According to the USDA, the Super Bowl is second only to Thanksgiving when it comes to the average amount of calories Americans consume in one day. And we can’t blame it all on the beer — beloved game-day snacks snacks like pigs in a blanket, buffalo wings, and jalapeno poppers also play their part. But seriously, those unhealthy eats seem tame when compared to some of the stuff that we found floating around the Internet, things like cheese-filled mugs made from bacon and deep-fried cheeseburgers. Click through and peruse these banned foods at your own risk.
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In honor of Halloween, some culinary artists are corrupting the sweetness of cake, fondant, and molding chocolate by transforming them into horrifying, ghoulish sculptures. Wounded zombies dripping with blood, grim pumpkins, eyeball-filled cauldrons, and eerie sugar skulls are just some of the All Hallows’ Eve staples that have been re-imagined with the aid of piping bags, buttercream spatulas, and layers upon layers of cake that have been carved down to form seriously creepy creations. In honor of the spooky holiday’s imminent arrival, we’ve rounded-up a batch of exquisitely detailed cakes that’ll give you a fright after the jump.
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Today kicks off the 2011 CMJ Music Marathon – that annual five-day barrage of label showcases, panels, and college radio nerdery. So as the indie music world descends on New York City, we thought we’d help introduce them to what Gotham takes almost as seriously as its tunes: its food.
We’ve created an interactive map of 125 NYC food recommendations from 58 indie artists, scraping everything from bands’ Yelp profiles to sites like Food Is The New Rock. Want to know where to find Hurray For Earth’s favorite slice? Maybe try some Das Racist-approved soup dumplings? We’ve got you covered. After all… it’s hard to rock on an empty stomach.
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Prepare to feel hungry. Very, very hungry. Or quite possibly queasy. Last week our friends at GOOD asked their readers to name “the most culturally significant, sustainably produced, locally sourced sandwiches” in their home states. The resulting responses vary from predictable (New York – pastrami on rye; Maine – lobster roll; California – veggie sandwich) to pretty interesting (Alabama – fried chicken liver sandwich; Montana – Rocky Mountain oyster sandwich; South Dakota – spam sandwich). Can you imagine if this infographic came in scratch ‘n sniff poster form? Click here to view the larger, clickable version of the map, and let us know in the comments if you think they got your state right.
With food trucks parked on the streets of every major city, serving up menu items from coffee to snail lollipops and everything in between, actual restaurants have started almost seem passé. But like so many trends, the food truck is actually a thing of the past, as well. Nineteenth-century ur-food trucks may not have sold their wares out of metal pigs or featured menus devoted entirely to egg salad, but they do date back to the chuckwagons of the 1860s, invented by a smart Texas ranger named Charles Goodnight who realized that putting a kitchen on wheels could solve a lot of people’s problems. Below the jump, we take you through a tour of the early history of the food truck.
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We were pretty amused to hear, a few weeks ago, that Ben & Jerry’s is producing a new ice cream flavor called Schweddy Balls, inspired by Alec Baldwin, Molly Shannon, and Ana Gasteyer’s classic, NPR-parodying Saturday Night Live skit. Not only is the concept hilarious, but the flavor — rum-spiked vanilla ice cream with rum and malt balls — promises to be delicious. Of course, because no one’s allowed to have any fun ever, a parent group is already protesting Schweddy Balls. The folks at One Million Moms, which is affiliated with the right-wing Christian group American Family Association, have decided they’re not going to stand for double entendre-laced desserts. “The vulgar new flavor has turned something as innocent as ice cream into something repulsive,” the group writes in a message that exhorts supporters to lobby Ben & Jerry’s to stop selling the flavor — and is sure to mention the gay marriage-boosting Hubby Hubby as an example of the brand’s previous attempts at “offending customers.” For our part, we’d just like to warn these pure-hearted matriarchs that they may well be powerless against the appeal of Schweddy Balls — if your impressionable child isn’t getting them at home, she’ll surely seek them out elsewhere. [via Pop Culture Brain]
As far as people whose opinions we would trust about fried chicken go, few rate higher than Elvis Presley. He was, after all, the junk-food connoisseur who made the peanut butter, banana, and bacon sandwich a thing. So imagine our delight at seeing that Kottke has dug up an old post from the Google blog, in which the company’s executive chef, Charlie Ayers, tells the story of how he managed to pry the recipe for the King’s favorite fried chicken out of the Waldorf Astoria co-worker who had once been Elvis’s cook. (Spoiler: It takes five days to make.) Using the measurement converter Kottke suggests and Google’s very own calculator, we’ve reproduced Ayers’s “Google-sized” recipe for those of you who are more likely to be frying one chicken than 30.
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According to a proclamation (Proclamation 5219, to be exact) that dear old Ronald Reagan made in 1984, today is National Ice Cream Day, so if you are a patriot, you will go out and eat yourself a big helping of the cold stuff. In his official 1984 proclamation, Reagan declared:
Ice cream is a nutritious and wholesome food, enjoyed by over ninety percent of the people in the United States. It enjoys a reputation as the perfect dessert and snack food. Over eight hundred and eighty-seven million gallons of ice cream were consumed in the United States in 1983.The ice cream industry generates approximately $3.5 billion in annual sales and provides jobs for thousands of citizens. Indeed, nearly ten percent of all the milk produced by the United States dairy farmers is used to produce ice cream, thereby contributing substantially to the economic well-being of the Nation’s dairy industry.
So true. Other important facts about ice cream: more ice cream is sold on Sunday than any other day of the week. The most popular flavor of ice cream in the U.S is vanilla (27.8%), followed by chocolate (14.3%), strawberry (3.3%), chocolate chip (3.3%) and butter pecan (2.8%). The most ice cream (per person) is eaten by children aged 2-12 and adults 45+. The average number of licks to consume a single scoop cone is about 50. It is delicious.
[via Gothamist]
It’s summer, and you know what that means: fresh food is in abundance, and it’s never tasted better. Farmer’s markets are exploding with organic goodness and all we want to do is while away the hours next to a pitcher of iced tea and a quart of plump strawberries. Summer is the perfect combination of skin-bearing opportunities and fresh produce availability, so maybe it makes sense that we’ve been seeing a ton of fruit and vegetable-related tattoos this year. As a tribute to the warmer months and all the market salads we have been consuming, click through to see our gallery of fruit and veggie tattoos. Maybe it will inspire your next bout of body art, or maybe it will inform your dinner, but either way, we think it’s sweet and delicious. Be warned: the final image, an artichoke tattoo, is NSFW but was just too good not to include.
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Even if beer isn’t your adult beverage of choice, there’s a good chance that you’re going to encounter one (or a few!) over the course of the holiday weekend. Thanks to new rankings by the Homebrewers Association, you can make sure that you’re drinking the tastiest ones available, instead of the same boring standbys. Warning: if you happen to loathe IPAs (cough, cough), you might want to skip their top three picks. Also, on a related note, most of our advice for how to throw a hipster-theme bbq still holds true.
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