Features


Don’t Feed On The Plants

New York Times

Humans and chipmunks go head to head as foragers hunt for a truly wild salad

Maybe it is the spiraling cost of food in a tough economy or the logical next step in the movement to eat locally. Whatever the reason, New Yorkers are increasingly fanning out across the city’s parks to hunt and gather edible wild plants, like mushrooms, American ginger and elderberries.

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From Churnalism to Surrealism

Food for the thoughtless

@procopster bows to a magical press release and creates a cocktail in its honour.

I struggled with the naming of this drink. The Melancholy Dane first came to mind, but it's not exactly what the Crown Prince had in mind when he asked me to cheer up his country. One look at the cherry sunk at the bottom of the glass inspired The Drowning Ophelia, but even that was still a bit grim– almost necrophilic.

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Accept No Substitutions

seriouseats.com

A healthy weight comes from loving your food. Not learning to resent it.

Loving food and fearing fat (body fat, not butter or avocados or triple cremes), have dominated my thinking since a pretty young age. I am not alone in that, unfortunately. Nor am I alone in being embarrassed by my obsession. I am a smart, educated, woman of some depth. Instead of worrying if I should eat the bucatini laced with ramp pesto, I could be writing a poem, or learning a language, or a million other, happier things.

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How To Deep-Fry a Dandelion

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There’s no batter way to celebrate the flowers in your garden, than by deep-frying them.

In a dark bar, the old-timers sit, sheltered by peeling wallpaper and shag carpeting, warm in the glow of the jukebox, which belts a Merle Haggard tune. On the other end of the spectrum: the crystalline beauty of winter woods or the perfect symmetry of a Rilke poem. I've always liked the world both ways: low-brow and high-brow. Beauty lurks in old neon and in the sonata; beauty glows in the coals of an oil-drum fire and lights the heart with a wilderness sunrise. I've explored the gutters and the branches, but nothing delights me more than the perfect marriage of degeneracy and elegance. Which brings me to the subject at hand: deep-fried flowers.

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All About The Entrance

Image credit: Quince

Why Silvena Rowe needs to kill the lights and start romancing her guests at Quince…

Of all the celebrity chefs, I thought Silvena Rowe was probably the best equipped to make a restaurant splash. She’s diva-ish, huskily foreign and talks about food with the febrile passion of a recently released prisoner. How could her restaurant be anything less than a magnificently passionate tribute to her first love ?

Yet inside her new restaurant Quince, it’s not Rowe, but her Mayfair environs that set the tone. Continue reading »

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Steak Out

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This guy’s all man… plus a little cow

SPARTANBURG COUNTY, S.C. — A man was arrested Saturday after deputies say that he stole meat from a grocery store by stuffing it down his pants, according to an incident report. Deputies said the manager of the Ingles at 2120 E. Main St. called police after an employee said he saw a man, later identified as Terry Campbell, walking out with meat in his pants.

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Sweet Tempered Boy

Chocoblog.com

Just one more year before this guy finds out whether chocolate really is better than sex…

David Craggs is a 15 year old from Southport with his own chocolate making business. When he sent me these samples, he specifically asked for the chocolates to be judged on their merits alone, rather than because of his age. Of course I’ll be doing that, but I do think David’s story is interesting. I’m always excited to hear about new people starting out in the industry, and the fact that David chose to start a chocolate business at the age of 13 as part of a schools enterprise scheme – and the fact that he’s still going – is really encouraging.

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Don’t Mention the Soy Sauce

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What did you eat in the Great War, Daddy?

Before World War II Americans ate a lot of meat. And potatoes. Sometimes they ate their meat with their potatoes. Even Chinese and Italian food was considered exotic. But something changed in the 1950s. Slowly new cuisines began to grow across America. Diners continued to exist, but people were willing to try new things – both at restaurants and at home. A big reason for this was that the food wasn’t strange anymore – at least for the men who served in the war.

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It’s Not the End of the World

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Desperate times call for desperate spirit measures (feat @thehandbooknews)

Brompton Bar and Grill launching London’s first ever absinthe bar decked out with leather bar stools (all the better to fall off), a zinc topped bar and authentic Parisian sketches harking back to the days when absinthe was imbibed by fashionable bohemians such as Oscar Wilde, Vincent van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec who no doubt fell off their stools all the time.

Too expensive now? Try this price-comparison cocktail bar site designmynight.com

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It’s Only Natural

kokblog

I could do with some Hirkum Pirkum right now…

At the end of June or the beginning of July is when St John’s wort starts to bloom. In Sweden, the plant is both common as a perennial in gardens and wild in the woods. I find them every year next to my house on the edge of our gravel road. I pick the flower or rather the buds to soak in vodka. In Sweden we call the spirit Hirkum Pirkum which comes from the Latin name of the plant, Hypericum perforatum.

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