Here’s some food for thought for today…
- In case you were wondering, diets don’t work. Jenny Craig didn’t work for Kirstie Alley and in the long run, the Subway diet apparently didn’t work for poor ol’ Jared.
- Heck of a Job, Brownie – the Bush years in food art.
- After three years of no profits and issues with unions, Gordon Ramsay hands over control of his NYC restaurant to a franchisee.
- Tips for making candy this holiday season – which happen to explain why my pralines went grainy (too much stirring – D’oh!).
- Oh my darlin’… it’s clementine season!
- People think food writers live on foie gras and truffles all the time, but we like our little bits of processed comfort food, especially when we’re sick.
- In NYC, the ice cream trucks don’t disappear in the winter, they serve soup instead. Awesome!
- Eighteen months after Jamie Oliver’s Ministry of Food series, the city of Rotherham has embraced the concept and claimed it as their own when the city council there took over management of the local program.
- Has dining gotten too casual, or do we need to bring back the tablecloth?
Here’s some food for thought for today…
- All the things the waiter never tells you – like where the dessert really comes from.
- Meatless meals, beer, pot roast, afternoon tea and eating out for breakfast – restaurant trend predictions for 2010.
- What exactly should you do when ginormous fast food sculptures appear on your front lawn?
- When you eat could be as much of an influence on your weight as what you eat.
- Gordon Ramsay has a reputation for being a bit screamy but the head chef at his 3-star Chelsea restaurant is cool as a cucumber – and a woman.
- Pre-made heat and serve thingies or oysters and chopped liver… what makes a perfect holiday canape?
- Urban farming is reshaping cities and people everywhere are jumping on board – but what about the suburbs?
- Hey, you poor people, get your hands off our good, fair, sustainable food. Why the “good food revolution” still faces the hurdle of hypocrisy.
Here’s some food for thought for today…
- The Oatmeal does awesome comics and this one about beer is fabulous.
- Regular readers are well aware of my feelings about the word “foodie”. Seems I’m not the only one who thinks there must be a better word. Although I’m betting they don’t share my opinion that it’s a derogatory term that is actually well-suited for the book in question. (Not a big Pim fan, sorry.)
- The flavours, they just… come alive. All food gets creepy when you give it googly eyes.
- An anti-trust investigation has been started against Monsanto who have a corner on the seed market, as well as subsequent pesticides. It’s about time.
- Your supermarket-bought chicken is probably contaminated. yum.
- Nobody wants those Michelin stars – a 2nd Italian restaurant returns their stars, saying they don’t really need them to attract customers.
- Missing Gourmet Magazine? It still lives in the hearts and minds of bloggers who are doing monthly round-ups of recipes.
- You’re not supposed to think about it, you’re supposed to buy it… how cereal companies try to get away with health claims on packaging.
- They get all the cool stuff in Japan – like this phone that looks like a melting chocolate bar.
Here’s some food for thought for today…
- Just say no to office Christmas parties – or at the very least keep the drinking to a minimum (I know, it dulls the pain, but you’ll regret it the next day).
- Men eat more processed meat than women and it could be causing them to have a higher rate of cancer.
- People, lay it flat, press down, and gently slice crosswise; why cutting a bagel really isn’t hard, and the gazillion inventions that only make it more dangerous.
- What to do when you’re a meat-eater and your kid decides to become a vegetarian? Suck it up, Princess, you just might like it.
- Trying to understand the allure of KFC.
- Would you eat meat grown in a lab?
- What does it mean to go hungry, especially in the US?
- After gardening, preserving and the CSA meat share, what’s next for city-dwelling locavores? Why, getting back to the land, being one with the earth, and killing your own dinner, of course. Yeah, that’s what we want to be doing – giving hipsters guns.
- This might work better as a top, because now it’s going to be impossible to look at a cupcake without imagining a fetishist on a bender in a cupcake shop.
I hate my new Brita.
Okay, hate is a strong word. But I certainly don’t love the thing.
Like most people (well, sensible people) we eschew bottled water in favour of tap. But even though Toronto’s tap water is fine and safe, it often tastes a bit chemically. Thus, most people I know use a filtration system of some kind. For year’s we’ve had one of the ones that fits right onto the tap. Flip the little lever and voila! filtered water. Flip it back for regular water for washing dishes, etc.
The problem is that we live in a kind of shitty apartment complex where management tends to cheap out on things like fixtures. On one level I understand that; tenants have a habit of treating rental units badly, there’s no point in installing Moen taps in every unit when half of them will get trashed within a year. We’d buy and install our own better quality fixtures but I’m not putting money into someone else’s building, so unless I could take them with me when I eventually go, that isn’t happening.
Which is a long-winded way of saying that the on-tap filter was never especially practical, since the tap was kind of crappy and didn’t reach very far – rinsing out the sink was a pain, and we really needed on of those attachments that twisted and swivelled.
Recently I’ve had plumbers (like cockroaches only with saggy pants and bad cologne), and discovered after they had left one day that one of them had been fiddling with my water filter attachment, and had broken it. When we turned the tap on, water sprayed every which way.
Instead of replacing it we opted for the non-filtering swively tap thingie and a Brita.
Oh, but I don’t like the Brita.
To be fair, the water tastes better. The Brita filters out more gunk than the other thing did. But it… takes… so… long… to… fill. Gah!
And the capacity is less than the jug o’ water we used before, so every time we have a glass of water (which is 6 to 8 times a day for me), the Brita needs refilling. Also, the charcoal bits are getting loose in the upper reservoir. This doesn’t filter thorough into the jug itself, but the floaty bits weird me out – they look like dirt, which shouldn’t be in my water. And the thing doesn’t fit especially well onto the fridge shelf, but if I move the shelves, everything else won’t fit right.
Also, the swively tap thing makes a godawful noise – like someone jamming a cat into a paper shredder. So we also have to remember to fill the Brita before the other person’s gone to bed because the noise wakes us up (or rather Greg needs to remember to not fill it after I’ve gone to bed). It gets the corners of the sink clean now, but oh, the noise.
I know… I’m whining and complaining unnecessarily. At least I have fresh clean water to drink, right? Plenty of people around the world don’t. And sometimes helping the environment is a bit inconvenient.
But I’m never gonna love the thing.
Here’s some food for thought for today…
- In most Western countries we stress (usually unnecessarily) about kids being overweight – but in Italy, your kid could “fail” lunch if they’re not chubby enough.
- What do you do if the restaurant accidentally undercharges you… but the food wasn’t very good? Do you point it out, adjust the tip or pay the bill as it is?
- Britain celebrates the 200th anniversary of its first curry house.
- Low prices and an abundant apple crop in the US this season means that even juice companies don’t want the “drops”, and apple farmers are leaving hundreds of bushels on apples on the ground.
- The amount of food wasted in the US (and probably other Western countries) is contributing to climate change.
- An ice cream parlour in Durham, NC, where a sit-in against segregation took place 3 years before the famous Woolworth’s sit-in. will be honoured with a historic marker.
- Poison, poison… ah, tasty fish. A Japanese fish farm is raising non-poisonous fugu fish. Which kind of takes the fun and excitement out of the whole experience, doesn’t it?
- Screw it, I give up, pass the fries. It seems that body fat results in changes to the blood that make it harder for people to lose weight.
Hello good peoples,
I know some of you hit this site specifically to enjoy the daily round-up of weird and wonderful food-related links. And I appreciate your traffic. However, it being US Thanksgiving this week, most of my sources of links have all become obsessed with turkey.
I’m also having some personal issues (rushed a sick dog to the vet earlier today), and have some things going on over at TasteTO.
So, Food For Thought is on vacation for the rest of the week. It will return next Monday once the food sites can talk about something other than turkey and cranberry sauce.
I’ll try and come up with some original content posts in the meantime (I KNOW… what a novel idea!).
Cheers,
Sheryl
Here’s some food for thought for today…
- Ever feel like a meanie when you’re out walking the dog and stop for ice cream and can’t give the dog any because it will make them sick? Boutique quality ice cream for dogs could be coming to an ice cream shop near you if a NYC teen has any say in the matter.
- A venison burger party is a great way for hunters to get in the spirit for the opening of hunting season. And also to make room in the ol’ freezer in the hopes of bagging something this year.
- This holiday season, it might be an idea to leave Grandma’s antique china in the cabinet – unless you like lead in your cranberry sauce.
- Or you could use those dishes for the picky eaters who demand special items and refuse to eat half of what you’ve cooked.
- Are “girly-labelled” wines (labels with images of dresses, shoes, red lips, etc.) opening up the world of wine to women, or are they just insulting in the assumption that we’re all “Sex and the City” kind of gals?
- If Obama wanted to put food and health front and centre – I supposed suggesting the same to Stephen Harper would be like spitting in the wind.
- The kitchen utensil you didn’t know you needed – a scrudle. (I can’t help wondering if this lady moved her cockatiel into the kitchen just for the photo shoot so the bird could be in the newspaper too.)
- A toast – to drinking. Another study (one that refutes the previous studies, so really, who the hell knows…) indicates that moderate and heavy drinkers receive some heart protection from the alcohol they consume. Note that the study does not address liver disease.
- And if the booze doesn’t kill you, the smoking might – in NYC, despite a ban, the stank of cigarette smoke is wafting through bars and clubs again.
Here’s some food for thought for today…
- The history of the bluefin tuna as Japanese delicacy. Once considered garbage, this fish is now on the verge of extinction purely because of human greed.
- Pie crust for wusses. No, it’s not one of those no-fail recipes with the egg, it’s the tough love version.
- “One, I will have to tell the government, and two, the government will trace it back…” Yeah… why people who eat conventionally-slaughtered beef are really, really, really stupid.
- There’s an art to complaining about something in a restaurant – do you know how to do it?
- Medium well-done? And you call yourself a meat-eater? Pffft! Sarah Barracuda’s new book apparently has more to do with her love of killing and eating animals than politics. (Unrelated: please, please, please let her run for US President in 2012 – it would be the best Presidential debates EVAR!)
- 15 things worth knowing about coffee.
- Mummies had heart disease too – a study of a variety of mummies dating back 3500 years shows signs of heart disease in many of them, possibly due to a diet high in meat and salt.
- It’s anything can happen day – Anthony Bourdain comments (briefly) on the sale of the Travel Channel to the Scripps Network (owners of FoodTV).
- They’re beautiful (and tasty) on the inside. TasteStopping – where ugly rejects from sites like FoodGawker and TasteSpotting have their 15 minutes of fame.
Here’s some food for thought for today…
- It’s a tradition at US Thanksgiving to “pardon” a turkey, thus saving it from becoming dinner. But where do the pardoned turkeys go? Disney. No really… where it turns out to not be the happiest place on earth. At least not for turkeys.
- If chefs are the new rockstars then it only makes sense that people would pay good money for their cast off cookbooks and kitchen equipment.
- Yesterday I included an amusing anecdote about Chavez – today’s dictator, Robert Mugabe, is less amusing as he blames the West for Zimbabwe’s food security breakdown.
- The British are still worried about a take-over of Cadbury, this time by Hershey. And while I enjoy the occasional peanut butter cup, the allusion to it tasting like “squirrel vomit” was good for a laugh since I’ve always found Hershey’s chocolate to have a baby vomit vibe to it.
- It’s bad enough that your imported tomatoes are picked with slave labour, but a backlash against those same labourers by retailers as they fight for a fair wage (an extra penny per pound of fruit) is unbelievable.
- I’m seeing lots of articles about the recently released “fat map” that shows global per capita calorie consumption but nothing with a key that shows actual figures.
- The science of food processing – from the text on the package to which flowers restaurants should put on their tables.
- Ohh… burn! Tokyo now has more restaurants with 3 Michelin stars than Paris.
