The fruity, dry, crisp, pleasantly-sour kriek ale from Cascade Brewing knocks the socks off that Lindemans you’ve been drinking. It’s reddish-copper, and tastes pleasantly of cherries without being sweet. There are very few krieks made in the States, which makes it even more special. This one starts out as a Belgian Flanders-style red ale, then gets refermented with fresh whole Northwest cherries and aged six months in French oak wine barrels. It might be hard to find retail, but going to Cascade’s brewpub sounds fun: It serves meat loaf and has magic shows once a week.
During a recession that’s killing restaurants off by the hundreds, one English chain is thriving. Not by serving the best-quality food, but by piling it high. As UK Guardian writer Tim Rich puts it: “Now, in an age where the spell of the celebrity chef has been broken, the biggest attraction of Taybarns’s food is that there is lots of it.”
“Just as an all-you-can-drink pub would be a haven for alcoholics, there are plenty of customers who smash the recorded average of 3.37 platefuls.”
And:
“The management say they can always spot first-timers because they totter around with ludicrously overloaded plates.”
And:
“The dessert counter is next to the carvery; some customers have been known to pour gravy on to their sweets under the impression it is chocolate sauce.”
Ha! Those gluttons sure are funny. Founder Simon Ewins supposedly got the idea to launch the chain from the success of America’s Golden Corral. Yeah, I can see why this would be appealing:
Good news for people who fear that fast-food workers are spitting in their food—there’s entertaining photographic evidence that sometimes the kitchen staff just write snarky messages on the buns using condiments.
Commenters on the site hosting the photo—passiveaggressivenotes.com—drag things right back into the gutter by speculating on other stuff that could be used, in theory, to spell things out on bread products.
“Now THAT’s special sauce!” writes a commenter in regards to something that you can pretty easily imagine.
The Center for Science in the Public Interest is serving as cocounsel on a class-action lawsuit against the good folks at Denny’s. The grounds for action: salty food.
The salt/blood pressure link is pretty clear. And the Denny’s/salt link is pretty clear, too. Here’s the Huffington Post:
“Consider a double cheeseburger with French fries. Most people know that’s not a health food. At McDonald’s, that meal has about 1,500 mg of sodium—a day’s worth for most of us. Denny’s (bigger) double cheeseburger with fries has 4,130 mg of sodium. That’s 275 percent of the recommended daily limit.
“A full dinner at Denny’s can be even worse. Say you start with a bowl of clam chowder, and move on to a Spicy Buffalo Chicken Melt sandwich and seasoned fries. That meal has 6,700 mg of sodium (along with 1,700 calories).”
The question is, can it seriously be legally actionable to serve oversalted food? One time, probably not. But by the millions of servings? Every year? Gets more arguable.
Apparently failing to seal a deal with either a gnarled tree stump or a butter statue from the Minnesota State Fair, NBC took one more step down the talent ladder, selecting Top Chef spokesmodel Padma Lakshmi as the star of a new food-based sitcom. The show is tentatively titled Holy Crap, How Can We Possibly Make This Work as a Comedy?
Sources suggest that the program will revolve around a hapless production crew and baffled professional actors, who have to jointly confront the titanic challenge of creating a sitcom starring a woman with no discernible affect, acting ability, or sense of humor.
No, seriously, NBC has picked up a Padma Lakshmi sitcom, and they might be calling it Single Serving. You mull the implications.
As Variety points out, tackling food themes in scripted television hasn’t gone all that well in the past. The Emeril show was a dud in 2001, and Kitchen Confidential, based on Anthony Bourdain’s memoir, didn’t last long either.
Swiss scientists working for chocolatier Barry Callebaut have apparently invented a high-melting-temperature “Vulcano”-branded chocolate bar with 90 percent fewer calories, reports Spiegel Online.
Sounds fine on paper, but details are awfully sketchy at this point: Is it 90 percent fewer calories by weight, or are we just talking by volume? (If the latter, the airy, bubble-filled texture seems to explain a lot of the “low calorie” nature of the stuff, as air is calorie free.) Also an interesting question: How does the stuff measure up to normal, non-air-puffed, nonvolcanic chocolate in terms of taste?
Trader Joe’s is an easy store to have a love-hate relationship with. It’s full of food, yet it seems impossible to pick up everything you need to cook a real meal there. And all the plastic packaging on the produce is really annoying and wasteful. But wait, you can get a bottle of Bulleit Bourbon for 20 bucks. And those peanut-butter-filled pretzel things are pretty awesome when you have the munchies. And the cheese is a sweet deal. Organic milk too.
But Greenpeace looks to be in the hater camp with the launch of its microsite Traitor Joe’s. The group’s beef? It says that its surveys found the grocer selling “15 of the 22 red list seafoods” like Chilean sea bass and orange roughy. But while the site is heavy on flash animations of fish singing,
Greenpeace doesn’t present much information to substantiate its accusations other than this pdf file, which doesn’t provide much concrete evidence. Ultimately, it looks like Greenpeace is pushing for the grocery chain to implement an official sustainable seafood policy, provide info to help customers make sustainable seafood choices, and stop allegedly stocking the “red list” seafood.
TJ’s press office emailed CHOW its response to Greenpeace’s allegations. Jon Basalone (the EVP of marketing and merchandising for the company), says that “Trader Joe’s does not participate in any surveys. As a result, information gets gleaned from sources outside of Trader Joe’s, and this can lead to inaccurate reporting. … The Greenpeace report details that Trader Joe’s sells a certain number of items on their ‘Red List.’ But several of the items that they call out are NOT for sale in our stores. We do NOT sell Chilean Sea Bass, Monkfish, Ocean Quahog or Redfish in any of our stores.” Basalone says that TJ’s will further efforts to improve sustainability by using the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s “science-based and research-backed” Seafood Watch recommendations to help the store with seafood purchasing decisions.
Ultimately, isn’t it a little unfair to cast all the blame on a grocer for making unsustainable choices? If a store stocks unsustainable seafood, isn’t it because customers are buying and eating it? It’s a responsibility that both consumers and retailers should share.
The Kitchn reports that Ree Drummond, a.k.a. the Pioneer Woman, has piggybacked off her wildly popular down-home cookin’ blog (uh, the zucchini cake with cream cheese frosting looks pretty awesome right now) to—you know it’s coming—pioneer a new website.
Tasty Kitchen is Drummond’s new site for people to share their “Favorite Recipes from Real Kitchens.” It doesn’t seem to have a lot of features that set it apart from other user-upload sites, however if the quality of recipes and photos is anything like Drummond’s, it should prove to be a good place to browse.
Morgan Spurlock, the director of fast-food fright flick Super Size Me, is teaming up with Dark Horse to produce a comic book version of the movie, says the Hollywood Reporter. Not a surprise, really, as Spurlock has already milked the concept thoroughly. But the graphic novel sounds like it might have some added entertainment value:
“Spurlock said after his movie was released that he and [his production company] Warrior Poets were inundated by calls from people who wanted to share their tales from the fast-food underbelly, including the story of a fat man whose cremation made a mortuary smell like French fries and the man that built in his garage a museum of McDonald’s food that never aged.”
Silentsketcher, an artist whose work is found on the deviantART website, has reimagined various fast food cartoon spokespeople as Mafia bosses to brilliant effect. I think “The Colonel” Sanders might be my favorite because it looks exactly like the original Sanders without the smile. And from reading the description on the original post, it sounds like Serious Eats has found its way to this bit of genius as well.
