This one made us laugh. Wag Hotels, a posh boarding kennel that bills itself as a pet “resort” in Northern California, is offering a full Thanksgiving dinner for dogs staying there for the holiday. The meal, created by pet food company VibraPet, includes:
• Hand-Pulled Boneless Skinless Turkey With A Light Turkey Glaze
• Honeyed Yams
• Apple and Cranberry Stuffing
• Steamed Green Beans
• Pumpkin Pie Puppy Pudding
“People don’t want to feel guilty that they’re having a fabulous meal and their dog is not!” says Kristen Green, publicist for Wag. The actual dog Thanksgiving meal is pictured above. The sprig of rosemary is a nice touch.
This short documentary by Patrick Johnson focuses on a collective of young dudes who go by the name Orchitecture (orchard + architecture). They brought a thousand Pink Lady apples from Patagonia to Bumpkin Island in Boston Harbor. While on the island, their diet solely consisted of apples, and they made various three-dimensional structures centered around the Pink Ladies. The whole thing feels a little Lord-of-the-Flies-meets-design-school, and I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. Plus it’s beautifully filmed, but bonus points if you actually understand the last shot.
The Let’s Do Lunch photo contest is on. There was a time when photographing food in a restaurant was something people debated. Whether it was rude, whether staff would assume the photographer was a blogger or reviewer, whether it was anti-social behavior sure to drive civilization into the ground.
As it turns out, people like to document what they’re eating. And photographing the plate in front of you has almost become a standard step between ordering and eating. Do the right thing with those photos: win with them, and win big. The Let’s Do Lunch photo contest will outfit one winner with a fantastic suite of prizes, including a Nikon D5000 Digital SLR camera. And beyond the first prize, other winners will receive things like printers and software.
Yes, there is an entry fee. But 20 percent of it goes to food banks, and a $2 taco or a $50 steak are equally worthy. CHOW is helping judge the contest, and we want to see delicious things. So shoot, shoot, and win.
We’ve blogged in the past about the delicious blackberry soda from Hotlips Pizza in Portland, Oregon. It’s got real pulp in it, and you feel like you’re actually drinking something made from fruit, not chemicals. Now, that drink and a bevvy of other Hotlips flavors, including apple, pear, raspberry, and boysenberry, are spreading into more locations. Besides Oregon, you can now buy the sodas online for the first time, including in a mixed variety pack. We’re hoping this is a sign that Hotlips will go nationwide soon, so we can pick it up at gas stations and janky corner stores everywhere. That’d sure be nice.
Yes, cheese from Wisconsin really is that good. So I was excited to read the new book The Master Cheesemakers of Wisconsin by CHOW.com’s own Supertaster columnist, Jim Norton, and his wife, photographer Becca Dilley.
The layout is really fun if you have an interest in the personalities behind the products: Each gorgeous picture of a particular cheese, like, say, the Cinnamon-rubbed butter jack from Bass Lake Cheese Factor, is paired with a mini-profile of the cheesemaker. In the case of the butter Jack, for instance, we learn that Bass Lake’s Scott Erickson looks really artsy, and once made gelatinous lutefisk (a Norwegian holiday dish of lye-cured codfish) for a living. It’s interesting to know just who goes into the old-fashioned business of making small-batch cheeses and how each cheesemaker got there, because who hasn’t fantasized about joining them?
The ultimate sign that pomegranate has reached critical mass: There is now a pomegranate Tootsie Pop. Introduced in 2008, pomegranate is one of a bunch of new flavors launched in recent years: watermelon, blue raspberry (yuck), and banana (double yuck). But the pomegranate flavor is wonderful, reminiscent of classic cherry but more fruity and puckery. It actually tastes like pomegranate, which is more than I can say for the center, which tastes less like chocolate than choco-scented crayon.
Tootsie would love for consumers to weigh in on the new flavors and suggest others. Peppermint, maybe? Oh, and by the way, according to the Tootsie Roll FAQ, the company has received tens of thousands of letters from children claiming to know how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop. Estimates generally run in the 600–800 licks range, but your own personal best “depends on a variety of factors such as the size of your mouth, the amount of saliva, etc.”
Sharp news commentary blog the Awlbreaks down Walmart’s $20 Thanksgiving feast, which actually includes a disturbingly long list of edible features for a disturbingly low price. Prices vary a bit from state to state, but in general your Jackson gets you:
• One 12-pound Grade A turkey
• Three 11- to 15.5-ounce cans Green Giant vegetables
• Two 14-ounce cans Ocean Spray cranberry sauce
• Three 6-ounce boxes of Stove Top stuffing
• One 5-pound bag of red potatoes
• One 12-count package of Sara Lee dinner rolls
• One 22-ounce pumpkin roll cake
The Atlantic writes about an effort to take back the mai tai, a beverage that must surely rank among the most debased drinks in modern bartending. Typically a syrupy-sweet fruit bomb, it can—and should—have a more mature flavor. Julie Reiner, a New York mixologist, makes a mai tai “with aged rum, fresh lime, and almond syrup, with a little Corduba rum floated on top (so the last few sips aren’t diluted by melted ice).”
Not long ago, I edited a story by Nick Kosevich, a bartender whose attention to detail and interest in reviving now-too-sweet drinks (such as daiquiris) run parallel to Ms. Reiner’s; his meditation on the Old Fashioned ran for a few pages and included the following comparison of old school versus new school:
“Much of the modern-day Old Fashioned-related controversy can be blamed upon Wisconsinites. A Wisconsin Old Fashioned consists of 1 tsp of granulated sugar (usually a little white packet), 2 dashes of Angostura bitters, 1 1/2 oz of brandy, and a splash of 7Up. The sugar and bitters are added first with a splash of 7Up to dissolve the sugar, then the brandy is added, and topped with ice and 7Up to finish the drink. This version is then garnished with a flag (a bar term for an orange slice wrapped around a cherry) …
“The classic recipe for the drink is 1 sugar cube, 3 dashes of bitters, and 3 oz of bourbon or rye whiskey, not brandy, served in an old fashioned glass on the rocks with a lemon twist.”
The explosion of boutique liquors and bitters available for sale, and the press received by mixologists, may suggest that Americans are getting more sophisticated about their cocktails. But the menu at any given faux-neighborhood midrange chain restaurant is a good reminder that we still have a long way to go. Once the real mai tai has made it to T.G.I. Friday’s, we might be getting somewhere.
The Hungry Beast has a revealing interview with Guy Fieri this week that unearths some interesting nuggets. To wit:
1. He owns a T-shirt cannon.
2. He is going on a national tour “in a bus stocked with Pabst Blue Ribbon and painted with flames.”
3., 4., and 5. “He now travels with a bodyguard to events, has bras and underwear thrown at him during cooking demos, and counts Sammy Hagar and members of AC/DC as close friends—no wonder he speaks about himself in rock-star language.”
Whoa. Visit the Hungry Beast to learn about Fieri’s other quirks, such as naming dishes things like No Can Beato This Taquito and Mac-Daddi-Roni Salad.
