"twitter" news and stories

For foodies and off-work cooks, Twitter is a way to share recipes for the tactfully short-handed and poetically brief. (See: Eric Ripert, Ruth Reichl and Ian Knauer). Most recipes are simple or merely state the components of a dish for inspiration, but some people tweet full recipes within the allotted 140 characters. Amateur cook Maureen Evans got pretty good at it -- so good, in fact, that she developed the first-ever Twitter cookbook.

Released just last month, Eat Tweet (Artisan, $14.95) compiles more than 1,000 tweeted recipes from Evans' @cookbook account, which she still updates with new creations, like Whisky Apples, Roasted Tomato Sauce or Eggs Berlin: shallots, thyme, lemon, pumpernickel and poached eggs. Or should we say: "3c shallot/⅓c olvoil h@low; +6c zuke 20m@low to tender; +¼t thyme/lem&garlc/s+p. Top 4pce pumpernickel tst; +4poachedegg/basil."

For those who might be wary of translating what she calls Twitterese, Evans has posted eighteen decoded recipes on her Huffington Post blog, including Julia Child's Boeuf Bourguignon. Check out the condensed version of that one.

From local spots like Chicago's Wow Bao restaurant to national chains like Chipotle, restaurants are turning to Twitter to interact directly with unhappy customers.

The micro-blogging site is letting customers and restaurants interact in new ways, and letting restaurants react to customer complaints with lightening speed, the Associated Press reported.

Celebrity chef Graham Elliot, judge on Fox's "MasterChef" reality show and owner of the Graham Elliot restaurant in Chicago, told the AP Twitter is helping tear down the wall between restaurants and their customers. His Twitter feed discusses cooking and his restaurant, fantasy football and what music he should play in the restaurant.

"Most of the time people just want to be heard," he said. "It's the democratization of fine dining."

It's time to pack away your romantic image of farmers clad in overalls, perched atop a tractor. Today's agricultural workers and landowners are a modern bunch, and nowhere is that more evident than online, where they're cropping up on Facebook and Twitter in record numbers. These days, farm equipment includes computers, and, by using status updates and clever one-liners, farmers are educating a whole new community about what life is really like on the farm.

A recent example shows the power of their online presence. After an animal rights group released a video on YouTube of dairy cows being punched and prodded with pitchforks, responses were understandably outraged. But farmers fought back, blogging, tweeting, uploading their own videos and defending the industry on Facebook.

"There is so much negative publicity out there, and no one was getting our message out," Ray Prock Jr., a second-generation Central California dairy farmer, told the Associated Press. Prock halted a family vacation to log on and respond to the cow abuse video.

If YouTube revolutionized the concept of downtime for cubicle drones, then Twitter did the same for lunch.

It was all thanks to last summer's glorious techno-culinary union of Twitter and the food truck. Mobile eateries serving up everything from edamame dumplings in New York to Korean BBQ in LA snagged a parking spot and began Tweeting their location to eager fans who were still stuck behind their desks. The only problem was, once you had the carne asada taco in hand, there was only one place left to go: back to your cubicle.

Enter the bustaurant. As Salon reports, what appears to be the country's first full-fledged restaurant on wheels began rolling the streets of LA this past March, offering not only the sort of hipster-pleasing fast food the trucks are famous for (Worcestershire-braised short rib; vegetarian chili), but also a place to sit and enjoy it.

Even Martha Stewart needs some time off from the kitchen every now and again. The domestic diva admitted on her Twitter last week that she ate out on Thanksgiving.

"Full confession: I did not cook on Thanksgiving -- went to Per Se for brunch and to watch the Macy's parade -- dinner with friends at Four Seasons," she wrote Friday. "Four Seasons did a great job -- turkey for each table, all the fixings, soufflés for dessert, pretty impressive considering a full house!"

Stewart ended her Thanksgiving with a screening of the "Twilight" film "New Moon," which she called "really excellent," though she found the wolves to be "mangy."

The eating out revelation came just a couple of days after she demonstrated turkey roasting on the "Today Show."

What do you think? Should Martha have cooked her own feast? Or do you approve of eating out for Thanksgiving?