Edible.com: for things that (many would say) aren't

I ran across this little specialty food site today called Edible. When I write "specialty food", I seriously mean it.

The items that caught my immediate interest were the Wild Black Vanilla Pod and the infamous Civet Coffee. The vanilla because the mind just overflows with the possibilities inherent in a wild version. The coffee because, well, it's kind of gross.

Which leads me to the strength of Edible.com: the Insectivore Section. Oven baked tarantula, toffee scorpion candy, and Chocolate Covered Giant Ants are merely a representative selection of the sorts of critters that I am not currently interested in eating. I mean, none of those are local, so justifying the expense of shipping them just for the gourmet experience seems excessive in our current climate of ecological responsibility.

My one real gripe, because if someone wants tasty tarantula, more power to them, is that, if you're going through the trouble of harvesting coffee from the solid waste of a civet or a weasel, then why would you pre-grind it? This is supposed to be a sublime gourmet experience, which is the only reason why you would take something that passed through the digestive tract of another creature (well, that and for medicinal purposes, I suppose. And for money). Why destroy the flavor by grinding it ahead of time. That's just stupid. I don't know if it's edible.com's fault, but I will not be ordering pre-ground civet coffee.

Oh, and the Monkey-Picked Tea looks cool.

In any case, it looks like their stock varies somewhat from time to time, and it's definitely the place to go if you need something for that extra-special dinner party, so check often for new and interesting experiences.

via MonkeyFilter.

BBum's Guide to Tequila

BBum is Bill Bumgarner an Alpha Geek programmer, works at Apple in a seriously geeky software engineering position, former owner and now adviser to CodeFab. Geek, for sure.

Tequila is… well, you know what tequila is. Or you think you do. However, BBum really does, and he's made a post to tell you all about what tequila really is, and how it can be good. Food + geek = stuff worth knowing.

There are a couple of local places that have large tequila selections, and one new one that is a Tequila tasting bar. There is some seriously good tequila out there, with a depth and complexity of whiskey. Expect the trend to grow over the next year or so.

Holiday Shopping: Jurassic BBQ Apron

Every good food geek requires properly geeky attire when cooking. Maybe not all the time; you can't just go getting dressed up in a lab coat when you just want to throw together some eggs and bacon, but when taking extinct animals and cooking them for pleasure and nutrition, sometimes you need a little something extra.

The WearScience store has just the thing: the Jurassic BBQ Apron. Perfect for the summer barbeque parties or the holiday get-togethers. Impress your friends! Frighten your family!

From the product page:

Hypothesis: Over 99% of prehistoric animal species are now extinct, many of which were no doubt delicious. By mastering advanced cloning techniques we can incorporate these long dead animal species into a unique and scrumptious BBQ experience.

Note: I'm not getting any money or other kickbacks from this, but I do think it's a swank design.

LimoncelloQuest

There is something good to be said for focus. Technically The Food Geek dot com has a focus, and that is food, but food is a huge topic. Huuuuuge. There are those that are even more focused, and the one I ran across today is LimoncelloQuest.

Since returning from Italy, I have been planning on making some Limoncello. For those who aren't familiar, Limoncello is a liqueur that is generally homemade around Italy, though it is available for purchase. You take some lemon peel, soak it in grain alcohol for a while, mix in some simple syrup, and you have yourself something tasty. Simple.

As those who follow cooking enough know, simple things are the hardest to do. Any small mistake features largely in the final product, because there are so few things covering for it.

The tagline of LimoncelloQuest is "A personal pilgrimage to create the perfect Limoncello". The site owner is taking every variable and, well, varying them. Organic vs. standard lemons, adding juice or no, whether to and how often to filter the grain alcohol, how long to let everything rest, all of that.

LimoncelloQuest is not only great for those who are interested in finding out how to make great Limoncello, but it's great for anyone who has a personal quest for perfection, and wants to see how someone else manages that quest.

Espresso as an extraction

There are a couple of sites that I have a difficult time not linking to whenever there's a new post. Ideas in Food is one of them, and khymos.org is the other. They have consistently good information and you should probably just add them to your rss reader if you haven't already.

Today I've failed at my attempt not to link to khymos.org, in this case a lovely initial part of a multi-part series on espresso. When I first started this site, I did a series of articles on coffee. I thought of doing a series on espresso, but it's a large topic that I have limited knowledge of.

Before, I didn't have an espresso maker, and now I have a super-automatic, so I went from no experience to limited experience. While the espresso that I make is likely to be better than any random coffee store you might wander into in a random US town, it's not perfection. Without striving for that perfection, it just didn't seem the proper series of articles that I should write.

However, the article Wonders of extraction: Espresso (part I) is everything I could have hoped to write and more, so it saves me no end of work to just point you there. Go to it. Read, learn, follow links, etc.

Making your own hard cider

There's this site called instructables. Its purpose in life is to have step-by-step instructions of doing just about everything, all generated by users, with the ability to comment and so on.

A lot of these projects are electronics, or carpentry, or steampunk, or what-have-you. Cool stuff, but not useful for thefoodgeek.com. However, instructables recently held the Hungry Scientist Contest intending, I think, to give me all sorts of crazy things to link to whenever I'm feeling lazy. In this case, they gave me one of the front runners, Home Brew Hard Cider from Scratch.

This takes about 20lbs of apples and turns it into fizzy, tasty, alcoholic cider. There's juicing, there's pasteurization, there's brewer's yeast, there's special valves to keep the wrong critters from colonizing your cider. It's got it all.

If you don't have a juicer, you could do like JohnnyT and build your own cider press from things you have laying about. I'm not sure all of those materials are food safe, but people are adventurous.

They Go Really Well Together 11 Wrap Up: Banana and Cloves

Khymos.org has wrapped up its most recently flavor pairing challenge "They Go Really Well Together" (TGRWT) #11: Banana and Cloves. The TGRWT challenges are a general web challenge to create new dishes that use a non-traditional flavor pairing.

I have not participated in the TGRWT challenges yet, but they're always fascinating. I wrote about them some in my post on Cooking Creatively.

One of the great thing about TGRWT is that you're encouraged to post failures as well as successes, because it's a learning endeavor. We don't really know the best way to pair some of these new flavors, so rather than having to try it all yourself, let others show what they've done and give results. Then you'll know what went too far and what worked out well.

As you can imagine, there are more than one banana bread in the bunch. There are also a couple of pork-based dishes. There are some desserts, and there is a martini.

If you're looking for inspiration for a dish, try one of these, or try something based on the TGWRT challenges.

Alltop Bacon: All Bacon, All the Time

Automated bookmarking site Alltop, from Guy Kawasaki, has added a new channel: bacon. Because bacon makes everything better, Alltop is now instantly better. So if you feel you don't have enough bacon in your life, visit the Bacon Channel on Alltop.

It looks like it has 18 bacon-specific newsfeeds, for roughly 90 bacon stories at any given time. There look to be bacon recipes, bacon podcasts, bacon reviews, and bacon songs.

Update: Yeah, that's what laziness gets me. Guy Kawasaki dropped by and commented below, so I'll clarify what he's, um, clarified. Also: spelling error fixed.

Alltop is created by people going about and finding a bunch of links to sites that follow a common theme. The automated bit is that it uses the RSS feed to grab the most recent stories from each site. It displays the headlines, and has some fancy technology to show you previews of the sites or the stories when you roll over them.

Guy (and, I presume, his other editor or editors at this point) use personal knowledge along with the power of the internet to find their sites. I've seen a call for blogs of interest on twitter from him, and he is instantly deluged with what must be 200 billion or so recommendations. It's a good blend of technology and editing, in a compact form. If you're looking for some sites to follow, or you just don't use RSS or its related formats, then Alltop is a handy site to visit.

Hot cheese bread: grip it and rip it! | King Arthur Flour - Bakers’ Banter

Hot cheese bread: grip it and rip it! | King Arthur Flour - Bakers’ Banter: "

If you’re a yeast bread baker, you know that different loaves provoke different visceral responses. There are sandwich loaves, golden brown and perfectly domed, that seem almost too beautiful to cut into. And there’s country sourdough bread, whose occasional lack of beauty is made up for by its enticing aroma. Focaccia begs you to cut it into squares and dip it in seasoned olive oil; a baguette makes you bend down and listen to it ‘singing’ as it cools.

But one response all homemade yeast breads invoke in common: they all say RIP INTO ME RIGHT NOW.

Hot-from-the-oven bread envelops your house with a yeasty aura of warmth and comfort. But it’s not enough to simply enjoy the aroma of bread, or to admire it as it cools. Though you’re cautioned not to cut into a hot sandwich loaf, lest your precipitous cut turn it gummy (and yes, if you cut oven-hot bread, that does happ"

(Via Slashfood.)

Must…make…bread. Wow.

Seasonal Ingredient Map

Seasonal Ingredient Map: "Epicurious has created a handy, interactive map of seasonal produce by state. Select a month, hover over a state, and a list of in-season ingredients is displayed with links to the ingredient descriptions and recipes....

I was looking for one of these a couple of years ago, and this one seems pretty good. It does a little grouping, I've noticed: when it says that this month is good for spinach in Virginia, it really means leafy greens in general (we get quite a bit of kale, mustard greens, and the like as well). With that minor quibble, it's a lovely tool.

I am actively working to become in tune with seasonality, and we are attempting the noble goal of eating a family's share of CSA vegetables between the two of us (and whichever guests we happen to have over). While this tool won't change much by way of what we do, it will be nice to know what to expect when, and hopefully reinforce the memories of which point of the season we get which fruits and vegetables.

(Via Required Eating.)