A blog about food, history, food charts, and more. (Formerly Mental Masala)
(Disclosure: I received a discount on the International Food Blogger Conference (IFBC) registration fee in exchange for writing three posts about my experiences at the conference. All opinions are my own.) This is part 1 of a 2-part series on a visit to an olive grove and olive oil processing facility in Yolo County, California. The second […]
Mexican food is hugely popular in the United States — salsa has been outselling ketchup for years, some of the fastest growing restaurant chains sell Mexican food, the taco truck craze is at its peak — but it took a many years and many innovators for this to happen. Gustavo Arellano’s Taco USA: How Mexican […]
Reports from the farmers market and about seasonal food are common today: for example, KCRW’s Good Food has a weekly farmers market report, the San Francisco Chronicle covers seasonal produce in the Sunday Food and Home section, there are apps about seasonal produce for your phone, and guides printed on paper. I have been following these reports for […]
Kale salad — superfood in a bowl, a nutritional powerhouse, a bold canvas for bold flavors — has been a major trend in recent years. A recent article in Food52 — A New Genius Salad from the Chef Who Started the Kale Salad Craze — notes that it was introduced to a wide audience in late […]
One of my favorite genres of art is the 19th century Japanese landscape print, especially the works by Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858), who is best known as the creator of several series that showed famous scenes from around the nation, like “53 Stations of the Tokaido” and “Famous Views of the 60-Odd Provinces.” The subjects of […]
Updated, 8/30/17: changed “cricket flour” to “cricket powder” because powder is a more accurate and preferred term. Every six months I visit several websites that sell pure cricket powder so I can update the prices in my “cricket powder price tracker.” The July update day occurred recently, so my post from 2016 has July 1, […]
One of my favorite posts featured a set of chocolate chip cookie charts, which built on an idea from Megnut’s Mean Chocolate Chip Cookie post. For her “mean” post, Meg collected a bunch of chocolate chip cookie recipes, calculated the mean (average) for each ingredient to create a new recipes, and then baked cookies. Her […]
A segment on potatoes with author Raghavan Iyer on the May 13, 2017 episode of Good Food, got me wondering about potato statistics: Where are the world’s potatoes grown? Which country eats the most potatoes? Who imports and exports potatoes? I went looking for answers at the amazing FAOSTAT website, which is a statistical database about food and […]
I’d like to conclude my celery trilogy by looking at the ngram for celery (the first two parts of the trilogy were about celery on restaurant menus and celery vases). Ngrams show the popularity of a word or phrase throughout time and are especially useful for slang, grammar, and spelling preferences (like ketchup and catsup). An ngram is […]
When I typed “celery” into the CC Search box to search a few museums’ public domain collections to illustrate my previous post on celery on restaurant menus, I was expecting one or two results, perhaps a still life. And so I was surprised when the search returned a bunch of objects called “celery vases” from […]