Zebra Milk

Top-flight London hotel manages to procure zebra milk for picky guest



And while we're talking about unusual milks, a classic thread from eGullet on why we don't have pig milk cheese.

Codornices Escabechadas

A friend of mine was travelling in Europe this summer and brought me home this can as a souvenir. The ingredients, in the original Spanish and the translation:

Ingredientes: Dos codornices (45%), agua, vino, vinagre, aceite de oliva virgen, cebolla, puerro, ajo, sal y especias.

Ingredients: Two quails (45%), water, wine, vinegar, virgin olive oil, onion, leek, garlic, salt and spices.

Canned quail. Okay. What does one do with canned quail, I thought to myself? Shaking the can revealed something that was too liquidy to be like canned chicken from this country. Maybe the cooking directions would provide some insight.

Original: Abrir y comer, para tomarla fria; o calentar a fuego lento en sarten o cacerola durante 5 minutos, para tomarla templada; o 10 minutos para tomarla caliente.

Babelfish Translation: To open and to eat, to take it fria; or to warm up to untimed fire in frying pan or casserole during 5 minutes, to take warmed up it; or 10 minutes to take it warms up it.

Okay, not much insight there.

Nothing to do but open it up. This weekend I had the company of some relatively adventurous eaters, and we made much ceremony of opening up the can.

Yep, that's quail alright. Bones and all. The breast pieces were relatively intact, as you can see in the picture above. But the rest of the birds had mostly fallen apart, so there were lots of little bones floating around in the broth. Certainly not the appetizing looking thing I'd ever seen. It didn't smell great, but not bad either.

It's definitely miles apart from most canned goods from this country. First off, well - it's quail. But even beyond that, there were whole bay leaves and peppercorns and garlic cloves with the skin still on - awfully food-like compared to most processed foods here.

We chose the caliente option from the directions, and heated it for about 10 minutes. Although it looks much like chicken soup, the broth had quite a bit of olive oil and vinegar in it, so it was very strongly flavored for drinking like a soup broth. The meat was pretty tasty, all things considered, although a little dry in that way that canned meat can be. I guess all the broth was to moisten it.

All in all, I think it was more fun talking about the can and anticipating what might be in the can than actually eating what was in the can. But it was a fun culinary adventure!

Liquid Candy Corn

Those wacky folks at Jones Soda are at it again.

The color of the juice has a Mountain Dew yellow glow, and after a sip, there’s a deep carmel flavor followed by a taste of vanilla, like tasting your way through the stripes on the candy. It’s satisfying, but not quite a perfect substitute. On the other hand at 130 calories for a 9 oz can, it’ll definitely jolt your brain and rot your teeth out, and really what more can you ask from a soda?

Read more at Hungry Magazine.

I'm busy planning my own candy corn experiments this holiday season. I bought a container of candy corn so I could practice chopping or crushing it for truffle rolling purposes, but my husband ate it all before I got a chance. Must move faster next time.

(People are really fanatical about their candy corn. It seems to be one of those "love it or hate it" kind of foods. Me, let's just say I'm not on the side with the love.)

That place - you know the one - it useta be a Dairy Queen?

Not Fooling Anybody. Subtitled "A Chronicle of Bad Conversions and Storefronts Past" this website provides a tour of some not-so-dramatic transformations. The pictures are occasionally amusing, but it's the "creative interpretations" that will occasionally make you laugh out loud.

Their manifesto:

It is not without the bitter taste of self-awareness, specifically about the overwhelmingly crass and commercial (and, indeed, downtrodden and dreary, bleakly suburban, and economically grim) nature of the content of this site, that we at NFA embark on our quest to document bad conversions. That said, it is perhaps best that we look at this phenomenon as a delightful yet sad part of our culture's clattering landscape: it is an amusing diversion, it is an economic gestalt, it is a crime of design, it is a confusion to the would-be consumer. Let us rejoice in bad conversions and seek to amuse ourselves with them wherever possible, taking utmost pains to observe the careful, hopeless touches of their renovation and their indelible flourishes of nonsense on our landscape. Embrace blight! We have no other hope.

Vegan sugar

You, like me, are probably thinking "Well, how the heck could sugar NOT be vegan?"

Turns out that the processing method for cane sugar refinement includes a step involving charcoal purification. And in some processing plants that charcoal is in the form of "bone char" - charcoal created from the leftover bones from meat slaughtering. This product used is so far processed from its animal origins that Kosher law considers bone char filtered sugar to be pareve, but for hardcore vegans it still presents a problem.

If you're a concerned vegan or vegetarian, you're in luck - sugar made from sugar beets does not require this step. However, it can be difficult to tell what plant the sugar you're buying is refined from, beets or sugar canes. For readers who have a Meijer nearby to frequent, they do label their store brand sugar as being from sugar beets. And of course, another option is simply to use alternative sweeteners or less refined cane sugar. (Beware of brown sugar, which is often just refined white sugar with molasses added back in.)

More info here.

And that's my "something new" learned for today! Of course, it just adds an extra wrinkle to the problem that I was researching in the first place (creating a vegan chocolate truffle) as now I have to worry about where the sugar in the chocolate comes from!

Coffee you can eat with a spoon

From Spanish molecular gastronomy mastermind Ferran Adria, comes Espesso. This "mousselike, cold solid sprayed right out of the canister" premiered in the US this week in Chicago. (A fitting location for it, given that most of America's own molecular gastronomist masterminds - Achatz, Cantu, Bowles - are located there.)

Espesso -- a play on the Italian word "spesso," meaning thick -- is essentially "taking coffee and solidifying it," said Joerg Oberschmied, vice president of operations for Lavazza, the 111-year-old Italian coffee company that is offering Adria's coffee creation.

Lavazza's three Chicago stores -- the company's only U.S. locations -- will be pouring or, rather, spraying espessos starting today. A serving costs $2.49.

On the heels of the bacon martini

How about a weenie-tini?

Over the years, I've tried various sorts of infusions, with vodka and other liquors. Fruit and herb-infused are the best known, and are often wonderful. But what I like is meat. Where's the infusion for people like me? I felt disenfranchised, and alone, especially after some research on the interwebs revealed a real lack of meat-based liqueurs. It would be up to me to blaze the trail.

Peanut Butter and Bacon Truffles

Really.

I'm finding the recipe strangely enticing.

And while we're talking about strange things to do with bacon, anybody up for a bacon martini?