Flash in the Pan

A weekly round-up of food and drink oddities:

• Taco With Weed A Colorado couple found that their take-out Tex-Mex food order included a bag of marijuana. (AP)


• Charm of Coffee Researchers say that even holding a cup of hot coffee can can warm the heart and not just the hands. (Reuters)


• Barkeep, a Two-Thirds, Please The U.K. is considering a measure that would allow bars to sell two-third pint glasses instead of only a full or half pint for those times when the one is too much and the other not enough. (Reuters)


• Turn Back the Clock and Prices A Manhattan restuarant hit its 100th anniversary and for the day set dishes back to 1908 prices. (AFP)


• Fat and Glad-iator It seems that Roman gladiators fattened up on carbs. (Crispy on the Outside)

Labels: news, odd, strange, weird

There's something odd going on at McDonald's. According to Bloomberg News, the company saw higher profits in the third quarter and attributed them to items from the dollar menu and specialty coffees. However, it was only back in July that McDonald's warned of coming changes in the dollar menu by next year because of rising costs, and back then attributed its profit growth to breakfast biscuits, chicken sandwiches, and drinks. Does that mean that there won't be changes in the dollar menu as those double cheeseburgers, which summer rumors suggested would be maybe dropping one of the pieces of cheese because of the cost, are supposedly what have been helping to fuel the economic success?

Labels: fast food, finance, McDonald's

A weekly round-up of food and drink oddities:

• Forget Stocks - Try Barrels The stock market may be taking a beating, but the World Whiskey Index has seen an average return of 26.2 percent over the last 11 months. That's putting your money where your mouth is. (Reuters)


• Use the Tape Faster Next Time A group of Iranians built what they hoped would be the world's largest sandwich, but before representatives of the Guiness Book of World Records could measure it, bystanders rushed in and ate the evidence. (Reuters)


• Burger with Everything - Literally A man took well over four hours to eat a 15 pound burger that, with toppings and all, topped out at 20.2 pounds. (AP)


• Not the Nuts - Police have warned thieves that stole 660 pounds of hazelnuts not to eat them because the sacks they're in are filled with a poisonous gas to extend the shelf life and they need additional treatment to be safe to eat. (Reuters)


• Don't Drink the Stew - About 170 wedding guests in northern China were rushed to the hospital after someone decided to flavor a pot of stew with powdered rust remover, mistaking it for salt. (Reuters)

Labels: news, odd, strange, weird

The food industry is seeing some of the fallout of the credit meltdown: the Archway & Mother’s Cookie Co. declared bankruptcy and is ceasing operations. Owned by private equity firm Catterton Partners, it sounds as though some financing the company depended on suddenly fell through. With the companies go such brands as Archway Oatmeal Cookies, Circus Animal Cookies, Salerno Butter Cookies, and, my personal favorite, the Archway Dutch chocolate cookies. The bankruptcy filing lists assets of $50 million and liabilities of $500 million. Unfortunately, that's the way the cookie crumbles.

Labels: bankruptcy, finance, news

A weekly round-up of food and drink oddities:

• A Slice or 45 Competitive eating champion Joey Chestnut just won a pizza eating contest, downing 45 slices in 10 minutes. That's even more than a teenage boy. (AP)


• Assault by Cake A Hartford, CT woman was charged with assault and various other activities for allegedly serving a pot-spiked gingercake to her real estate agent. Maybe she wanted a higher price? (AP)


• To Choose, Look Down The tabletops of an upscale London restaurant are giant touch-screen displays that let you see the food and then order it. (Evening Standard)


• Bad Wine? Wait 30 Minutes An inventor has found a way to "age" wine in under an hour using ultrasound. (London Telegraph)

Labels: news, odd, strange, weird

There was some excitement in our household when the samples of Ghirardelli's new baking chocolates arrived. Baking and chocolate: two of our favorite subjects. Unfortunately, the products themselves are never going to be top shelf in our pantry. Shipped in 10-ounce bags ($3.99 to $4.99), the chocolate came in the form of chips. Tasting the samples, because that's the real test, resulted in disappointment. The texture was waxy, and no surprise. The ingredient list included unsweetened chocolate, sugar, cocoa butter, milk fat and soy lecithin (though real vanilla where that flavoring was used, to their credit). Milk fat simply isn't an ingredient in dark chocolate.

At the high end of this line, the price is about $8 a pound at the suggested retail price. That seems far too low for top chocolate. If I were to pick up three kilos (6.6 pounds) of a good Valrhona couverature from Sparrow Enterprises, for example, I might be paying about $11.60, and Sparrow is one of the least expensive sources I know for good chocolate, as it's a wholesaler that will also ship to consumers. The tastes are also incomparable, probably because chocolate quality depends completely on the quality and the roasting of the beans. Having a chocolate announce 60 percent cocoa solids doesn't matter if it uses inferior beans.

If you're looking for really good chocolate for baking, go buy some Valrhona or Callebaut or El Rey. It's easy enough to break up and chop the chocolate with a kitchen knife if having small pieces for melting is important to you, and the results will be better.

Labels: chocolate, product, review

There's an old myth floating about that science suggests drinking hot drinks when you want to cool off and cold drinks when you want to warm my. The twisted logic says that your body is an incredibly efficient heating and cooling machine. If you're cold, the fastest way to get warmer is for the body's own furnace to kick in, and it will if you drink something cold, lowering your core temperature. When it's hot, you drink something warm, causing the core temperature to rise and the cooling system (known as sweat) to activate.

Why don't people actually act that way? Because intuitively, I think, they know that it doesn't make sense. Oh, it might if you were cold and your body wasn't going to react. But the point is that you're already cold, and your body knows that. As you lose heat, the body will work to replace it. Sure, drinking hot chocolate (close to mind at the moment as the temperature is near freezing here) will make the body think that it's warmer and, thus, reduce the amount of heat it needs to produce. But that's because you've just added heat and the body now is warmer. Which was the idea in the first place. And by the time I reach for iced tea in the summer, chances are that I've already been sweating and still hot.

So celebrate the season, and if you're in a colder climate, I'll heartily recommend hot chocolate with a dash of caramel sauce.

Labels: beverages, caramel, chocolate

A weekly round-up of food and drink oddities:

• Food Stars at Ig Nobel One of the winners of this year's Ig Nobel Awards, an honoring of real but weird research, was someone who showed that Coca-Cola was a good spermicide and that people will enjoy stale potato chips so long as they crunch loudly enough. (Reuters)


• End of Free Naked Lunch A Maine restaurant had been offering a free lunch to people who would jump naked into a nearby lake (probably setting their teeth chattering so much that they wouldn't be able to eat), but has dropped the promotion when the town offered to drop his liquor permit. (AP)


• It's Good for You A zoo in central China has been feeding chicken soup to its pandas. And what of the matzo balls? (AP)


• Hair of the Horse A man in Kazakhstan beat a drunken-driving rap because he had consumed fermented mare's milk, not beer or liquor. (AP)


• Ballsy Cooking A Serbian chef has come out with a cookbook focused on recipes using testicles as an ingredient. (AFP)

Labels: news, odd, strange, weird