When serving crab, it is very important to get out each tiny piece of shell that might have been left behind and that is a difficult job. To make the task easier, we inspect the crabmeat under a black light. The shells glow under this light and they are easy to pick out.

Think outside the tortilla. Carefully unwrap the Burrito Supremes and soft taco, and extract their stuffings in a bowl. Carefully rinse off each of the tortillas, and then briefly steam them in a steamer to soften and moisten them. Then lay each tortilla on a cutting board and cut circles in it using a small circular cookie cutter, or simply an empty tin can measuring around 2 1/2" in diameter. Take the filling and put a small amount in each small tortilla circle, then fold it in half and pinch it into a tortellini shape. The moisture should keep it sticky enough to stay put. Pile the tortellinis on a plate. Next, cut open and pour the contents of the sauce packets in a measuring cup, then generously drizzle the sauce over the tortellini. Garnish with parsley and serve with Sierra Mist in a wine glass.

Oh, this is stupid and sad. Pez Candy Inc., makers of pixel-y candy dosed out in those iconic character dispensers, is suing the Burlingame Museum of Pez Memorabilia for copyright infringement. Doctor Popular blogs about it over at Laughing Squid:

The suit, filed last week, claims that the museum deceives the public into believing they are operating under the authority of Pez and asks that the museum’s 7 foot tall replica of Pez dispenser be destroyed. The lawsuit also takes issue with the museum’s sales of toy truck Pez dispensers which had been modified with Obama and McCain logos during last years elections. The museum has been opened since 1995 and is said to be the only place in the world were you can see every Pez dispenser ever made.

Update: The love that dare not Pez its name. At left, Scott Beale snapped this scandalous pic proving what Star Wars slashfic scribes have long known: The 'droid hearts Chewie, as evidenced in two giant Pez dispensers. Lawsuits be damned. C-3PO & Chewbacca, Together At Last.

Threadcakes Gallery! :: Threadcakes: A Threadless Cake

Some of the results are in for the Alpha-test Meatcard Challenge, and they are terrific. The rules were to photographically recreate one of several famous Frank Frazetta paintings (without using Photoshop or the like). The winners get business cards made from laser etched beef jerky.

Frazetta Meatcard challenge results

The Evil Mad Scientists are rightfully fascinated with Sichuan peppercorns.

Sichuan peppercorns, oh yeah! Raven of Made with Molecules after eating them wrote, "There's a war in my mouth." They create a riot of numbing and tingling sensations, particularly if you can get relatively fresh ones (i.e. not stale from sitting around in a Whole Foods bulk bin). Raven links to an abstract about the particular anesthetic-sensitive potassium channels inhibited by hydroxy-alpha-sanshool, one of the components of sichuan peppercorns that make them so exciting.

Posing as owners of a new LA area vegetarian restaurant, we arrived at Bodhi and asked to speak with a customer service manager. We were quickly introduced to a helpful lady who was ready to advise us on what products to buy. She was either the manager or the owner, and most definitely the senior person on-premise at that time.

She showed us to a freezer of "veggie chicken", and we checked the ingredients on the label (all vegan). We asked her why some products have a better mouth texture than others, even though they have no eggs listed as ingredients, and after a long conversation and questions, she said the following:

"We buy most of this veggie meat from a manufacturer in Taiwan. It's produced for the Taiwanese and Chinese vegetarian market then re-labeled for export, often to the USA. I do know of times when things have been labelled incorrectly, but I do my best to make sure that what they send me is what they say it is."

Upon further questioning, she kindly gave us the email address of her contact in Taiwan. She specifically asked that we didn't mention Bodhi Vegetarian Supply when we contacted them, and so we're not disclosing the name of the manufacturer here.

This is [Sona restaurant chef de cuisine Kuniko Yagi's] recipe for making tofu from soy milk, and it's the one Yagi uses: Add a teaspoon of liquid nigari to 500 milliliters of cold soy milk and stir. Then pour it into heat-proof bowls and cook (in a water bath or steamer) until it sets like custard. That is it. There's no heating the soy milk to bring it to a certain temperature before adding the nigari. No separating liquids from solids. No straining once it's cooked.

Kariya had figured just the right amount of soy milk (which he makes -- so he knows that the brix, or percentage of dissolved solids, is 14%) to use with a certain amount of nigari (which he imports from Japan and has magnesium chloride and other trace minerals), so that his tofu recipe works consistently. He sells both the milk ($3.50 for a half-gallon) and the nigari, which isn't cheap but will make a lot of tofu and will last almost indefinitely ($25 for a pint).

There's a house in our neighborhood that's been for sale for over a year. Two months ago the for sale signs disappeared, junk mail littered the front porch and the mow and blow guys stopped showing up, leaving the lawn to go wild. A busted sprinkler head creates a nightly fountain as the houses' infrastructure lapses into a timer operated zombification. We knew the nice young family that used to live here and I hope that they were able to sell somehow, but it doesn't look good.

I started picking up the junk mail to make the place looked lived in. I also remembered that the backyard had both figs and bananas, and ventured beyond the gate to see how the fruit was developing (fyi, picking up fallen fruit is important to keep down the rat population). The figs aren't quite ready but the bananas, the ones the squirrels didn't get, were the tastiest damn bananas I've ever eaten. It turns out that our national real estate bubble has a fruit filled silver lining. I imagine that all across America there are abandoned fruit trees yielding their bounty for a new generation of gleaners. Thank you Angelo Mozilo for creating a literal banana republic!

Step 4
* Insert your thumbs into the split of the peel and pull the two sides apart.
* Expose the top of the banana. It may be slightly squished from pulling on the stem, but this will not affect the flavor.

Step 5
* Pull open the peel, starting from your original split, and opening it along the length of the banana.

After having eaten more than my share of mouth-watering ham during my recent trip to Gijón, Spain (where I gave a presentation about DIY at the fantablulous Foro Internet Meeting Point) I was gratified to read that the Mangalica pig has been saved from the brink of extinction. As Michael Pollan and others have pointed out, one of the best ways a plant or animal species can ensure its survival is to be useful to people.

At one time, only 198 purebred pigs remained in the world. Farmers preferred other breeds. "The corpulent Mangalica grows very slowly and cannot be kept in closed quarters. It is therefore poorly suited to modern industrial pig farms, and it has been gradually replaced by modern breeds," according to the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity in Florence, Italy.

After less than two decades of intense breeding, the Mangalica population has now increased one-hundred-fold, with 20,000 pigs living in Spain and Hungary.

An 8-10 pound leg of Boneless Jamon Mangalica costs $490 at La Teinda. Rare pig breed resurrected for ham lovers

paper taco trucks (via Andre Torrez)

The Meatcard Challenge: If you do a good job of recreating one of three Frazetta paintings using live people you could win a slab of beef jerky with your business card laser-cut on it.

RULES

* Your image must be a photograph of actual, live people, not a drawing, illustration, or diorama. Recreating the painting with action figures does not count.

* Do not halfass the photo. If there is a dinosaur in the painting, there had better be something awesomely dinosaur-y in your picture. Not a stuffed animal, or your cat. Unless your cat is six feet tall and has a wicked gleam in its eye. We will be judging on creativity, ingenuity, and attitude.

* No photoshopping. No shooping whatsoever. We have shooped the whoop many times, and we will be able to tell.

* Judging is gender-agnostic. That's a man in the bikini holding the knife? Fine! We will judge based on whether he's successfully achieving the Fierce Frazetta Stance. Gender doesn't matter in the contest, but attitude and costume does.

* One winning photo, one alpha-tester slot. If your photo wins, you get one alpha-test slot, with one 4"x11" slab of jerky resulting. (Otherwise, one photo with 15 people in it could take up all the slots.)

* Pictures do not need to be work-safe, fully clothed, partially clothed, tasteful, appropriate, or attractive. They must be creative, ingenious, and make us glad we did this instead of just doing it "first come, first served."

I can't wait to see the contest entries!

Meatcard Challenge

The initiative is being seen as an attempt by the saffron party, which popularised the 'vada pav', staple diet of many a Mumbaikar, four decades ago, to establish rapport with the 'Marathi manoos', whose tilt in favour of Sena offshoot MNS, cost the party dearly in recent Lok Sabha polls.

"In foreign countries, burger is available 24-hours. Why can't vada pav be also available similarly," Uddhav said. The party, which has started a cooperative to encourage Marathi entrepreneurs, showcases 'Shiv Vada' as its first project under the new initiative, sources said. "To begin with, 25 Shiv Vada stalls would be operational in the city," they said.

(Image: Jumbo Vada Pav.jpg, CC-BY, Wikimedia Commons)

Asserting that the practice of lobbing fish above the heads of patrons and tourists at the market and other venues is disrespectful to creatures that already have gone through a lot, an animal rights group is protesting plans to stage a flying-fish exhibition at an upcoming national veterinarians conference in Seattle.

Ultimately, they would like to see the practice banned at the fish market too. They argue that tourists would not be nearly so eager to snap photos if dead kittens or gutted lambs were sailing over their heads.

"Killing animals so you can toss their bodies around for amusement is just twisted," said Ashley Byrne, senior campaigner for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in Washington, D.C.

The CarboPouch development allows craft draft beer brewers to fill on-site, a clean, ready-to- go Single45 or Single25 pouch with spout and cap. Storage and shelf-life requires refrigeration. Low-carbonated water and shelf-stable energy drinks can also be filled. The organoleptic film structure ensures no off flavor. The patented film structure is designed to handle the pouch "stretch" after filling and carbonation expansion. The automatic filling process is such that there is no headspace after filling. The three-side seal pouch has a smooth side comfort grip feature. The combination of these factors makes the CarboPouch a true economical innovation for distribution of craft draft beers to the consumer's home. Sports functions now have a package!

In Brooklyn, about a mile south of us (via Making Light)

supermarket checker
vintage supermarkets
konbini life
grocery cart sculpture
bread ties
buying organic
foodzie
hard to find grocer
laughing banana

and the classics...
trader joe's ad
Illeanarama

Permalink for this edition. Web Zen is created and curated by Frank Davis, and re-posted here on Boing Boing with his kind permission. Web Zen Home and Archives, Store, Twitter. (Thanks Frank!)

I ordered naga jolokia pepper seeds from the Chile Pepper Institute at New Mexico State University. The naga jolokia, sometimes called the bhut jolokia, the ghost pepper, or the poison pepper, is the world's hottest chile pepper. My brother, the expert gardener, is growing them right now. These are pretty difficult to grow in Minnesota; they take forever to germinate and the drop flowers at the slightest provocation.

The scale used to measure chile pepper piquancy is called the Scoville scale. At the low end is a green bell pepper and at the high end is 100% capsicum pepper spray.

In 2001, an academic visiting India and sent back seeds of a pepper he found growing there to NMSU. Shades of hades, the fruit of the naga jolokia were hot! How hot? The peppers were analyzed and found to be 4 times hotter than the previously known hottest pepper, the Red Savina. Can eating a chile pepper be dangerous? Judge for yourself.

In Absinthe and Flamethrowers, I devote a chapter to "Thrill Eating" which is practicing the art of living dangerously by eating "dangerous" foods. So name your poison: fugu, ackee, pokeweed, casu marzu, Amanita mushrooms, naga jolokia, or Los Angeles danger dogs. As Nietzsche said, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

Wedding Cake (Thanks, Jay!)

The first time my 11-year-old got a bloody tongue from licking a Tootsie Pop, we thought it was a fluke. The second time it happened, we examined the Tootsie Pop and figured out that the voids that had formed in the pop had sharp edges. Anyone else have this happen to them?

Beanzawave: The World's Smallest Microwave (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

d20 groom's cake (Thanks, Jason!)

Crawling Zombie Torso Gelatin Mold (Thanks, Alice!)

On May 21, a judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California dismissed a complaint filed by a woman who said she had purchased "Cap'n Crunch with Crunchberries" because she believed "crunchberries" were real fruit. The plaintiff, Janine Sugawara, alleged that she had only recently learned to her dismay that said "berries" were in fact simply brightly-colored cereal balls, and that although the product did contain some strawberry fruit concentrate, it was not otherwise redeemed by fruit. She sued, on behalf of herself and all similarly situated consumers who also apparently believed that there are fields somewhere in our land thronged by crunchberry bushes.

Mix an Exploding Drink (via Neatorama)

I couldn't bring myself to watch the video of the chef killing a chicken with a snake bite, but here it is if you are interested.

Snake-bite chicken 'off the menu' (Via Arbroath)

It's a brand new CandyFab-- still in beta. A clean break, designed from the ground up with almost no parts in common with the original, the CandyFab 4000. All new mechanics. All new electronics. All new software. Smaller but still big: the build volume is more than 10 liters, but it's now small enough to fit on a desk top...

The new modular electronics control platform is called Zuccherino-- that's italian for "Sugar cube." One Arduino-compatible circuit board per axis. (Our prototype above shows X,Y,Z, Heat, and Air axes, plus a master board.)

It's an expandable system for all kinds of motion control projects, and we'll be making kit versions of all of the Zuccherino boards later this summer.

We've also got new cross platform control software -- called CandyFabulous underway, and it's looking sweet.

I like this photo from the Instructables article on Gummi Bear Surgery. (Via Weird Universe)

"Evidence is increasing to suggest that excessive cola consumption can also lead to hypokalaemia, in which the blood potassium levels fall, causing an adverse effect on vital muscle functions."

A research review carried out by Dr Elisaf and his colleagues has shown that symptoms can range from mild weakness to profound paralysis. Luckily all the patients studied made a rapid and full recovery after they stopped drinking cola and took oral or intravenous potassium.

The case studies looked at patients whose consumption ranged from two to nine litres of cola a day.

Collin said, "Just in time for summer … though I may hold out for the bread-bread bowl. That 'rising-heat' effect on the Domino's Flash is making me sleepy already :("

In a recent post, Roberts says he thinks that the shift in the 1960s from home-made food to processed food, which has resulted in people having less bacteria in their bodies, has caused corpses to rot more slowly than they used to.

A friend of mine, who went to college at MIT around 1980, had a classmate who was the son of an undertaker. His dad had told him that when he (the dad) had entered the business, you had to work fast. Bodies would start to smell quickly. But now — around 1980 — that was no longer necessary. You could wait a lot longer before they smelled bad.

Which I take to mean that around 1980 the average old person, where this classmate came from, had a lot less bacteria in their body than around 1960.

The "tiers" (the base and the middle) are foam board wrapped in fondant, and were planned to be that way from the get-go to support the weight of the cake. The cake itself contains 5 chopsticks: two to support the second tier (holding the upper body) and one each for the core of the three arms. The lower half of the body is white cake frosted with vanilla buttercream and wrapped in coffee fondant. The copper balls are all fondant, and the piping is just royal icing. The upper half of the body is sculpted from Rice Krispie Treat that was then covered with fondtant and piped with details. The little armor plates and the accessories on the arms are made of sugar candy (gumpaste). The whole thing weighed about 10 pounds. Dassit.

(Photo: Anders Krusberg/The Martha Stewart Show)

On Monday, May 18, I'll be on The Martha Stewart show. I'm going to demonstrate bunch of different projects from the pages of MAKE, and I'll also show Martha how to build a vibrobot. Martha is one of my heroes, so it was a thrill to be on her show!

Above: Martha Stewart is enjoying a Maker-made cup of coffee. The coffee roaster on the left was designed by Larry Cotton and was featured in Make Vol 8. The hydraulic espresso tamper was designed and built by John Edgar Park and appears in Make Vol 12. And that's my espresso machine that I modded with a PID temperature control kit from espressoparts.com.

MAKE Editor Mark Frauenfelder on The Martha Stewart Show this Monday

The Boing Boing editors have been having fun with some guest-writing over at GOOD, and my latest contribution has just been published. It involves NOM. Here's a snip:

When the economy took a nosedive, I did the same thing a lot of other Americans did: I looked at my household expenses and my lifestyle with newly frugal eyes, and began thinking about costs and personal priorities in new ways. That included food.

Rethinking what I cook and eat post-econopocalypse meant simpler, slower food; a more local and traditional diet which, in fact, makes good sense in any economic weather. But I live an urban life. I spend a lot of time online or working in short attention bursts. I don’t have a lot of time to cook or prepare food, and my city apartment doesn’t afford room to raise goats or grow tomatoes.

Despite this, I’ve gradually eased into a number of new rituals and good habits that reduced my grocery bill and make me feel happier and healthier. One of them is making yogurt each week. It takes maybe 20 minutes of actual work and attention, zero equipment beyond stuff I already had in my kitchen, and yields a yummier, healthier, and yes, “probiotic” product that costs five to 10 times less than the store-bought stuff.

Here are the basics of rolling your own yogurt the lazy Xeni way...

(Special thanks to my co-editor, BB founder Mark Frauenfelder, for putting the yogurt bug in my head, so to speak.)

Eat the body of the FSM! Hallelujah! Sweet and chewy pasta strands, and His all-seeing eyes. Partake of Him with friends.

Heart shaped watermelons (Via Japan Probe)

The influence of the Slow Food movement is increasing, and gardening is getting ever more popular. Even the tech bloggers are posting about local pollinators and getting beehives. In this environment, it is fitting that a new use has been found for our Now Slower and with More Bugs stickers, which were first seen in the wild back in December 2007. If you find a good use for them, we'd love to see pictures in the flickr auxiliary!

(Photos by Lorien Tersey )

Ruth Fankushen Kunkel (who ran a restaurant called the Delta of Venus Coffeehouse and Pub) says An Alien Robot's Cookbook: Recipes from Earth "began as a journey to find something that my son Gabriel would eat besides pizza, hot dogs, and cereal."

Her son provided the fun illustrations that accompany the recipes for dishes like "Big Bang Breakfast Potatoes," "Apple Robocakes," "Overnight French Toast," "Quasar Quiche," "Dark Star Vegan Cupcakes," and dozens of other tasty items.

Science facts and alien robot lore are interspersed through the pages. As the father of two picky eaters, I'm looking forward to trying some of these recipes with my kids. An Alien Robot's Cookbook: Recipes from Earth

The WOW Pod is an immersive architectural solution for the advanced WOW (World of Warcraft) player that provides and anticipates all life needs.

Inside, the gamer finds him/herself comfortable seated in front of the computer screen with easy-to-reach water, pre-packaged food, and a toilet conveniently placed underneath his/her custom-built throne.

When hungry, the gamer selects a food item ('Crunchy Spider Surprise', 'Beer Basted Ribs', etc.) and a seasoning pack. By scanning in the food items, the video game physically adjusts a hot plate to cook the item for the correct amount of time. The virtual character then jubilantly announces the status of the meal to both the gamer and the other individuals playing online: "Vorcon's meal is about to be done!" "Better eat the ribs while they're hot!" etc.

When the food is ready, the system automatically puts the character in AFK ('Away From Keyboard') mode to provide the gamer a moment to eat. When the player resumes playing, he/she might just discover his/her character's behavior is affected by the food consumed in real life -- sluggish from overeating or alternately exuberant and energetic.

Update: Andrew sez, "The MIT Museum hosted WoWPod creators Cati Vaucelle, Steve Shada and Marisa Jahn a few weeks ago as part of the CMS Colloquium Series. Here's a great podcast available of the event." (via Make)

Katamari Cakes (Thanks, Lissette

Here's a link to a new tumblog that collects photos of delicious, healing hospital meals from around the world. (Thanks, Reno!).

SugarStacks.com has photos of different kinds of food (both processed and natural) showing how much sugar is in the the food by displaying a stack of 4 gram sugar cubes next to the item. (Via Presurfer)

Phil Ross says:

Please come to the first annual CRITTER Kimchi Contest!

All are welcome to submit their favorite version of this spicy pickled delicacy and taste the competition. The people’s choice will win $100, second wins $75, and third will get $50. Bring 1 quart of your best Kimchi to CRITTER on Saturday May 9th at 1 PM. Tasting opens at 2PM.

All varieties accepted! There will be ongoing demonstration of how Kimchi is made, and plenty of palette-cleansing white rice available. So even if you don’t have a favorite recipe for Kim Chee, or you’ve never tried it before—here’s a chance to try the best Kimchi at CRITTER.

You're going to pre-heat to 500F. But how do you know when the stone is ready? You could give it maybe 30 minutes and hope for the best. Or, splurge a little. A $45 infrared digital thermometer is not only a fun toy, it's the perfect way to assess surface temp from a safe distance.

Open the oven and quickly shine the beam onto the stone every 15 minutes. Any more often than that will a) let more heat escape, and b) lower your spirits. Compared to when I pre-heated the pizza stone all by its lonesome, getting the stone up to 470F when surrounded by the brick house took 30 minutes longer. Makes sense, you've just added twice as much ceramic or terra cotta to the mix.

Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.

As with every spring, the rains fall, the sun shines, and I remain hopelessly inept as a gardener. Or, maybe, "inept" isn't quite the right word. "Lazy" and "impatient". There, that's the ticket. So, despite fantasizing repeatedly about the wonderful life we would lead if only we got around to putting in some vegetables this year, my husband and I have never gotten around to putting in some vegetables. At best, we keep the lawn mowed and free of vehicles on blocks.

But that may be changing because, last week, Baker brought home a copy of The All New Square Foot Gardening guide, a book written by a retired engineer, which manages to make home veggie patches appealing to both my laissez-faire approach to plant life, and Baker's (who is, himself, an engineer) tendencies towards efficiency-obsession and Maker glee. The book promises to help you grow more, in less space, with less work. OK, I'm game.

The basic idea is that most people try to garden like they're making a miniature farmstead---with wide rows, hills and furrows, plowed into the earth of your backyard. And, frankly, all that adds up to a pain in the ass. Tilling sucks. Your dirt probably isn't ideal for growing things. You get weeds that need to be dealt with every day. The watering process wastes water and usually ends up with some plants drowning and other plants parched. And all you want is a freakin' salad.

Square-foot gardening, on the other hand, is all about eliminating those problems. Instead of tilling the dirt and pumping in fertilizer, you build a big box, put a liner on the bottom, and fill it with a mixture of peat moss, vermiculite and compost. Great soil. And no weed seeds to sprout up.Because you make the box small enough to reach everything without stepping in the dirt, your soil stays aerated. Because you don't have to weed, you can grow plants from fewer seeds, closer together, with each box broken down into neat, anal-retentive grids. The idea of a garden that can be plotted out on graph paper is already making Baker salivate.

The watering solution is particularly slick. Instead of moving around a sprayer that never seems to successfully dampen the full area you've aimed it at (and chucks water onto places that don't need it), you hook up a pipe system to your box and screw in the hose. Plant stuff than needs lots of water closer to the pipe, and stuff that needs less further away. Then you can turn the water on (at a lower pressure than you'd use for spraying) and let it trickle down.

I'll be honest, as the wife of an engineer, I end up poking a lot of fun at the hyper-planning, "let us sit down and work out the numbers before we toast that bread" mindset. But it's all in fun. I promise. You engineers can be as detail-oriented as you want to be, as long as you keep offering up great solutions like this.

Image of a nicely gridded-up square foot garden courtesy shygantic, via a Creative Commons license.

After treating lab-cultured human pre-adipocytes with the tea extract, the authors found that fat incorporation during the genesis of new adipocytes was reduced. According to Winnefeld, "The extract solution induced a decrease in the expression of genes associated with the growth of new fat cells, while also prompting existing adipocytes to break down the fat they contain."

(Image: Fail Pig, by Fabio Rex Too.)

The excellent foodblog Ethicurean has a good roundup of news links about H1N1 and the pork industry.