If you've ever tried to get an online recipe, you'll understand why this video by MasterChiefin1 is funny ('cause it's true)!
Don't you hate when you look up a recipe for something basic and the author feels like they need to tell a 10 page story about how that recipe changed their life? I sure do. I'm not sure why cooking websites allow this.
Thanks, Terry! Read the rest
36 years after the release of David Lynch's film adaptation of Dune, that famous flop is still finding new ways to surprise me. Like this Dune Activity Book — not to be confused with the Dune Coloring Book, or the Dune Color and Activity Book, all of which were apparently released in a failed attempt to market the film to kids.
Today, I'm particularly fascinated by this recipe for Dune "No-Bake Spice Cookies."
Anyone feel like making me some #Dune No-Bake Spice Cookies with me over Zoom? pic.twitter.com/NFDv3z4FYv
— Patrick Macias (@Patrick_Macias) June 19, 2020
Was melange supposed to taste like cinnamon and coconut? That doesn't strike me as a very exotic, out-of-this-world spice flavor. Was this supposed to tantalize children like a gateway drug to lead them towards the addictions of hallucinogenic-induced space navigation skills and telepathy? And why should the Kwisatz-Haderach need parental assistance to melt the butter in a saucepan? Children must not fear! Fear is the mindkiller!
Perhaps these cookies are the little death that brings total obliteration. Only one way to find out.
(If you want to get a closer look inside these weird childrens' books, check out this post from Coilhouse)
Image via YouTube Read the rest
Wow. Breakfast burritos are WAY better when working and cooking from home.
Now I am hungry. Read the rest
A while back I posted about the kind of fluffy pancakes you can get in Japan and how one guy said he makes them in a rice cooker. I still haven't tried it yet, but here's a simple recipe that I'd like to try from Kitchn:
Here’s how to make it at home: All you do is grease the insides of your rice cooker, pour your pancake batter in, set it to “cook/warm,” close the top, and for a 10-cup rice cooker, set the timer for 45 minutes or so, keeping an eye on it. Don’t worry if the giant pancake appears “wet” when you open the top. It’s just condensation from the steam. But do yourself a favor and give it a touch: it should feel firm and bouncy.
Image: Flipper's Pancake in Tokyo by Mark Frauenfelder, CC BY-SA 4.0 Read the rest
A simple but effective tip for a better burger, from Boing Boing buddy Gareth Brawnyn's excellent "Tips, Tools, and Shop Tales" e-newsletter:
Read the restHere’s a life-thing that you need to know about, especially before this weekend’s cookouts. How often do you get a restaurant burger, or grill one yourself, and before you’re finished horking it down, the soggy bun has lost the will to live and has disintegrated in your hands? Here’s the fix for your fixins. Don’t place the meat directly on the bun or the condiments on top of the lettuce. Place lettuce between the meat and the bun and between the condiments and the bun. No more soggy burger.
Do you like Flaming Hot Cheetos? Well, heck. Why not enjoy a Flaming Hot Cheetos Thanksgiving turkey dinner with the whole family this year. Read the rest
Former prison inmate Josh of Lockdown 23and1 teaches the proper way to make prison pizza using only ingredients that an inmate might easily be able to acquire: saltines, Ritz crackers, ramen, tomato sauce, cheese, pepperoni, Slim Jims, and pickles.
(via Laughing Squid)
Sure, the recipe for hotdog fried rice your mom passed along to you may have been brought over from Ireland by your grandfather but, tasty as it is, it can’t come close to touching the lineage of a 4,000-year-old stew recipe scrawled onto an ancient cuneiform tablet that dates back to the heyday of Babylon. No, not even with green onions thrown in for good measure. Respect where respect is due.
From Open Culture:
While cookbooks containing Mesopotamian fare do exist, to be really authentic, take your recipes from a clay tablet, densely inscribed in cuneiform.
Sadly, there are only four of them, and they reside in a display case at Yale. (Understandable given that they’re over 4000 years old.)
When Agnete Lassen, associate curator of Yale’s Babylonian Collection, and colleague Chelsea Alene Graham, a digital imaging specialist, were invited to participate in a culinary event hosted by New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, they wisely chose to travel with a 3D-printed facsimile of one of the precious tablets.
At the competition, the Yale team cooked up three different one-pot dishes from ancient Mesopotamian as described on the tablets they brought with them. Apparently, the weight of ages didn’t make them taste none too great. One of the dishes, Broth of Lamb, uses blood as a thickening agent, which doesn’t sound too appealing — and I like blood pudding. Unwinding Stew, a vegetarian dish, apparently looked as bad as it tasted, let along what its name implies it might do to the imbiber’s bowels. Read the rest
In this video, three reputable Italian chefs are subjected to severe moral injury by being forced to watch the top five 'how to cook carbonara' videos on YouTube. Their emotions range between outrage, disappointment, dour amusement and absolute horror in under 13 minutes. Be sure to turn subtitles on for this one before settling in.
The most interesting thing for me was how disappointed they were in the final video that they watched, which features Jamie Oliver showing off his carbonara chops. According to the chefs, they ain't great. Their chief complaint was that he failed to show the meat being properly sanitized before chopping it up and throwing it in a hot pan to fry. I'm sure the pig processing poop adds flavor, but Yuck.
Image via Wikipedia
Maximize flavor, minimize cleaning. Read the rest
In some parts of America's hinterlands, older folks call green peppers "mangoes." Turns out it goes back to a recipe substitution from the 1700s. Read the rest
Hellen Die admits that her recipe for Alien facehugger pudding-cups "isn't easy": you have to make egg-molds that you cover with pastry and decorate to resemble HR Giger-esque Alien eggs, then use more pastry to sculpt the facehuggers, make a custom pistachio pudding mix with ground up Vitamin B-2 caps, assemble, paint (with food-safe pigments), mix a slip of vodka and B-2, pipe the eggs full of yellow custard, and dust with pop-rocks just before serving for that wonderful fizzing effects. Read the rest
In 1978, Random House recalled the Woman's Day Crockery Cuisine cookbook because one of the recipes could apparently "cause a serious explosion." According to a statement from Random House, "If the recipe (for Silky Caramel Slices) is followed, the condensed milk can could explode and shatter the lid and liner of the crockery cooker." (Please, no Boston Marathon bomb jokes.) From a May 1978 article in the Chicago Tribune:
Because of an unfortunately elusive line that should have instructed folks to fill the pot with water, following the recipe appears to have resulted in some unintentional pop-top cans and badly damaged crockpots...
The conditions that have made this underground recipe successful and therefore popular, especially with children, are water and temperature. By being heated in boiling water, the temperature of the can and milk do not exceed the boiling point. After a few hours of this, the sugared milk turns to a caramel pudding. In the Crockpot, however, especially without water, the temperature can build up rather like a pressure cooker. That was the most immediate cause of the problem.
"The Exploding Recipe" (Weird Universe) Read the rest
In her spare time, University of California, San Diego engineer Janelle Shane trained a neural network to generate recipes for new dishes. Informed by its reading of existing recipes, the neural network did improve over time yet it's clearly not quite ready for Iron Chef. Here are two recipes from her Tumblr, Postcards from the Frontiers of Science:
Read the restPears Or To Garnestmeam
meats
¼ lb bones or fresh bread; optional½ cup flour1 teaspoon vinegar¼ teaspoon lime juice2 eggs
Brown salmon in oil. Add creamed meat and another deep mixture.
Discard filets. Discard head and turn into a nonstick spice. Pour 4 eggs onto clean a thin fat to sink halves.
Brush each with roast and refrigerate. Lay tart in deep baking dish in chipec sweet body; cut oof with crosswise and onions. Remove peas and place in a 4-dgg serving. Cover lightly with plastic wrap. Chill in refrigerator until casseroles are tender and ridges done. Serve immediately in sugar may be added 2 handles overginger or with boiling water until very cracker pudding is hot.
Yield: 4 servings
This is from a network that’s been trained for a relatively long time - starting from a complete unawareness of whether it’s looking at prose or code, English or Spanish, etc, it’s already got a lot of the vocabulary and structure worked out.
This is particularly impressive given that it has the memory of a goldfish - it can only analyze 65 characters at a time, so by the time it begins the instructions, the recipe title has already passed out of its memory, and it has to guess what it’s making.
Ironman champion Lentine Alexis has developed a recipe for a She Persisted energy bar: pumpkin seeds, shredded coconut, black sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, chia seeds, bee pollen, dates, coconut oil, cacao powder, vanilla extract, poppy seeds and rolled oats. Bake, bag and eat while you march. Remember: talking with your mouth full isn't cool, but protest chanting is totally OK. Read the rest
I can’t cook.
A few years ago though, I had the semi-crushing revelation that it’s not that I don’t know much about cooking, it’s that I legitimately can’t cook. I’m terrible at it. No piece of chicken would go uncooked to a leathery dryness that couldn’t even be passed as “jerk.” No meat sauce could be made properly spiced, just prepared with the desperate hope that crushed red pepper and more tomato paste could cure anything. It was my wife that graciously brought me the knowledge that I wasn’t just not-so-great at cooking, but I legitimately cannot cook to save my life or the lives of whatever poor group I was cooking for. I thank her for coaxing out this revelation of myself (and for being an amazing cook).
I do, however, like cartoons. And the good news is that Bob’s Burgers isn’t a show about cooking, it’s a show about family and it’s quickly grown into one of the best shows on TV. Bob’s Burgers treads an amazing line between strange and sweet, highlighting the ridiculous exploits of the Belcher clan, a family of oddballs who love each other and are continually misunderstood by the rest of the world while running a small, boardwalk burger shop. Over the past few seasons each character has been fleshed out into people more real than anything you’ll find on your average lawyer or cop show. And it’s a lot funnier than most episodes of NCIS.
The show’s success has prompted a good sized following, and when one member of fandom created a Tumblr dedicated to creating or recreating the fanciful burgers listed in each episode as The Burger of the Day fans were naturally interested. Read the rest
