Family Styles » random stuff we like, via the interweb

Link Roundup and MOAR CHOCOLATE.

mei — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 23:07:34 +0000

I absolutely decimated an enormous chocolate bunny this weekend. I know, Easter was a while ago. Kind of like how I started making this list of links a while ago. But it’s still good. Just like the bunny was still good. REALLY good. Basically, this was me:

This image is courtesy of Hyperbole and a Half, a blog that had our office on its knees in paroxysms of laughter for a good portion of the workday. Thanks, H+1/2, for destroying our productivity like a 7000% deadly shark-sloth.

Anyway, those links. Here’s some cool stuff we’ve been reading when not stuffing our faces with defenseless chocolate creatures.

Eat-onomics: The Ten Most Inspiring People in Sustainable Food [Fast Company]

Q&A with Chef Dan Barber: Can Organic Farming Feed The World? [TED Blog]

People Who Photograph Food and Post the Pictures Online [New York Times] Who are these freaks?

Jamie Oliver’s TED Wish: Teach Every Child About Food [TED]

20 Fascinating Lectures for Serious Foodies [Online Universities] Lots of our faves here, from Malcolm Gladwell to Dan Barber to Jennifer 8. Lee to a ‘renegade lunch lady.’

How To Make Perfect Pork Crackling [Guardian] Finally, a decent reason to buy a hair dryer.

Q & A: Oscar Week: Food Inc. Director Robert Kenner [TIME] Yeah….this was from a long time ago.

Weekly Link Roundup: Eating Maps, Grass-Fed Beef, Aquaponics and More.

admin — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 21:51:25 +0000

Here’s what I’ve been reading this week. Lots of good stuff.

Most Fast-Food Per Person and Other Food Facts [Daily Yonder] – some cool maps of eating habits across the U.S.

How Eating Grass-Fed Beef Could Help Fight Climate Change [TIME] – that’s as self-explanatory a title as you can get.

Behind the Organic Pasture Rule at the USDA [Chewswise] – a blog by the author of Organic, Inc.

The Great Grocery Smackdown [The Atlantic] – on buying organic at…Walmart? Plus a blind cookoff between Walmart and Whole Foods. Some interesting results…

The Spotless Garden [New York Times] – a great article about backyard and basement aquaponics systems and the ‘otherworldly yields’ from this type of growing. ‘It is either a glimpse into the future of food growing or a very strange hobby — possibly both.’

More photos and cool stuff here. All credits to NYTimes.

Weekly Link Roundup: The Food Porn Version

mei — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 02:22:44 +0000

I’m up in the middle of the night with a serious head cold. A friend suggested it might be haggisitis – which turns your internal organs to pulp and mixes them with oatmeal – but I’m pretty sure it’s more of a deepfriedmarsbar syndrome, where your sinuses and lungs get encased in a thick, viscous batter. Either way, it’s really not a pretty picture.

Because I’ve self-medicated with an assortment of pharmaceuticals and can’t really read anything, I opened my Google Reader for the first time in about 6 months to look at all the pretty pictures. Oooh, pretty pictures. I will share some of them with you now.

First off, a great photo from a great article called Northeast China Branches Out In Flushing in the New York Times.

Wait a minute. Those are sticky-sweet caramel sugar strands stretching off chunks of deep-fried sweet potato? And that’s Chinese food? Holy crap. My world is rocking right now and it’s not just me overdosing on cold meds. Perhaps my deep-frying obsession is coded deep within my DNA. Irene Bean sent this article to me at about the exact moment the drool hit the keyboard upon reading it myself. Go read about the cuisine of the Dongbei (literally ‘East North’) region and look at the slideshow: I promise you’ll do some serious drooling yourself.

Next, up: Boston Creme Pies from Design*Sponge

Ooooooooooooohmyyyygod. Despite being proudly Boston born and bred, I’ve never really liked Boston creme pies. But seeing this photo made me want to scoop up that cheeky little cake and smooosh it into my mouth in one bite. Look at how mini it is! It would totally fit. Design*sponge is one of my favorite design blogs and their foodie/recipe series ‘in the kitchen with’ has some of the most gorgeous food styling I’ve ever seen, along with some great recipes. My camera whimpers a little in shame every time I look at the photos. But my heart sings a bit with joy at the beauty of it all, so I do my best to temper the rising bile of inadequacy. I mean, really…how has a messy, half-eaten plate of radishes ever looked so good?

This spectacularly beautiful radish explosion is better described as a Spicy Heirloom Radish Salad and the recipe can be found ‘In The Kitchen With’ Penny De Los Santos.

My last photo (because I reeeeeallly needed to go to bed like 3 hours ago, but I am not up of my own volition. Damn the batter in my head!) is from Slice: America’s Favorite Pizza Weblog, which is part of the jolly, fat, and friendly Serious Eats family. If I manage to stay up to date with my Reader, it will probably be due to the daily dose of deliciousness from Serious Eats.

Scrolling through the several hundred posts I missed over the past few months, my eyes starting to glaze over, my brain beginning to succumb to the dripping ooze of fry batter, I was shocked out of my stupor by the following photo:

Hey! I know that pizza! I know that pizza damn well, and glancing at this photo again has me tempted to book a flight to New Haven, Connecticut as we speak. Rather, as I type. And I’ll be honest with you, I’m not a huge fan of Connecticut. But seriously, Sally’s Apizza is some of the best pizza you’ll ever have. It’s absolutely orgasmically good. It’s also the home to one of my favorite food stories…

Assuming you have a generally adequate level of vision and sense of spatial reasoning, I think you get an idea from the above photo how large the ‘Large’ pizza at Sally’s is. 16 slices! It’s about the size of a small stovetop, a mid-size bath mat, two normal ‘Large’ pizzas, or perhaps a very big catskin rug if your cat were one of those hilariously overweight cats whose pictures make me laugh on a regular basis. Regardless, the Larges should more aptly be called Enormously Huges, and then the Large pizzas from every other pizza institution would not suffer the intense shame of comparison.

I went to Sally’s with four girlfriends – Rachel, Lex, Olivia, and Helen, all champion eaters and all wanting a different kind of pizza. I wanted to try the classic White Clam, Rachel swore by the Eggplant Parmesan, Lex refused to leave without the Mixed Hot Peppers No Mozz, and Helen preferred the Pepperoni and Onion. So of course, after waiting in line for almost two hours, we decided to get all four. In Large. For five girls. We had so much pizza, they had to bring over another table to put it on. The guys at the table next to us started heckling – like straight-up shit talking – but we shut them up when we took down approximately 3.15 of them and had just enough to divide for leftovers the way we intended. It was one of the most satisfying eating experiences of my life – mostly because the pizza is unquestionably amazing and we waited two hours for it, but also seeing the grudging looks of respect in the eyes of those dudes.

Or maybe it was horror. I might have been too high on tomato sauce to know the difference.

Oh, and then Lex ordered another one to take home. Seriously people, it’s that good.

Also…you’d think if I could ingest almost 16 slices of pizza, I’d be able to ingest enough Tylenol PM aka Lemsip Max All Night Cold & Flu Tablets to knock myself out for the night, wouldn’t you?

The Definitely-Not-Weekly Link Roundup: Remixed Muffins, Rules Worth Following, and SF City Gardens

mei — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:16:11 +0000

Link roundups are awesome. At least the happy faced chocolate chip and vanilla citrus panettone bread pudding from last week’s Rambling Restaurant thinks so. This alleged weekly roundup of link love is not so weekly – right now, we’re going for bi-monthly. Might get worse. May get better (unlikely).

But anyway, some interesting stuff we’ve been reading:

Is There Enough Food Out There For Nine Billion People? [The New Republic]

San Franciscans Turn Abandoned Lot Into Full-Fledged Farm [Inhabitat]

This is awesome – London has city farms all over the place. More American cities should do this, especially with abandoned unused spaces. Great for food production, community involvement, education, improvement of city aesthetics and urban landscape, and general awesomeness. For more on city farms, see below!

Rules Worth Following, For Everyone’s Sake [The New York Times]

On Michael Pollan. Yeah, we talk about him a lot. But it’s an article worth reading, for everyone’s sake.

Whole Wheat Muffin, the Remix [The New York Times]

Bittman is another foodie fave. I am excited to make this.

And the best interactive/participatory link of the week? Put your money where your mouth is on the urban farming tip. Help fund an amazing San Francisco urban garden (in my old beloved hood of the Mission) on this seriously phenomenal crowdsourced funding site called Kickstarter.

Here’s how it works: You pledge a bit of money to support a really cool project. They only take your money if they get enough funding. In return, you get to support a great idea AND you get something in return. A piece of artwork, dinner, a shoutout in a music video, whatever small piece of the project you helped get off the ground according to the level of your donation. For example, you could get an adorable set of seed packets like these for pledging $25:

Or get a gorgeous set of screen-printed posters by one of the farmers who’s also an artist by donating $250.

You can give as little as $5 or as much as you want. Everyone wins! I only wish I could have given $1000 for my very own garden picnic. Someday…when I’m a baller…

Read all about Little City Gardens: An Experiment in the Economic Viability of Urban Farming. Support an SF farm!

gay meat, sexytime, ultimate jelly, and the wobble

mei — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 21:54:58 +0000

i woke up this morning to two delightful emails from friends with links to new york times food articles.

my wonderful and equally food obsessed friend olivia sent me this piece on goat meat. any nytimes article that references borat, bra-biting, satanic disney characters, and goat as aphrodisiac gets two thumbs and an inflatable goat leg up from me. henry alford, you are f*cking funny. below, a simultaneously dopey and satanic jungle lamb:

dude, you may look ridiculous, but you make dope ass west indian curry wrapped in roti. mmmm.

from nadja, my mimosa fairy godmother of dolores park, this awesome article on insanely humungous, detailed, large-scale, architecturally inspired jello molds made by these two jolly looking british guys:

how could hanging with those dudes not be immense amounts of fun? jelly boys, i’m heading to london in two weeks, and i will make you my friends. i will erect castle cakes next to your gelatin airports and steeples and we shall be the gods of our edible world.

all photos thanks to the nytimes…

i'm in a snuggie, on a boat, and i just f*cked a mermaid.

mei — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:56:29 +0000

you may or not be aware of the fact that i am obsessed with snuggies. you also may or not be aware of the fact that i love boats and…t-pain. my worlds have just collided in an epic cosmic explosion.

thank you tall skinny white dude and i-feel-awkward-about-seeing-you-in-your-tighty-whities-big dude. you’ve just made my morning.

that’s all.

did i really just 'tweet' my breakfast?

mei — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 04:03:26 +0000

hilarious. yes, food blogging is ridiculous. and i love it.

from serious eats from bastholm on twitpic via deep fried kimchee

'food, and how we approach it, is life and death to me'

mei — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 05:54:53 +0000

david chang, chef/owner of the momofuku family of restaurants, in new york, is funny and awesome and makes orgasmically tasty pork buns. i want him to be my friend and make me whole pork butts. also, he reminds me of my brother.

andy! irene! let’s hit the pork at momofuku!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3CcTtGheWs&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]

(via serious eats)

honey, we've been meaning to tell you…

mei — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 07:30:35 +0000

so my roommate annie’s birthday isn’t for almost a month, but we’re already discussing cake options. for some reason, maybe because the other two people in the apartment have both read all four twilight books in the past two weeks (and maybe one additional leaked sequel online, but no one’s admitting to that), the idea of a red velvet vampire cake was suggested.

hoping to find some pictures of a super hot, barely post-adolescent edward cullen jumping out of a cake, the ever resourceful jess did some googling, and ended up with this gem:

i knew there was a good reason we just got a cat! our seriously socially awkward cat named LD (for larry david) would be PERFECT for this. having already baked a birthday cat cake, i’m excited to take this one on. trust me, gina, he’ll love it. here, kitty kitty…

fuck you, penguin is seriously fucking awesome

mei — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 03:32:12 +0000

not like i was really ‘working’ anyway, but i will not be doing anything else productive today because i have just discovered a blog called fuck you, penguin. it is so awesome that i must pass it on. the writing is snarky genius, and the photos are absolutely amazing, like this one of a cute bunny that actually made me scream out loud in my kitchen because it IS SO FUCKING CUTE.

go forth and waste the next hour of your life catching up on photos of cute animals and the hilarious person telling them what’s what.