swimming freestyle

The G20 menu

I've noted before a fascination with the menus of big state affairs.  English chef, Jamie Oliver, is preparing tonight's meal for the G20 heads of state at the British Prime Ministers home.  From the Guardian:

The politicians and their wives will begin their meal at Downing Street with a starter of organic Scottish salmon served with samphire and sea kale, and a selection of vegetables from Sussex, Surrey and Kent.

For the main course, Oliver has plumped for slow-roasted shoulder of lamb from the Elwy Valley in north Wales, with Jersey Royal potatoes, wild mushrooms and mint sauce.

Dessert will be an old teatime favourite – bakewell tart and custard.

Vegetarians at the meal will be offered a goat's cheese starter followed by lovage and potato dumplings for the main course.

I had to look up a few of the items.  Samphires are edible native coastal plants with white flowers.  A bakewell tart has a shortcrust pastry shell, spread with jam and covered with a almond pudding.

So, there you go.

"Worst Food Product" award

Yeah, this has gotta be it. 

mmmm, pork brains.  Plus a milk gravy.  Yowza.

How about the cholesterol?  1170% of your daily cholesterol!!  Wow.

(h/t The Consumerist)

Bacon is now unhip

Speaking of cooked food....

The worst food in America

Men's Health Magazine lists the 20 Worst Food in America 2009.  A couple examples:

Worst Pasta:

Romano’s Macaroni Grill Spaghetti and Meatballs with Meat Sauce
2,430 calories
128 g fat
207 g carbs
5,290 mg sodium
       
With three times your recommended daily intake of saturated fat and two days’ worth of salt, these ain’t your mama’s meatballs (at least we hope not). This dish debuted on last year’s list, but there’s no other pasta that delivers this bad of a blow.

Worst Breakfast:

Bob Evans Stacked and Stuffed Caramel Banana Pecan Hotcakes
1,543 calories
77 g fat (26 g saturated; 9 g trans)
2,259 mg sodium
198 g carbs
109 g sugars

It’s not a good sign when it takes you nearly five seconds to spit out the name of your breakfast. This bad boy packs in more than 75 percent of your calories for the day, along with more sugar and fat than nine glazed Dunkin’ Donuts, and nearly as much sodium as five Bloody Marys. That’s why it’s back on our list of the 20 Worst Foods in America again this year.

And the #1 Worst food:

Baskin Robbins Large Chocolate Oreo Shake
2,600 calories
135 g fat (59 g saturated fat, 2.5 g trans fats)
263 g sugars
1,700 mg sodium

We didn't think anything could be worse than Baskin Robbins' 2008 bombshell, the Heath Bar Shake. After all, it had more sugar (266 grams) than 20 bowls of Froot Loops, more calories (2,310) than 11 actual Heath Bars, and more ingredients (73) than you'll find in most chemist labs.

Rather than coming to their senses and removing it from the menu, they did themselves one worse and introduced this caloric catastrophe. It¹s soiled with more than a day's worth of calories and three days worth of saturated fat, and, worst of all, usually takes less than 10 minutes to sip through a straw.

It's squirrel appreciation day

Yep.  Every January 21st.  And there's many ways to "appreciate" squirrels.

Yikes.

Raccoon: the other dark meat

I've read about a resurgence of interest in eating exotic meats and offal.  There's one big time chef in Britain, Fergus Henderson, who's gained renown for his trendy London restaurant where nothing but organs and entrails are served.  It's Mr. Henderson's contention that there's gold in them there entrails and a shame to throw away parts of a slaughtered animal that are plenty edible all by themselves.

The tradition for eating the more exotic animals and their organs is, no doubt, more prevalent in rural hunting communities and born from a need to stretch the yield from a slaughtered animal as far as possible.   It's less common here and, mostly, in the southern United States.  One prized meat is raccoon.

At the Blue Springs home of Billy Washington, raccoon, fish, bison and deer are staples on his family’s table.

On this day, it's raccoon.

All night he has been soaking a carcass in a solution of salt and vinegar in a five-gallon bucket. Now he rinses the raccoon in his kitchen sink.

"Eating raccoon has never gone out of style. It's just hard to get unless you know somebody," he says as he carefully trims away the fat and the scent glands.

"My kids love eating game. They think eating deer and buffalo make you run faster and jump higher. My grandkids will just tear this one up, it'll be so good."

The meat is almost ready to be boiled, except for one thing: Although its head, innards and three paws have been removed, it still has one. That’s the law.

"They leave the paw on to prove it's not a cat or a dog," Washington says. (Link)

Snoop Dog and Martha Stewart make mashed potatoes

Just in time for Thanksgiving...

Insect sushi

From The Telegraph:

Shoichi Uchiyama, the Japanese author behind an insect recipe book, traces his interest in insect cuisine to his boyhood in Nagano, where shops would sell bags of grasshoppers cooked in sake, soy sauce and sugar

Now 58, Uchiyama is Japan's leading insect-eating evangelist. He has a blog on the topic which gets 400 visitors a day and is the author of a recent cookbook on bug cuisine

He added: "I'm not sure if my recipes will actually catch on, but I firmly believe they are a natural resource that will benefit mankind."  (Picture: REX FEATURES)

The 9 year old version of Gordon Ramsey

Will It Blend?

(via Gizmodo)