Dinner Impossible," we reckon he's got some stiff competition.

I recently stumbled across Minimus, an online retailer that specializes in individually wrapped foods designed for travel. I don't know that I'll ever need to mail-order a single packet of Saltines or two Grissini breadsticks ($0.06 and $0.11, respectively), but having a few packets of Frank's Red Hot Hot Sauce in the glove box or carry-on bag might not be a bad idea. The Minimus FAQ also states quite clearly that "[n]one of our items are from hotel guests or from restaurant tables." Still, it seems like some of these things aren't usually offered for individual sale. The disposable tea stick seems kind of cool, although I don't know why it would be any better than a regular tea bag. Like the entire site, maybe it's the novelty that's drawn me in.