The MoMA store has the cutest tumblers on sale right now; they would make great summer cocktail glasses. Each one is cut glass with a different pattern. Since they’re all clear, they match nicely, but since each has a different pattern, perhaps your guests will be able to tell their drinks apart.
Distinct Patterned Glasses, $64.95 for a set of six
The Daily Beast, Tina Brown’s artful online magazine/website, is a study of celebrity fascination, political punditry, and the sex lives of powerful people. Its food channel, Hungry Beast, just launched, and it’s a study of celebrity fascination, food punditry, and the sex lives of food-oriented people. It’s fun! And I don’t just say that because it’s linking to CHOW at the bottom of the page.
Hungry Beast will be updating features weekly, and the Cheat Sheet links to smart stuff that other people are writing.
The stories for this week include Gael Greene on the sex lives of chefs (she’s saddened by monogamy and by the prospect that today’s young, randy chefs aren’t getting enough action) and an assessment of Robert De Niro’s prospects as a restaurateur (they’re better than those of his now-shuttered Ago).
The appropriation of street food by trendy food people has yet to peak. The latest casualty: hot dogs. Bacon-wrapped for lunch at Wexler’s in San Francisco; Southeast Asian–style with shrimp paste and pickled garlic at NYC’s Fatty Crab; spicy and natural at LA’s The Golden State.
For a beautiful look at old-school Chicago dogs (they put giant slices of pickles on them!) go here. Or check out New York mag’s Adam Platt’s food-porny slideshow of dogs with nouveau toppings.
Image source: Flickr member adactio under Creative Commons
Print ’em. Fold ’em. Vend miniature tacos and/or tortas and/or tamales from them. Yes, the technology of folded paper has finally come to the world of taco trucks. A Flickr user called goopymart has produced a wonderful assortment of seven different trucks for the public’s enjoyment and amusement.
Image used with permission of the artist
Just when you were finally starting to get the difference between a double and triple, a farmhouse ale and a saison, American craft brewers have moved beyond Belgian-style beers into the realm of Germans. Sierra Nevada just released a new German-style wheat beer called Kellerweis that will be available year-round.
In addition, Brooklyn Brewery in New York teamed up with the brewer from the German Schneider brewery to create Brooklyner-Schneider Hopfen-Weisse, a malty, darker wheat beer with pronounced hop characteristics. Yeah, Belgians are still popular. But they’re not exactly the hot new thing anymore—unless you consider Redhook, a large craft brewery part owned and distributed by Anheuser-Busch InBev, to be cutting edge. It recently released a Belgian-style triple made using a “secret monastery yeast strain.” Yawn.
The Nuscüp Adjustable Measuring Cup and Scoop makes all other measuring cups obsolete. You need 2/3 cup of flour, 1/8 cup of milk, 6 ounces of syrup? No problem! Simply point the rubber thumb slider at the measurement you need, fill, and dump. The Nuscüp measures both dry and liquid ingredients, cups and tablespoons, English and metric systems. There’s even a magnet on the back so you can hang it on the fridge instead of sticking it in a drawer, and the whole thing comes apart for easy cleaning.
Looking for an alternative to traditional (and wasteful) Styrofoam takeout containers? SIGG aluminum snack boxes are being praised by blogs such as Stamen Design.
Restaurants like saving the money they spend on takeout containers, and customers like the satisfaction of eliminating yet another pile of disposable packaging that would otherwise have to be thrown out. Plus, the boxes are incredibly cool looking in a low-key, countercultural way.
Lugging home groceries isn’t easy for the car-free urban shopper. Either you confine yourself to what can be carried on the bus, or you have to drag a large, unwieldy granny cart to the store with you. But wait! You don’t anymore.
The Hook and Go Shopping Cart is a svelte alternative, folding up into a much-more-draggable size than the granny cart, and expanding into a sturdy rolling conveyance with hooks to hold your shopping bags (reusable, of course). Roll it through the market and then roll it right back home. Maybe you can even roll it right next to your bed and eat out of the bags with your fingers.
Hook and Go Shopping Cart, $70 ($75 with two reusable polyester shopping bags)
Food Media, posted November 23, 2009
New Finds, posted November 18, 2009
Trend-o-Meter, posted October 16, 2009
Food and Cooking, posted October 30, 2009
