West coast ice creamery Salt & Straw isn't encouraging anyone to give up their Thanksgiving day meal, but they are making a version that is cold and creamy to ingest.

For the month of November, you can order their five-pint "Thanksgiving Dinner of Ice Cream Series," as follows (descriptions via Los Angeles Magazine):

-- Sweet Potato Casserole with Maple Pecans ("Sweet potatoes are roasted down and mixed with cream and sugar to make a sweet, spicy, sticky ice cream. Then Oregon pecans are mixed and caramelized with maple sugar. It is then of course topped off with hand-churned ribbons of Salt & Straw’s own delicious homemade gooey maple fluff.")

-- Buttered Mashed Potatoes & Gravy ("Salt & Straw has made over 600 different flavors of ice cream, and this is hands-down the most savory one ever served. Salt & Straw makes a potato- flavored ice cream, thanks to the real potatoes boiled down until the starch turns to sugar, and then stirs in their own homemade gravy fudge made from two mashed-up recipes, pun very much intended.")

-- Apple Cranberry Stuffing

-- Salted Caramel Thanksgiving Turkey ("Turkey stock is cooked and mixed with sugar, spices and onions down until it bubbles into a caramel, which creates the base of the salted caramel ice cream. And Salt & Straw also roasts turkey skin until it’s crispy and then candy-coat it and mix bits of that in, too.")

-- Spiced Goat Cheese & Pumpkin Pie ("It starts with goat-cheese ice cream, which is sprinkled with pumpkin pie spices, but the generous helping of mashed pumpkin folded and swirled in really steals the show.")

All five pints are available now for $65 plus shipping. Read the rest

We found this little fellow in the garage preparing dinner. Despite a sultry summer, we've been free of flies and I figure it's all thanks to Team Cellar Spider.

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If you like heights and Los Angeles and food and have a grand or so lying around, maybe Dinner in the Sky would be a fun July adventure. Read the rest

Deer at Nara Park in Japan are brought to feeding time with a horn. [Arbroath] Read the rest

Not only are insects a more resource-efficient food source than meat (and more nutritious, to boot), you're also already eating them, writes Mary Hall at Mind the Science Gap. Insect parts are considered unavoidable, natural "defects" in foods and the FDA makes allowances for them, including up to 30 insect parts per average chocolate bar, up to 10 whole aphids for 2.5 cups of spinach, and up to 10 fly eggs (or, if you prefer, 5 eggs and one maggot) per serving of tomatoes. It all sounds gross, but when you consider all the benefits of bug eating (and the fact that many, many reviews proclaim them to taste delicious) it might be best to think of this news as a wakeup call. You're eating bugs already. Why not do it intentionally? Read the rest