Kids like mountaineering, right?

Monk Hands,
originally uploaded by Braden Gunem.

I had a Butter Rum flavored Life Saver today and it made me think about whether a Butter Tea could be popular among fans of Himalayan mountain climbing. Pop one of these onto your tongue and you can experience the Everest Base Camp sensation, especially if you refrain from breathing.

Breakfast craft

Someone should invent a small hot-air balloon that would make your toast and deliver it to your plate in the morning.

Rojo

Name for an ice cream flavor: Cherry Garcia Lorca

via flickr.com

 

Posted via web from Poor Poor Thing

Yeah, you heard me - WISDOM

 

Traditional end of meal course: Surrealism Cookies

 

The other day we had to go to the phone store to replace Pam's broken handset, and when we were done we stopped at a local non-Western restaurant named after an inhabitant of the natural world. It was a nice meal, but I was stopped in my tracks when I opened my fortune cookie. It seems to have sustained translation damage in more than one place. But I think it is good when your food makes you stop and think, because that gives you three extra opportunities a day to achieve enlightenment.

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Everyone knows midichlorians are orange

Bad Guy: Darth Gourd (his subordinates would address him as "Lord Gourd")

They probably look even better when they're slightly moldy.

Pretty soon it will be time purchase the raw materials needed for the year's Halloween creation. I always favor interesting shape and texture versus brute size.

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The mystery of the bread from heaven

Yesterday, sometime in the morning when we were off at the gym, one slice of bread inexplicably showed up on our front walk. I am pretty sure that I didn't put it there, and I trust my wife who says she was equally perplexed when she saw it while going out to the car. When we first spotted it it was pretty much pristine (this picture shows it having sat out one damp night, thus the moist appearance you might have noticed), making it unlikely to have been dragged there by a bird or a squirrel, say out of our compost heap which is located quite a long distance away. It's also rather far from the street
which argues against the idea that some person passing by might have tossed it there for reasons too obscure to ponder. That person would pretty much have had to walk up our walk and place it down for it to have ended up where it did, which seems even more unlikely.
We didn't pick it up, thinking that it would simply be absorbed into the food web by the various mourning doves, starlings, sparrows, squirrels, and other wildlife we have seen foraging in the yard. This too proved to be an odd part of the puzzle, as this lovely nice fresh piece of nutrition was spurned by all. Was there something suspicious about the look of the slice, scaring off the birds, and about its odor, scaring off the squirrels?

The investigation is ongoing.

Update: Well, someone appreciates it, or the half that's left at any rate.

Roach Sushi makes Gregor Samsa miserable

RoachSushi 2,
originally uploaded by FeltedChicken.

This item makes me think there might be a market in making revolting tableaux as diet aids. You would put one or more of these around your kitchen and dining areas as appetite suppressants, and since they lack the characteristic odors and scutling noises of the real thing, when company comes around you could just sweep them into a drawer and they would be none the wiser.

As you become habituated to the fake roaches, you could achieve the same effect by coming up with more and more disgusting stimuli. It could be a subscription you would sign up for over six weeks, say, where a package would come to your house with more and more disturbing replicas so that you would not get too used to things.

The flaw in the plan, which I do not yet have a ready way to get around, is that one could simply leave the house to take meals elsewhere. It would generally not do for one to take one of the fake roaches along with oneself to a restaurant where it would be likely to disturb other customers and drive them off.

Intelligent design in my soup

I was listening to Shirley Temple sing about these and thougth I'd do a search on Flickr. Seems to me that someone should have a line of animal crackers including dinosaurs, trilobites, etc., to appeal to those arguing for a young Earth. And don't forget the Serpent!

Have you no sense of decency, sirs?

Mmmmmmmmm!,
originally uploaded by urtica.

On our recent Christmas break, I was disappointed to find that among the sundae toppings available at the Friendly's Ice Cream, butterscotch was not listed. Butterscotch! When I was a kid, sundaes came in only three varieties: chocolate, strawberry, and butterscotch. Now, there are a dozen and a half kinds of toppings you can put on your sundae, but when I asked about butterscotch, the waitress suggested only the substitution of caramel.

Which is not the same thing at all, of course, being only composed of sugar and water, no butter at all. What a travesty! How is this to be endured?

This is not the first time I have run into this. Last summer at Baskin-Robbins back here in New Jersey, I inquired about butterscotch and the fellow behind the counter looked at me as if I were crazy. Not only did they not have it, he'd never heard of it, and seemed to suspect that I was making it up. Cold Stone Creamery lists ed to suspect that I was making it up. Cold Stone Creamery lists Fat-Free Butterscotch, which seems to me to be an abomination. I am pessimistic that the local Carvel's would be any more likely to come up with the goods either.

Perhaps I'll have to take another trip to New England and sample the hot penuche at Herrell's.

Keep out of reach of children, and adults

I am not one for sugary sweet drinks, especially not those of the alcoholic sort (more of a Scotch whisky type, really). For those of you of different tastes, consider this rainbow-colored hootch made by mixing vodka with Skittles. I doubt that the two days of steeping added much to the color depth, so perhaps one could accelerate the process and mix up a batch in an afternoon, I don't know. Make sure you're not too close to a flame, by the way.

Probably one could achieve similar results substituting Jolly Rancher hard candy. I think it might eliminate the need for filtration, perhaps. Until I did a search, I had not appreciated the fact that this would not make it the first Jolly Rancher alcoholic drink concoction, nor even the second.

Urgence de feu

I was thinking for hipsters in French-speaking Switzerland and in the Haut-Savoy region of France, one could adapt this T-shirt design

to one that takes advantage of the local fire-roasted culinary specialty, raclette

To wit: "break the glass to get a wedge of cheese and some potatoes."

Even though people usually use a machine nowadays to make their artery-clogging treat, rather than open flame, I think the gag would likely get across anyhow.

I was thinking

Yes, challah is taken...,
originally uploaded by MarisaElana.

If rednecks ran a matzo bakery, would the labels say Challah done been took?

Eclipse pies

1. Print out high resolution pictures of the moon in eclipse using food-grade inkjet ink and edible paper in a Canon or Epson printer.


2. Apply the illustrations to traditional Moon Pies.


3. Share with fellow lunatics.

More information on high resolution edible printing here.

Update: A warm welcome goes out to all my visitors from evilmadscientist. I have not pressed forward to make this astronomically themed dessert a reality because I lack the prerequisites, but would love to hear from anyone who has in fact been able to construct this or something similar in reality.

Synaesthetic dessert

Cuisenaire rods,
originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

One is white, two bright red, three lime-green and so on. When I first heard about the synaesthetic association between numerals and colors, something like this came to mind, but it wasn't until later that I could identify the source: Cuisenaire rods. How like a perfectly-trimmed carrot stick the mighty orange Ten looked! The succulent purple grape color of the Four!

I think it might be a nice idea for a primary-school teacher's going-away party to make edible Cuisenaire rods out of agar, fruit juice, and appropriate coloring. Arrange the rods to illustrate mathematical problems, but be prepared for the guests to play with their food afterward.
Has someone already done this? I would like to see how it turned out.

Guide for former vegans

How to Hold a Drumstick

When I first saw the title, I thought it had to do with etiquette for barbeques. I mean, it might be conceivable that a person unaccustomed to eating poultry might pick one up by the meaty end (perhaps thinking that this is the best way to do it if one were actually planning to play some drums with the thing), though it is hard for me to picture the scenario. Anyway, perhaps one should start a new wikiHow article with this in mind, going into all the regional variants, sauce vs. breading considerations, dipping technique, and so forth.

Axiomatic Mexican platter theory, with Elvis

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Combo Platter,
originally uploaded by egseah.

At Marginal Revolution there is a post up about the phenomenon of random combination platters at Tex-Mex restaurants. It does seem as if as if this is more characteristic of those sorts of restaurants than those of other types.

Rather than the economic perspective they adopt, I prefer to think of it from a mathematical point of view. Consider S, the set of all n individual dishes they sell on the menu. The maximum variety of combination platters which could be assembled from these is the set of all subsets of S, known as the power set of S, P(S) and has 2ⁿ elements, ranging from an order of no dishes at all ("I'll just have a coffee, thanks.") to one comprising all the dishes at once ("One of each, please.")

Thus a restaurant with five house specialties could post an exhaustive menu of platter combinations thereof:

{}, {chile rellenos}, {elvis green chile fried chicken}, {chile rellenos,elvis green chile fried chicken}, {chicken flautas}, {chile rellenos,chicken flautas}, {elvis green chile fried chicken,chicken flautas}, {chile rellenos,elvis green chile fried chicken,chicken flautas}, {chuychanga}, {chile rellenos,chuychanga}, {elvis green chile fried chicken,chuychanga}, {chile rellenos,elvis green chile fried chicken,chuychanga}, {chicken flautas,chuychanga}, {chile rellenos,chicken flautas,chuychanga}, {elvis green chile fried chicken,chicken flautas,chuychanga}, {chile rellenos,elvis green chile fried chicken,chicken flautas,chuychanga}, {steak burrito}, {chile rellenos,steak burrito}, {elvis green chile fried chicken,steak burrito}, {chile rellenos,elvis green chile fried chicken,steak burrito}, {chicken flautas,steak burrito}, {chile rellenos,chicken flautas,steak burrito}, {elvis green chile fried chicken,chicken flautas,steak burrito}, {chile rellenos,elvis green chile fried chicken,chicken flautas,steak burrito}, {chuychanga,steak burrito}, {chile rellenos,chuychanga,steak burrito}, {elvis green chile fried chicken,chuychanga,steak burrito}, {chile rellenos,elvis green chile fried chicken,chuychanga,steak burrito}, {chicken flautas,chuychanga,steak burrito}, {chile rellenos,chicken flautas,chuychanga,steak burrito}, {elvis green chile fried chicken,chicken flautas,chuychanga,steak burrito}, {chile rellenos,elvis green chile fried chicken,chicken flautas,chuychanga,steak burrito}

Fudging the prices somewhat would make it just about impossible for one to tell easily what the best deal for the money would be.

Having made it through the entree, one could then work one's way through the combinations of the 31 flavors of ice cream offered.

It claims to be 70.0513% cacao

I think this chocolate bar shaped- and scented-calculator (broken link) would be the ideal gift for a Mom who happens to be a CPA, if she happened to like chocolate as well. chocolate covered cherry body spray.

I think I broke the Scoville meter

You call this Death by Chili? 2Tbsp green chiles, and Budweiser?

I think Death by Chili should be something that looks more like this.

iron pour 2- of fire and metal,
originally uploaded by khushdude.

Things I've said recently which would have been incomprehensible 25 years ago

• "Where did I leave my computer?" I was rushing off to an appointment and had mislaid my laptop temporarily. Back in the old days, we did have personal computers, though only luggable in the most generous sense of the term.


• "They left their two Bobcats in our driveway."
  The neighbors are putting an addition on the back of their house and we have agreed to let them use part of our property to bring their equipment through. Because of the recent rain, we have about 15 yards of mud that gets tracked through the kitchen now.
  The Bobcat(tm) line of small earthmoving equipment does not quite go back that far.


• "It keeps doing that whenever I'm not wearing the Bluetooth." Because of the hands-free cell phone laws here, I spend a good part of the day with a headset stuck in my ear, which mostly works fine. But when I do take the thing out and my wife calls, we often seem to get into this thing where the phone thinks it should be picking up from the headset instead of the built-in speaker, and she can't hear me, even though I can hear her. Twenty-five years ago a good many phones I used still had dials on them.


• "I was thinking it might be a good time to buy some more Chinese stock." I was at my doctor's office and the subject of the recent market downturns came up, and I mentioned the possibility of an opportunity to take advantage of the situation. The only Chinese stock we knew about back in the old days was usually made with chicken and ginger.


• "I haven't had T'ang-T'ang noodles in years." We were at a restaurant at the tail end of the Lunar New Year celebration, having the traditional noodle dishes. I'd have this dish at the old Joyce Chen's Small Eating Place in Cambridge regularly, though they were called dan-dan noodles.

I thought they'd have more salt

Thinking about what to bake for Valentine's day? Perhaps Cori Crooks' Mexican Divorce Cookies (broken link) would hit the spot.