Blendie

Kelly Dobson, an artist, invented a blender that responds to sounds. She took an old blender from the 1950s and retrofitted it so that you could turn the machine on and make it go various speeds depending on the tone and volume of your voice. This interactive blender is called Blendie.

According to the website (where you can see Blendie in action), "The participant empathizes with Blendie and in this new approach to a domestic appliance, a conscious and personally meaningful relationship is facilitated."

You'll understand this better if you actually check Blendie out.

What were they thinking?

I stumbled across this home remedy in a 19th-century cookbook called Aunt Babette's:

"How to Make a Bacon Bandage for Sore Throat.
Cut the bacon in strips one quarter of an inch in thickness and two or three inches in width and long enough to pass entirely around the throat. Remove the bacon rind and any lean meat there may be in it to prevent blistering the throat or neck. Sew the bacon to a strip of flannel so as to hold it in position and prevent its slipping and then apply the bacon to the throat and neck. Pin it around the neck, so that it will not be uncomfortably tight. The throat and neck should be completely swathed with the bacon. If after an application of eight hours the patient is not better apply a new bandage in the same manner."

I'm baffled by the use of bacon as a sore throat remedy, but I'm not baffled by the use of bacon in a chocolate bar (go figure). On the Vosges chocolates website, there is a category called Exotic Candy Bars. There you'll find Mo's Bacon Bar (as well as other exotic bars made with things like hemp seed and tea). This use of bacon makes sense to me, because the combination of sweet and salty works beautifully. (Have you noticed the recent trend of salt in sweet things like ice cream and caramel?)

The creator of the Bacon Bar explains that as a child she first encountered the delicious combination of sweet + salty/crunchy when at breakfast her pancake syrup got onto her piece of bacon. As she puts it "...on that plate something magical happened, the beginnings of a combination so ethereal and delicious that it would haunt my thoughts until I found the medium to express it--chocolate."

Eventually the idea took the form of this chocolate bar, which is made with milk chocolate, crunchy bits of applewood smoked bacon and just a sprinkling of smoked salt. It costs $7, but it's worth it just to say you've had a bacon chocolate bar.

Cooking the Gullah Way

Years ago, when my son had just reached the age where he could appreciate a road trip, I decided to take him to a part of the country that had always fascinated me: the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina.

My fascination had started many years before, when I was not yet in the food business. I was writing a book chapter on cruising the Intracoastal Waterway from New Jersey to Florida, and in the course of my research read a lot about the Sea Islands. I also read about the food of the region, because though I was writing about boats, I was dreaming of being a foodie.

You can't read about the food of this area without encountering the Gullah culture of Daufuskie Island off South Carolina. The Gullah came originally from West Africa, and because they lived on an island that for decades was only accessible by boat, their culture and language survived without much dilution.

Daufuskie Island (and its inhabitants) is the subject of a book called The Water Is Wide by Pat Conroy (the author of, among other books, The Prince of Tides). In the book, Conroy describes his year as an English teacher in the one-room schoolhouse on the island. One of his students was a girl named Sallie Ann Robinson.

Sallie Ann Robinson grew up to be a cookbook writer, with the express purpose of preserving on paper her Gullah food roots. She has just written her second cookbook, Cooking the Gullah Way, Morning, Noon, and Night. There are recipes for local dishes like Preserved String Beans and Tadas (potatoes), Momma's Crackling Muffins, Local Sea Island Country Boil and Persimmon Wine. The last 20 pages or so are a compendium of Daufuskie home remedies for such things as bed-wetting, tick removal or getting rid of the smell of burned food from your house.

If you're interested in Gullah cooking, you could also check out Robinson's first cookbook: Gullah Home Cooking the Daufuskie Way (especially if you're in need of a recipe for Sticky Bush Blackberry Dumpling).

Dining in the dark

I was reading the other day about a restaurant in Montreal called O.Noir where the wait staff are all legally blind. When you enter the restaurant there are no lights, and you order and eat in the dark (the name of the restaurant is a verbal play on the French words au noir, which mean in the dark).

The mission of the restaurant is to promote an understanding of what it is to live life as a blind person as well as provide employment for the blind. The side effect is that without the sense of sight, your senses of smell and taste are heightened.*

The idea of dining in the dark got me to thinking and I eventually found myself looking for cutlery that lights up. I found a number of sites--Who knew there was such a need?--including We Glow Ware at the Virginia Toy Company. The We Glow Ware is actually fork, knife and spoon tops that fit onto glow sticks, so the glow is temporary, but you can change it up for each party you throw. Like red and green for Christmas, or blue and white for Chanukah.

I also found flashing beer mugs, but I'll bet that's more interesting to a college kid who has had just enough beer that the flashing is amusing instead of intensely irritating.

*If you're a C.S.I. (Las Vegas) fan, you will have seen a recent episode all about the dining in the dark trend. (For any fanatics out there, it was Episode 2, Season 8 and was called "A La Cart.")

A world of flavor: 4 international cookbooks

I've been accused of having an "obvious" palate, meaning that I like really strong flavors, not vague nuanc-y flavors. I like really tart things and really spicy things and stinky cheese. So I decided to put together a little compendium of cookbooks that have crossed my desk recently that I feel will satisfy this obvious palate of mine.

The first is from Jean-Georges Vongerichten, the New York chef (transplanted from France) who in his twenties spent some time in Thailand, as chef de cuisine in a French restaurant. This is where he found the magical melding of French cuisine and Asian flavors that has influenced his food sensibility ever since. His new cookbook, Asian Flavors of Jean-Georges, is an ode to this sensibility. Just pick a recipe in the book and you will find this fusion of East and West. Roast Chicken with Haricots Verts and Onion Compote, for example, uses Gewurztraminer wine and maple syrup in companionship with star anise, soy sauce and rice vinegar. You can't go wrong with any recipe from Jean-Georges. His food is spectacular.

Now let's fly to Mexico with Mod Mex: Cooking Vibrant Fiesta Flavors at Home. This book is from Scott Linquist, executive chef of the Dos Caminos restaurants (three in New York and an upcoming Las Vegas branch). Here are the recipes that tempt me: Chocolate Layer Cake (but wait) with a Morita Chile Mousse and Pistachio Palanquetta (palanquetta means brittle), Chipotle and Tamarind-Glazed Pork Chops with Apple Pico de Gallo, Roasted Duck Breast and Duck Carnitas Enchiladas with Mole Manchamanteles and Roasted Peach Salsita. Phew. These recipe titles are long, but they sure do tell you how many crazy flavors are at play in these dishes.

Now, to India with Meena Pathak, the Director of Development for Patak's, a well-known brand of Indian foods. In Meena Pathak Celebrates Indian Cooking, her third cookbook, Pathak presents recipes many of which actually call for Patak's brand of sauces and curry pastes. Indian home cooks make regular use of store-bought sauces and curry pastes. It's like calling for mayonnaise or ketchup in this country. You could make these recipes with any brand of curry paste you wanted to, but the fact of the matter is the Patak products are very good and pretty available in supermarkets in this country.

Last, but not least, is Tangy Tart Hot and Sweet by Padma Lakshmi (of Top Chef fame). I have to say that the title of this book had me at hello. The recipes draw heavily on Lakshmi's Indian heritage, but are really a reflection of her more eclectic, international taste in food, with recipes like Red Stripe Chicken (Jamaica), Braised Spinach Catalana (Spain), Persian Chicken Soup with Omani Lemon and Dill (Middle East), Fiery Linguine with Tomato and Shrimp (Italy) and BBQ Korean Short Ribs.

Elizabeth Falkner's Demolition Desserts

If you don't know who Elizabeth Falkner is, you need to get her new book, Demolition Desserts: Recipes from Citizen Cake, and get a glimpse of her wonderful cooking sensibility as well as her very rock & roll outlook in general. Falkner is a pastry chef in San Francisco, and the owner of three restaurants: Citizen Cake (her first), Citizen Cupcake and Orson. This book is a collection of recipes from her restaurants as well as other flights of dessert fancy.

The book is decorated with beautiful photographs of her desserts as well as manga*-style illustrations (by Falkner's brother Ryan) of Falkner's cartoon alter ego Caremi—named, I'm guessing, for the legendary French pastry chef Antoine Carême.

And then there's the food. The book includes both the most elementary desserts—like chocolate chip cookies, brownies and cupcakes—as well as restaurant-style productions numbers, like Gingerbread Bauhaus (chipotle gingerbread, pear sorbet, pomegranate gel, royal icing shards) or Apple of My Eye (tarte tatin apples, cheddar crumbles, cinnamon ice cream, balsamic-apple reduction).

Each recipe comes with instructions on what components can be made ahead, as well as a category called "Minimalist Version." The Minimalist Version tells you how to make a less restaurant-y dessert with all the same flavors. When there is no way to minimize the dessert, it will say "Nope. Don't do it" or "It would be a mistake to minimize this one."

Even if you don't ever cook from this book, it's worth reading just for the good information you get on basic dessert ingredients (like sugar), and for a peek inside the mind of an extremely inventive chef.

*manga is the Japanese style of cartooning that, in its animated form, is called animé.