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via Grub Street in New York Magazine

It’s Japan’s most expensive strawberry, and it’s currently in short supply, hence a $45 price tag for a box of seven to twelve.

via New York Times

there is one place where fortune cookies are conspicuously absent: China.Now a researcher in Japan believes she can explain the disconnect, which has long perplexed American tourists in China. Fortune cookies, Yasuko Nakamachi says, are almost certainly originally from Japan.

via New York Times

The division of the Treasury Department that approves alcohol packaging sent back his label seven times, he said. They thought it looked too much like the British pound note. They wondered why it was called Absinthe Verte when their lab analysis said the liquid inside was amber. Mostly, it seemed to him, they didn’t like the monkey.

“I had the image of a spider monkey beating on a skull with femur bones,” Mr. Winters said. But he said that the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau thought the label “implied that there are hallucinogenic, mind-altering or psychotropic qualities” to the product.

“I said, ‘You get all that just from looking at a monkey?’”

via gridskipper, six cozy restaraunts

San Francisco has a cure for what ails you: lots and lots and lots of primo high-end comfort-food joints, where no one harangues you about not being married yet, and you can drink alcohol without sneaking it into the house.

from Grow Better Veggies: an essay By Chef David Kinch

Over time we have learned how we can use different elements of a plant at different times of its life: roots, stems, seed, flowers, buds, leaves, shoots, etc. The possibilities are endless. This changed things dramatically. We began to view the dish more as a concept, a mirror, and not just as a plate of food. We wanted customers to step into the garden, to enter it in their taste and in their minds when they ate the dish, to feel as if they transported themselves to the garden of which we are so proud.So we changed the name and called it “Vegetables from the garden, their vegetable juices.”

Alameda distiller helps make absinthe legitimate again

Absinthe. “It leads straight to the madhouse or the courthouse,” declared Henri Schmidt, a French druggist urging his own countrymen to outlaw the green liquid in the early 1900s, which they did.Now it seems that no one can remember exactly why it was prohibited. Some say it was the chemical thujone found in the herb wormwood, used to make absinthe, that affects the brain. Others say it was a plot by the wine industry to put the popular spirit out of business. And there are those who believe it was a case of baseless hysteria, not unlike “Reefer Madness,” the 1936 propaganda film about marijuana.

BAY AREA FLAVORS FOOD TALE

“The central challenge was making food look appetizing in animation,” said Lewis, adding that when it came to the actual ratatouille, it really had to be spectacular.For inspiration and authenticity, they went to Keller. The Yountville chef tutored the film’s creators on the inner workings of a French kitchen and acted as the key consultant for the cooking. Producer Lewis, who interned in the French Laundry kitchen as part of his research for the film, gave the chef an extra challenge.

“I asked him how he would prepare the ratatouille if he knew the most famous critic in the world was coming in to the restaurant,” he said.

via New York Times
Recipe for ratatouille’s ratatouille

Movie Recipe for Ratatouille

Here is Remy’s ratatouille recipe, from the movie with the same name as the dish, courtesy of Thomas Keller.

via Science of Candy

The caramel color of caramels comes from a reaction between the sugar and the protein in cream. Called the Maillard reaction, it’s the same chemical process that happens when you toast nuts, barbecue meats, or put on self-tanning lotion.