Snips & Snaps

Things that have interested me recently, but that I'm entirely too lazy to write about (at any length), are:

1. Foraging for wild bamboo shoots. Complicated, but interesting. Even Jean-Georges Vongerichten thinks so. I was just playing around with the bamboo shoot in the photo (don't you ever accuse me of being a food stylist!): The white filling is goat cheese and the little topper-jobs are chive blossoms (from my garden) that I pickled.


2. Steaming eggs to hard-boil them . . . it makes them incredibly easy to peel. You can also really nicely control the "doneness" of the yolk. Thanks to Maria Rodale whose book, Scratch (Rodale, October 2016) turned me on to this. (Though to be fair, she learned it from a chef in Pennsylvania named Allan Schanbacher. You'll have to ask him where he learned it. And then let me know what he says.)

3. Making an easy-peasy ratatouille by roasting whole (untrimmed) eggplant, zucchini, and plum tomatoes (and sometimes some sliced onions) and then slicing everything up after. Just add olive oil, herbs, S&P, and maybe a dash of balsamic. Done.

4. Black limes. They are an ingredient in Persian (OK, Iranian) cooking and are called—among other transliterated words—loomi. I've never seen a whole lime, but I bought a bottle of powdered limes. The powder has a nice sort of citrusy tang and a very faint underflavor of something else....almost like fenugreek, or some other sort of haunting spice. I mix black lime powder with sea salt for sprinkling on things. I thought that I had stumbled on a fantastic salt substitute until I found out that "black limes" are first cooked in a salt solution (sheesh) before being dried in the sun until they turn black. The bottle I bought is labeled Black Lemon Powder, even though the ingredient list says black limes (oh, those wacky Middle Easterners).

5. Dried mango powder. Called amchoor/amchur (more transliteration here). Liking this too, for the same reason as the black limes. Faintly tart and sort of like putting salt on food, but not.

6. And then, in a complete 180°, I've been obsessed with making flavored salt. (It was weird last Xmas, 2015. I gave people flavored salt and they gave me flavored salt. Everybody gave everybody flavored salt. What up?) Anyway, I just experimented with mixing kosher salt with various liquids: some simple (lemon juice) and some more complex (red wine and balsamic with herbs steeped in it). I spread the resulting paste out on a baking sheet to dry and then I crumbled it back into sprinkle-able salt. It's fun. You can get cool colors. Don't bother with the lemon juice, it just tastes like salt on steroids.

The mystery teapot

In the late 18th, early 19th century, a certain style of teapot came into fashion in England. It was modeled after a pot brought back from India by a Lady Cadogan and was made popular because George IV admired one. Thenceforth everyone absolutely had to have one.

I want one too, not because I am a follower of George IV, but because the teapot is just plain cool. This teapot has no lid. There is no apparent way to fill it.

The way it works is this: If you invert the teapot you see that running up into the pot from the bottom is a tube. You fill the pot through the tube, turn the pot rightside up and the water.....aaaah, too hard to explain. Look at this glass version of the pot and you can see how it works.

You can look for antique Cadogan pots (like the top photo) manufactured by the Rockingham works in England or you can buy the modern glass version shown here (called the Mystery Pyramid Teapot) for $30 from a site that also sells Klein bottles.

Just in case you don't know what a Klein bottle is, it's a bottle that, like a Moebius strip, has a continuous surface. Enough said. You can check out the Klein bottle site to learn more.

Hi, Monkey

I must be very easily amused, because I find the website called "Hi, Monkey" absolutely charming. The site is filled with recipes and craft projects all illustrated by photographs of a small stuffed terrycloth monkey preparing the food or making the craft. (Bear with me, here.)

For example, Monkey's recipe for potato latkes, which starts out with a photograph of Monkey and two potatoes and a caption that reads: “My two little friends from Idaho have graciously consented to be turned into potato pancakes.” In the next photo Monkey is peeling the potatoes and the caption reads: “After thanking them profusely I peel my little pals. Please don't do this with any of your friends unless they are actual potatoes.”

Anyway, you get the picture. But the recipes are serious, and although the ingredient quantities are a little loose, you could probably make potato latkes after reading this.

There are tons of other craft ideas and recipes and photographs of Monkey. I recommend checking out his decorating ideas for “Panda Cupcakes.”

Awesome sushi

In July I wrote about these sushi wrappers made of soy (Soy Wrappers for Sushi). I just knew they could be wonderful in the hands of an inspired cook.

My favorite artist/blogger, Luxirare, made my imaginings come true. Who else could have made such an incredible looking piece of sushi? Check out her (as always) wonderful photo essay about making this, and other, spectacular looking wrapped edibles. It's actually a story about her assembling a bento box lunch to which she has also added a fantastic collection of jello shots (scroll to the end of the bento box story).

Organic lip balm

I'm not much for make-up, but I am addicted to lip balm. I have a million brands and I am always on the look-out for something new.

Odd to have this in a food blog? Well, lip balm is intended for your mouth, with which you EAT, and these organic balms from eos come in flavors that sound good enough to EAT: Summer Fruit, Honeysuckle Honeydew, Sweet Mint.

I want them for their looks alone. The bonus is they're 100% natural, paraben-free, widely available, and about $3. Eos also makes balm in stick form with 2 more food flavors: Vanilla Bean and Pomegranate Raspberry.

A final note: On the eos website, their promotion for the lip balms includes this claim: "precisely glides onto lips." Huh? As opposed to that uncontrollable and imprecise Chapstick?

Samurai eggplant

Japanese eggplant wearing samurai helmet. From Union Square Farmer's Market in NYC.

Chuckle for Sunday

A box of 12 goldfish trash bags is $16 from perpetual kid.

'nuff said

I have neither explanation nor apology for posting this except that it provided a nice Saturday morning chuckle. Over to you.

The King Tut tissue box cover is $25 from Toscano.

Recipe cards from the 1970s

It all started with Fluffy Mackerel Pudding.

I was trading war stories with someone (hey, Deri!) about some of the worst recipe titles we'd run across in our careers, and I mentioned a recipe called Crusty Prune Delight. She countered with Fluffy Mackerel Pudding (which won the contest fins down) and pointed me to a website where the aforementioned fish pudding was displayed along with a collection of other hilarious Weight Watchers recipe cards from 1974.

The scary photos of the food are enough reason to check out candyboots.com, but the commentary from Wendy McClure, the site's author, really makes the click worthwhile. Wendy has also compiled the cards into a book called The Amazing Mackerel Pudding Plan. If you laughed at the cards on her website, then you'll find more of the same in the "Look Inside" feature on Amazon. The photo above is from the book, and Wendy's comment on the dish is this:

Sometimes, all the photo stylist can do is use a prop so ugly it can only make the food look better in comparison. Thus, for the Pears That Look Like They've Gotten Sick on Themselves, only the Sludge-Drooling Blowfish will do.

I'm just sayin'.....

The Japanese have cornered the market on weird and cute. Not always at the same time. Sometimes just weird, sometimes just cute. But I will say that the idea of cat cafes definitely falls into the weird-cute intersect.

A cat cafe is a cafe where for about $8 an hour you can go and pat the feline staff. The cats are there for the sole purpose of being patted and played with. Of course, given the general arrogance of cats, this probably only happens at the cats' convenience. The reason that the place is called a cafe is because you can order tea or coffee while you pat the cats, because otherwise the places look more like kindergarten classrooms than cafes.

Anyway, I find this completely hilarious and I just had to share.

Sweetest cupcake actor ever

It's rare that I read someone else's blog with a link that I want to pass along, because I find the P.C. (as in politically correct) acknowledgment process frustrating:

"Say, here's a great story, I got it from here [link]"
Click. Load page.
"Interesting story, I got it from there [link].
Click. Load page.

Multiple polite links later you finally end up at the story itself. I often give up before I get there.

So, that said, I read a blog entry on Al Dente, which is a blog written by the editors at Amazon.com, who thanked a blogger (Key Notes with Becca) for making them aware of a stop-action animator named Kirsten Lepore, who has a collection of videos on Vimeo.com. [phew]

You need to watch her cupcake hero in a video called Sweet Dreams.

Fun with Food: cuddly cream puffs

A bento artist named Anna the Red took a break from her lunchbox designs to come up with these cute little cream puffs (though I guess cream puffs are inherently cute, no?). Anna's post is quite detailed on how she set about making them.



The cream puffs are actually representations of an anime character named Totoro. You don't really have to know who Totoro is to want to make these cutie-pie pastries, but just for a frame of reference here is the real Totoro.

Fun with Food: potato portraits

Lebanese artist Ginou Choueiri paints portraits on potatoes. I love that she leaves in the potato "eyes" as part of the warty nature of the faces. As she explains:

I chose the potato to portray human faces because of the many striking parallels. Not only is their skin porous like ours, but their skin texture and color is very similar, and like us, they come in different sizes, shapes and forms.

The portraits are eerie, and especially so when you see all the potato faces staring up at you from market-style burlap bags.

Koziol napkin ring

This is a completely self-indulgent post. I saw this napkin ring from a German company called Koziol and I want it. Koziol's kitchen products are mostly mundane gadgets (bottle openers, pancake turners) designed as whimsical creatures, usually animals. I'm a sucker for that. I would buy this if I could figure out where it's sold (other than Germany).

Ever since I lived in France years ago, I've been a fan of the cloth napkin and napkin rings. My son was raised that way. We used our napkins for a week and then they were committed to the laundry. I've found that most other people of my acquaintance find the idea of using a napkin more than once disgusting. They would rather use paper napkins and then throw them away (!?!?!?). On behalf of the environment, I object.

Now, I'm just waiting for someone to tell me that the laundry detergent I use to wash the cloth napkins is as bad as throwing away paper (paper, by the way, that I had to pay $ for just for the privilege of throwing away). But since I just add the cloth napkins to my regular wash, it doesn't really compute.

Sorry, rant over. But this is why I love napkin rings, and I want this one. It comes in 6 colors.

Fun with Food: mock lobster

Last April I wrote about a book called Face Food, the art of making bento boxes (Japanese lunch boxes).

I recently stumbled across a Flickr gallery of a bento artist named Sakurako Kitsa and found the same bento I had used to illustrate the blog post. What made this fun was that now I could see how she had constructed the bento (which she calls spa bento). Kitsa has installed little hyperlinks in the photos so that when you mouse over parts of the bento box, a little caption box pops up to explain what was used in the construction.

This will all become clear if you check out her gallery. I was especially fond of this lobster, which is made of plum tomatoes.

Fun with Food: sausage spiders

When Joyce Maffezzoli used linguine in place of toothpicks (see yesterday's post), she said she didn't think she'd invented the idea and felt as though she'd read it somewhere. So I did due diligence and searched on "pasta as toothpicks." I found quite a few tips on using linguine to truss poultry, but then I stumbled on an idea that produced these cute little spider guys.

The suggestion I read called for hot dogs, but I'm not a fan so I used mango-chicken sausages instead. I stuck in 4 lengths of linguine (for 8 legs) and cooked it in boiling water for the amount of time needed to make the pasta tender.

I didn't take it to the next step--how to serve them--because I was amused enough by their cuteness. But since I don't see an adult struggling to eat a whole plate of sausage spiders, this is probably just a fun dish for kids.

Grampy throws a party

Not only do I love Rube Goldberg (see yesterday's post), but I also love Grampy, a character in the old Betty Boop cartoons. Grampy was an inventor and a basically kooky character. In one of the Betty Boop cartoons from 1935, Betty and her friends go to Grampy's house for a party. At the party, Grampy does a classic Grampy-style dance [I had a video showing the dance, but it was dissallowed for copyright reasons] and also uses the skeleton of an umbrella to cut a cake into equal portions. I wonder if the manufacturers of the following item took their inspiration from that cartoon...

This cake divider (which I was surprised to discover even existed) cuts 7 equal slices (why 7?) and works for pies, too. It's $19 from Amazon.

A Rube Goldberg corkscrew

Who doesn't love Rube Goldberg machines? (And if you don't know what I mean, check out Rube Goldberg--and his cultural legacy--on wiki)

According to the dictionary, a Rube Goldberg (machine) is a "comically involved, complicated invention, laboriously contrived to perform a simple operation." Enter the elaborate machine (above) designed to extract the cork from a wine bottle. It is actually an art installation and the creation of a British designer named Rob Higgs.

The video below is a little frustrating because it's very "arty" and you never get to see the whole contraption at once, but if you wait long enough (about 3 minutes) you'll see Bono turn the crank.

BLT candles

From The Grateful Palate--a website that celebrates bacon (their tagline is "It's a bacon, bacon, bacon, bacon, bacon world)--comes BLT Candles. The clearly impassioned inventor explains why he/she (unclear authorship) felt the need to create votive candles that smell like a sandwich:

I love the smell of bacon cooking. I fantasize about having bacon grilling on the stove day and night. In my philosophic musings I asked myself what is better than a BLT? As much as I try, I can't eat a BLT at every meal and I can't grill bacon 24 hours a day.

As the candles clearly indicate, one smells like bacon, one smells like tomato and the third smells like lettuce (????).

If you're not willing to spend $34 on the BLT candles, you should check out their Bacon of the Month Club (I'd mentioned this before when I was discussing a book called Seduced by Bacon).

For you scrambled egg lovers

Scrambled eggs was the clear winner in the egg-cooking poll, so this video is for you. Every January, for the past 30 years, the town of Uzès (in the south of France, near Avignon) celebrates truffle season by cooking a giant pan of scrambled eggs. They used 2,500 eggs, 10 quarts of olive oil and 4-1/2 pounds* of truffles. Check it out.



*at today's prices, in this country, 4-1/2 pounds of French black truffles would cost you about $4,900!!