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.

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.

The Vegetable Orchestra performs music solely on instruments made of vegetables. Using carrot flutes, pumpkin basses, leek violins, leek-zucchini-vibrators, cucumberophones and celery bongos, the orchestra creates its own extraordinary and vegetabile sound universe. The ensemble overcomes preserved and marinated sound conceptions or tirelessly re-stewed listening habits, putting its focus on expanding the variety of vegetable instruments, developing novel musical ideas and exploring fresh vegetable sound gardens.

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?’”

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.

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.”