Blogger, author, photographer, and general all-purpose food enthusiast Matt Armendariz is all over the place: online at MattBites.com, on TV with Martha Stewart, and now in print. It's no accident that his new book, On a Stick!, carries an exclamation point in the title: It expresses the author's deeply felt enthusiasm for food on sticks, a surprisingly broad category that spans everything from überhip Asian street food to übersquare state-fair corn dogs. We called up Armendariz to chat about spaghetti and meatballs on a stick, how he got into food photography, and moving up in his food career from Whole Foods bagger to having one of the top 50 food blogs in the world. READ MORE
Q&A 
Interview on a Stick with Matt Armendariz
Vegan Black Metal Chef: A Grim and Brutal Interview
One month ago Brian Manowitz posted the first of his cooking video series, Vegan Black Metal Chef, to YouTube, a 14:41 clip of him making vegan pad thai in corpse paint, chain mail, and (vegan) spiked armor, the recipe narrated with shrieked vocals and an atmospheric black metal song. It's now up to over a million hits.
Manowitz, who has two metal bands in Florida, has just uploaded his second episode (watch it below), which involves mashed potatoes crushed with a mace and vegetable prep on a pentagram altar. What does his rapid viral video success say about the future of food television? We're not saying. The bottom line is, Brian Manowitz knows how to make people laugh by channeling inherently campy, theatrical black metal into the overly sanitized genre of food TV. We called up the dark lord of vegan food at his Orlando home and asked him about building a rad metal-kitchen set, whether he thinks his success will last, and if there are any VBMC groupies. READ MORE
Going Wild with Hunter Angler Gardener Cook’s Hank Shaw
The timeless world of hunting and foraging that writer Hank Shaw documents on his blog Hunter Angler Gardener Cook sometimes seems a million miles away from those of us who dwell in the urban jungle. But through tireless exploration and documentation, Shaw's done a lot to bring the rugged world of wild food into the antiseptic world of cyberspace, and do it without a trace of hipster-foraging smugness. We asked Shaw about his hot-off-the-presses book, Hunt, Gather, Cook, and the connections between the duck blind, the forest, and the modern kitchen. READ MORE
CakeSpy: An Interview with the Multitalented Confectionary Art Ninja
That Jessie Oleson is a woman of many talents—baker, writer, illustrator, businesswoman—is impressive. That this Seattle resident manages to make a full-time living by harnessing all those talents under an umbrella enterprise called CakeSpy is damned improbable. Under the CakeSpy flag, she blogs at cakespy.com; sells cute, anime-esque illustrations and merchandise; shares recipes for gloriously-bad-for-you sweets such as Cookie Cake Pie; and writes books—her first, CakeSpy Presents Sweet Treats for a Sugar-Filled Life, is due to pop in October via Sasquatch Books. We caught up with the sugary muse to find out more about her book and how she brought all her talents together so successfully.
Life Lessons in Gardening
Brent Ridge of Beekman 1802 discusses leaving Martha behind for dirty feet and early morning pig feedings. READ MORE
Michael Ruhlman’s So Rational
He's got a new book and a message to Americans: Get a cooking scale and some sharp knives. READ MORE
