Celebration of our favorite pork product

Just got this from my buddy Chad: "I thought you needed to know that it was Pork Week at Salon, with lots of hard-hitting bacon-focused journalism." 'Nuff said, Chad. I am there.

(Bacon porn snapped by Renee Comet for the National Cancer Institute in 1994.)

When you know a trend is running its course

In gastronomic meccas around the country, teeny-tiny desserts have found their way into the sweet spot, often served in diminutive ramekins or even shot glasses. And, really, what's not to like? You get to try lots of gooey delights for less money than ordering all of them a la carte, and even the calorie count is a little more reasonable.

Now Chili's is serving "sweet shots." You can order one or all of these: Layers of Warm Cinnamon Roll, Double Chocolate Fudge Brownie, Strawberry Wave Cheesecake, Dutch Apple Caramel Cheesecake for $1.99 each or $5 for 4.

Extra cheese, or why Wisconsin is weird

Just got this release. Wow. There are "nationally recognized cheese carvers"?

In celebration of Independence Day, Sarah "The Cheese Lady" Kaufmann, a nationally recognized cheese carver and Wisconsin native, will be sculpting a 5,000-pound mammoth Wisconsin cheddar cheese at SAM's Club 7050 Watts Road, Madison, WI. Sarah will carve a patriotic-themed scene featuring popular Wisconsin icons in a “Spirit of ‘76”-style parade.  Famous Wisconsin characters like Bucky Badger, Musky (the state fish), a dairy cow, a cheesehead, a bottle of milk and more will be marching around the 15-foot circumference of the “big cheese.” One might even see a carving of the SAM’s Club store manager. 
 
The public is invited to view the initial cutting and preparation on Tuesday, July 1, and the carving on July 2, 3 and 4 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Onlookers can also taste the cheese and purchase their own piece of the 5,000-pound mammoth cheese.
 
“This is a unique opportunity for people of all ages to see and taste a cheese of this mammoth size – 54 inches tall and 60 inches in diameter offered during this special promotion in SAM’s Fresh departments,” states Kaufmann.
 
This isn't the first time cheese was used for a patriotic reason. In 1801, Elder John Leland of Cheshire, MA, collected milk from members of his congregation to create a 1,200 to 1,600-pound, four-foot wide, 15-inch thick mammoth cheese. The cheese was presented to Thomas Jefferson on January 1, 1802 as a political statement of support for Jefferson. This later inspired President Andrew Jackson’s supporters to order a mammoth cheese in 1837. Although Kaufmann's cheese sculpture won't be nearly as partisan, it does come with some precedence.
 
A mammoth cheese is defined as any artisan, handcrafted cheese larger than 75 pounds.  The mammoth cheddar cheese Sarah “The Cheese Lady” will be carving is provided through DCI Cheese Company, a leading supplier of domestic and imported cheeses.
 
“Folks are amazed at the sizes and can’t believe the cheese is real,” Kaufmann explains about the mammoths. “They stop dead in their tracks and love to have a taste just to ensure it’s real cheese!”
 
“The Cheese Lady” has been sculpting cheese since 1981.  For the past 12 years, she has been commissioned by SAM’s Clubs across the nation to carve “big cheeses.” She currently carves in her studios in Cincinnati and San Diego, as well as at various venues nationwide. Although Cheddar is the most common, she loves using a variety of cheeses including Provolone, Asiago, White Cheddar and Gruyere. She has carved cheeses as small as two ounces – the F-18 fighter jets she sculpted to land on a six-foot-long 640-pound USS Ronald Regan aircraft carrier – and as large as a 12,500-pound cheddar mammoth inscribed with a fierce dragon. Other notable creations include a 120-pound Mickey Mouse and several personalities (Jay Leno, Matt Lauer, Katie Couric, Mario Andretti and Wisconsin's own Bret Favre).

 

My cup size runneth over

This post is totally in honor of Sean and my O'Boobigans versus Tilted Kilt story. I may have been all snark  on that piece, but I might as well 'fess up and say it's sour grapes. Or tiny grapes.

But get a load of this. It's a booze bra, kind of like the camelback hydration system. These boobs are packing, storing a full 750 ml of liquid in a sports bra. Um, I'm not advocating anything really nefarious, except it adds two cup sizes and it IS summer concert season. I'm just saying.

$30, available in two sizes, go here.

Talk about a wine rack.

New trend alert

Perhaps it’s an economizing measure, or maybe it’s a ploy to capture younger audiences, but restaurants are opting for Myspace.com pages instead of websites these days. A no-brainer, really. It’s free, you don’t need any fancy domain name or Web host, and restaurateurs can put it together themselves in a snap. Chefs and owners are pimping their pages with stuff they find. They’re indicating their mood, they’re accruing walls of friends, all the usual Myspace shenanigans. Here are a couple examples.

All fine and good, but we have a tip. A page should contain the address, phone number and hours of operation for the restaurant. That’s why people are googling you, not to listen to your song choices. Also, think about posting directions or a scan of your menu (with current prices).

Where's the ketchup, and other trends

Got this the other day from my devoted reader Dizzy: "I've got a favor to ask. Can you help me out with something? I am wondering why restaurants seem to be shying away from serving ketchup on their burgers. When I go out to a chain restaurant, one along the lines of a Chili's or Outback, I order a lot of burgers and they seem to come with onions (which I take off), tomatoes, lettuce, mustard and sometimes mayo. But never ketchup. It seems like that marks a change - they used to come standard with ketchup, right? My dad (also a big burger guy) is also wondering about this as well. I told him that I would write you, the bestest foodie on the planet, and have you find out what's happened to the ketchup on our burgers? Please, do tell. P.S. y.b.d.n.k.i.t.g.a.i.i."

Not sure about that whole P.S. part, but now that he mentions it, ketchup has been MIA, especially in upscale burgers, which seem to have adopted a ketchup-it-yourself approach. Not sure what it means. Even that fancy chipotle ketchup is an elective.

Another mysterious disappearance is that of the spoon. Not as in, "the fork ran away with." The fork is right there where you expect it, as is the knife. Just no spoon. Zagat Buzz tried to get to the bottom of it: "We wondered if there was something more to the spoonless trend. And it turns out there is, according to Dr. Brian Wansink, the director of Cornell's Food and Brand Lab who's currently on leave to run the Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, in Washington, DC.

Wansink said that his team at Cornell learned that "while place settings don't seem to have much of an effect on the way people order it definitely changes how people perceive a restaurant." They conducted a study of business diners "who don't blink at spending $30 on an entree," in which they asked participants to look at dozens of different settings and rate them by features like how expensive that restaurant would be. 'Settings without spoons were seen as more 'European' and were rated as slightly more elegant than most settings that had spoons,' Wansink said."

One more trend, one I could do without, is the ascendance of the square plate. Plain white, big lip, impossible to balance your knife on. There are the long rectangular white plates on which a trio of something comes (tartares, creme brulees, etc.), but the square white plate might contain anything. Vaguely Asian-feeling, they're meant to be hip and possibly space-saving on a small table, most prevalent in a small-plate restaurant.

Ahead by a nose

Alright, I will not ride a motorcycle or be a boxer, knife thrower's assistant or a fire-breather.

Those vocations are right out, at least according to the insurance policy just written up for Ilja Gort, a leading European winemaker and taster. He has insured his nose with Lloyd's of London for 5 million euros (that's $8 million).

According to this article, Gort's schnoz is not the first body part that Lloyd's has insured. There are Marlene Dietrich's legs, Keith Richards' fingers and America Ferrara's (from "Ugly Betty") smile. Another wine taster, Angela Mount, trumped Gort and had her sniffer insured for more than $20 million.

Why his beak and not his mouth? He says that basically the tongue has five areas of taste, but the nose discerns between millions of scents. So for anyone for whom tasting accurately is essential, the nose is ahead by far more than a nose.

A year of what I ate

It was the year of the food memoir, 2007. Even Camilla Parker Bowles’ son, Tom, wrote one. Let me give you a peek: “I look down at my belly. Never taut, it has taken on a worrying wobble.”

Ugh.

Everyone wants to remember meals beloved and reviled and, perhaps more importantly, they want to tell you all about it in lavish detail.

Here are my own personal favorites from the year.

Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love is a book club staple at this point, the audio version narrated by the author herself (who, through some cruel twist of fate, I have yet to meet and become best friends with). As the title implies, the first third of the book is food memoir, the other two thirds given over to more boring stuff like spiritual enlightenment and romance. But whoa, is that first third good, wandering through Naples eating pizza. Noodles, gelato and sloe-eyed Italian men are packed onto every page.

And I can’t help it, but celebrity stunt eater Anthony Bourdain definitely gets my motor running. His new one, No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach, is pure macho swagger with good pictures. Beirut, Singapore, Uzbekistan—with all their attendant organ meats and gustatory madness.

At the end of October I read a great piece in the New York Times about Judith Jones, the legendary Knopf editor who introduced Julia Child, Marcella Hazan and Madhur Jaffrey (oh, and Anne Tyler, William Maxwell and John Hersey) to the world. She was spicy and opinionated and seemed to know everybody. You get the full measure of all this in her recently published The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food. A good view into how the average American cook owes her a lot.

Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, the story of her family growing their own food in southern Appalachia and "putting food by" for a year could make you feel lousy about how/what/where you eat. This eating locally, minimizing-your-carbon-footprint thing has room for snobbery, but the book is inspirational--a family's team effort with great essays and recipes contributed by her kids.

Close, but no cigar:

Phoebe Damrosch's Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter had a lot of room to be funny. Fundamentally, a behind-the-scenes look at the megalomaniacal people in the kitchen (and, come to think of it, probably the megalomaniacal customers) at New York's Per Se (Thomas Keller's East Coast blockbuster), could be mighty titillating. This fails mostly because the nuts and bolts of waiting tables aren't universally interesting (serve on the left, clear from the right, yada yada).

In a similar vein, Kathleen Flinn's The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter, and Tears at the World's Most Famous Cooking School just didn't knock my socks off. I think I've hit the wall on those culinary memoirs that are like this: "I was in a career that was insanely lucrative, but it just wasn't my passion. I found food, and now I'm poor but happy."

Not a memoir, but reads like one. A good one:

The Last Chinese Chef by Nicole Mones is a novel, but it's a novel about a food writer who is widowed and goes to China for a variety of strange reasons. There, she meets a guy/chef, falls in love with him, falls in love with China and--most importantly--falls in love with Chinese food (convincing us that we should be smitten, too). It has all these lovely food history bits that give context to dishes and traditions we are familiar with.

Too rich for my blood

In my endless quest for inane food-related stories, here are two humdingers.

Serendipity 3 in New York is offering a $25,000 dessert bulging with top-grade cocoa, edible gold and shavings of a luxury truffle. The Frrrozen Haute Chocolate was declared the most expensive dessert in the world on Wednesday by Guinness World Records. What is it? A frozen, slushy mix of cocoas from 14 countries, milk and 5 grams of 24-carat gold topped with whip cream and shavings from a La Madeline au Truffle.

And then there's this, also in New York:

A $1,000 bagel. Chef Frank Tujague of The Westin New York hotel at Times Square has dreamed this up: a bagel topped with white truffle cream cheese and goji berry infused Riesling jelly with golden leaves. If that sounds good to you (???), hurry, because it's only available until December 14.

Latte art

Both last weekend in New York and this weekend in San Francisco I experienced a small thrill: Latte art.

You go to a coffee shop and order a cappuccino. And the barista goes hog-mad and creates a stunning work of art out of foam. These designs are  created in espresso-based drinks in one of two ways. First, the barista may manipulate the flow of milk from a metal jug into the espresso (this is called "free pour" latte art). Second, designs may be drawn on with a little metal instrument or using stencils or powders.

Watch this video to get a feel for what I'm talking about.

The beauty of it is that latte art is coming to a coffee shop near you. The Southeast Regional Barista Competition takes place this weekend at The Harborview Center (300 Cleveland St., Clearwater), with baristas from all over the southeastern states competing for foam supremacy. It's free and open to the public, 10:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, with the finals held Sunday 10:30 a.m.-1 p.m.