I've seen my share of Fall corn field art. I've been to the Great Godfrey Corn Maze more than once. They turn a corn field into a different shaped maze each year. While that is certainly impressive, the rice field art featured on Cool Things in Random Places blows me away!
What surprises me most about it is that the parking lot next to the field is not full. I would think people would be lined up to climb up on that roof and get a good look at the art from above.
Cool Things in Random Places has photos of several other spectacular rice fields as well as some pictures showing the process of making the art and what it looks like close up.
I'm posting images of sausage counters the world over each weeknight (and occasionally weekend) witching hour until I run out. Please use the comments section to post links to your Flickr or personal site faves, and perhaps you'll see 'em posted here late some evening.
New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee traveled the world to crack the case of the fortune cookie's cryptic origins, hunt for the infamous General Tso and track chop suey back to its creator. Turned out, many of the answers were closer to home than she'd ever imagined.
Q: What makes you pick a particular Chinese restaurant from all the ones around it?
A: Well, I tend to like Chinese restaurants that cater more to Chinese people rather than to an American palate. They may both serve General Tso's chicken, but you can look at a Chinese menu and know if they expect a more Chinese clientele. For example, cold appetizers -- especially jellyfish – is a giveaway. Lamb dishes are also ore Chinese. Anything with whole fish, and certain kinds of noodles: cold noodles, dan dan noodles.
Apparently that's how some people do things in Japan. One gift that you can give a new mother is a bag of rice with the new baby's image on it. Oh, and the bag of rice weighs the same amount that the new baby does.
There are some funny gifts out there. As the writer of this InventorSpot post asks: what do you do with the bag? I hope that you're not meant to eat something that represents your new baby. Big yuck factor there.
A black watermelon fetched $6,100 at a Japanese auction on Friday, making it one of the most expensive melons ever sold.
The 17-pound black-skinned "Densuke" watermelon drew the unusually high price or its rare color. It is said to have an extraordinarily delicate taste and perfume. The purchase came on the heels of another record fruit auction - a pair of cantaloupes went for $23,500 last month.
In Japan, where specially cultivated "gift fruits" are given as presents and tokens of respect, melons usually retail for upwards of $100. These special fruits are grown in air-conditioned greenhouses lined with rich soil. Growers only allow three melons to grow on each plant, and when the baby melons are the size of a fist, two are chopped off to allow the best one to suck all the nourishment from the vine. The "perfect" melon is then wrapped in fine tissue papers and sold in a carved wooden box. A gift pear can cost $40, 10 ounces of cultivated winter cherries might sell for $400.
Yes, there are regular fruits too. A conventionally grown melon might retail for $5.
Dotcomedy.com's Sean R. recently took a jaunt to Bangkok, Thailand. Being an avid carnivore, he took his camera on a long, languid lap around a market's sausage counter. Come and take a stroll with him, why don't you?
Even though it's been sold in Japan for more than 50 years, Coca-Cola has only just received trademark recognition for its iconic bottle. The elongated hourglass bottle became a registered U.S. trademark in 1960 and is honored by Russia and China, among other nations.
Coca-Cola began fighting for Japanese trademark registration of its "contour bottle" back in 2003. Other shapes associated with pop culture and American food, notably Kentucky Fried Chicken's Colonel Sanders, have won Japanese trademarks. What made the Coke case different is the fact that its bottle has no lettering whatsoever. In fact, it's the first bottle sans lettering to receive a trademark in that country.
For some reason this case begs the question: Is Sapporo's silver 22-ounce can a registered Japanese trademark? If not, it should be, I find the tapered can as evocative and iconic as Coca-Cola's classic bottle.
In Japan, the "flavor of the month" isn't barbecue, or citrus, or licorice, it's...citrulline.
Sound strange? It's an amino acid found in large amounts in watermelon, and it's being touted as a performance enhancer to the Olympic athletes in Beijing, China. It widens blood vessels, allowing for improved circulation, as well as increasing levels of nitric oxide, as well as breaking down lactic acid, (which, as our readers have gently reminded me, is not the scary substance we once thought it to be).
L-Citrulline has long been available in supplement form, but the Japanese are seeing how far they can market it, putting it into sports drinks, sports bars and even gum.
But mainly, it's just another excuse to eat a huge, juicy slice of watermelon.
Did you know that laksa actually needed saving? Neither did I. You may recall laksa being the dish that was recently butchered by Lisa on Top Chef, followed by Lisa being butchered by the relentless Anthony Bourdain (he repeatedly equated the dish to "sticking his nose into a campfire.")
...but I digress. Reuters recently interviewed food critic KF Seetoh, who fears that traditional Singapore cuisine is being overshadowed by fast food and an apathetic younger generation. He is a part of Makansutra, a company that promotes indigenous Asian food through mediums like books, TV, and the Internet.
In the Reuters article, Seetoh describes "hawker food culture," where food is sold in large street markets. The markets used to be a great place to sample a wide variety of Asian cuisine, but Seetoh denounces the arrival of Japanese, German and French food stalls cropping up.
This is surprising, as almost in the same sentence as he denounces people who are enjoying other cuisines, he calls Singapore cuisine "a bastardization of the three motherland food nations of Asia -- China, India and Indonesia." Hmm...if the food is a conglomeration of three countries' cuisines, wouldn't he be more inclined to accept Sinagpore's embrace of different, unique foods from other cultures? Promoting indigenous food is all well and good, but isn't Singapore big enough for food stalls from all cultures?
That's the focus of one of the latest polls from What Japan Thinks. Sure, the poll asks about scary Japanese food, but there must be lots of food out there that seems weird that you'd like to try anyway.
My favorite from the list was the sweet green tea and adzuki bean spaghetti (pictured above), but there's lots more where that came from. The only American food I can think of that seems scary that I'd like to try is one of those burgers with donuts for buns, or something like that. so, what kind of scary foods do you want to try?
I just came across a new blog (for me) called What Japan Thinks. As I am a lover of all things Japanese, this could be an invaluable resource. Of particular interest to me, on this visit to the blog, was an article on chop stick etiquette.
The blog post is really a vehicle to share the opinions offered in two surveys about using chop sticks. One deals with bad habits that you can't break, and the other is about bad habits that you can't help but notice other people doing.
I thought I was sure to have bad chop stick etiquette, as I have never had any pointers from anyone beyond the very basics of how to use them, but I actually did pretty well based on the habits mentioned in the two surveys. I am really bad about laying the utensils across the top of the plate, but I definitely don't stick them straight up in a bowl of rice. Check it out, and see how your chop stick manners compare.
I first encountered dragon fruit a few years ago in Nicaragua, where it's known as pitahaya. I was working for a travel guide at the time and spent a lot of time in transit, riding chicken buses from one muddy, pitted town to another. At every stop, a little girl would climb on board carrying a bent coat hanger bearing a dozen or so plastic baggies of jewel-colored liquid and crying "refrescos! refrescos!." Yellow was granadillo (passionfruit) - sweet, but full of slimy seeds. Orange was...orange. And then there was the neon magenta, like Kool Aid on acid. That was pitahaya. For a córdoba or two you'd buy a bag, and the little girl would untwist it from the hanger and hand it to you. If you were lucky, you'd get a straw. But usually you'd gently bite off a corner of the baggie and suck the juice out like a piglet at its mother's teat.
The pitahaya juice was sweet-tart and filled with little black seeds, which crunched entertainingly beneath your teeth. You suck your baggie down like a very hungry piglet, then buy another at the next stop. And then, a few hours later...
Originally published in 1973, An Invitation to Indian Cooking was Madhur Jaffrey's very first cookbook. She moved to New York City from India in the early 1960's and started cooking when she started craving the flavors of her childhood. Later on, when people would ask her for Indian restaurant recommendations, she'd sadly tell them that there wasn't anything that appropriately authentic in the city and then, feeling bad and wanting to share the tastes of India with them, she'd invite them over for dinner. When throwing regular dinner parties became exhausting, she began to hand out her recipes. They spread across the city (and some all the way across the country) and eventually led to this book.
My copy of this book came to me in that load of cookbooks I acquired from my friend Fran's friend about a month ago. One of the delightful things I've discovered as I've gone through these books has been the unexpected notes and page markers that fall out when I start to leaf through. This edition is no exception, the recipe for Pork Chops Cooked With Cabbage is marked with a seed pack for wildflowers.
Back in April, I featured another one of Jaffrey's books, that time it was her volume devoted to Quick & Easy Indian Cooking. That book relies more heavily on pre-made spice mixes and short cut items that are available in the supermarket. This book has none of those short cuts and so while the dishes do take considerably longer to make, the rewards that come from toasting and grinding your own spices is quite high. Recently, Serious Eats spent a month cooking from this volume and, other than an unfortunate incident that involved a greasy, gristly goat stew, enjoyed the experience.
If you are a fan of Madhur Jaffery, your collection is not complete without this book.
Ladies and gentlemen ... I've traveled over half of New York City's East Village slurping ramen noodles and broth. From Minca Ramen Factory to the city's first truly Japanese ramen-ya,Ramen Setagaya, to David Chang's self-professed "... crappy Pan-Asian ramen made for round-eyes," I have been on the front lines of New York City's so-called ramen wars. So ... ladies and gentlemen ... if I say I am a ramen man you will believe me.
As a ramen man I had been steadfastly waiting for the opening of the East Village outpost of Japan's Hakata Ippudo ever since reading about it on Rameniac. I longed to taste the much heralded soup of the Ramen King Shigemi Kawahara. Ladies and gentleman ... let me assure you it was worth the long wait for Ippudo NY to open. Upon my first visit I was so overcome by the springy noodles and the richness of the long-cooked pork-bone broth in the Shiromaru ramen that I was unable to take a photograph, lest I be separated from my first encounter with ramen ecstasy.
How cute is this: an online Chinese take-out party. Hong Kong-based blogger Mocochocolata Rita invited all her food blogging friends to contribute recipes and pictures for Chinese dishes, which she posted together, menu-style. What a feast!
There are several Hong Kong 'set meals' - a main with noodles and soup; a multi-course dinner for friends - potstickers, beef braised in chou hou sauce, pina colada milk pudding; sides of kimchee gyoza and baked tofu; several different takes on kung pao chicken; desserts of sweet peanut soup and homemade fortune cookies.
The recipes all look delicious - I'm particularly keen to try the pineapple sesame chicken recipe. It's also a great introduction to a lot of neat food blogs - Rita must have a lot of friends.
A black 
Even though it's been sold in Japan for more than 50 years, Coca-Cola has only just received trademark recognition for its iconic bottle. The elongated hourglass bottle became a registered U.S. trademark in 1960 and is honored by Russia and China, among other nations.
I just came across a new blog (for me) called 
How cute is this: an online 
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