I was out walking the other day, and it was hot, so I was really feeling the collar. As I rounded the corner onto Kings Lane, I spotted my old crony George. And so I says to him, “I’m headed to the Lion’s Pub, why don’t you come and have a pickle?” Once we got […]
Recipe: Smoky-Spicy Glaze
Bowl of peppers from Thomas Campone Photography (via Flickr). CC BY-NC 2.0. When a bowl of beans or a bowl of soup needs some zing, or if I’m making a quesadilla in the middle of winter and don’t have any decent salsa, I open my freezer and reach for a jar labeled “Spicy Toltec BBQ […]
Two More Menus from 1917 and 1918: Magicians and the U.S.S. Oklahoma
The Buttolph Collection of Menus at the New York Public Library has grabbed my attention and I’m wondering if I should start a new blog called “Menu Masala.” A food history nerd could spend a lot of time looking for menus with compelling art, analyzing the how contents have changed over time, searching for special […]
Two Small Rants about Book Design Flaws
As I work on a book review that will certainly take me a while, here’s a short rant about two elements of book design that can be irksome. Irker 1: difficult to use endnotes. There are good ways and bad ways to organize endnotes, making the notes easy to consult or more of a treasure […]
Are Media Outlets Writing More about Insects as Food (Entomophagy)?
As I follow the news on insects as food (entomophagy), I have been wondering if the pace of articles has been increasing because it seems that every time I turn around there is another article about cricket flour or a new book about eating bugs. To answer my question, I visited the U.C. Berkeley library […]
Micro-Round-Up on News about Insects as Food (Entomophagy)
One of my favorite posts on my blog looks at the history and psychology of “insects as food” in European and closely-related cultures and U.S., Canada, and Australia. (A quick summary: These cultures have a long history of associating insects with disease and filth, which makes them unappetizing. In addition, not many large insects that […]
A War Bread in a Modern Cookbook: Oat Bread
As I mentioned in a previous post, I have been baking a “war bread” for quite a while. My long-time favorite one-day bread is the oat bread in Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. The original recipe is simple, delicious and nutritious, being a single-day bread that is enriched with rolled oats and oat bran. By […]
A Less Successful Use of Arduino in Bread Making
The light-bulb-based dough chamber that I posted about a few months ago was a good design and worked well. However, it requires an input of electricity to provide the heat (i.e., to run the light bulb), while there is already an appliance in my kitchen that offers “free” heat: my oven. My old oven (a […]
More fun items from the March 27, 1898 New York Herald
The software on the microfilm reader made me a little scan crazy, so I grabbed a few more fun bits from the March 27, 1898 edition of the New York Herald while my USB drive was working well with the microfilm reader’s software (something that didn’t happen the first time I visited the newspaper room). […]
Credibles, A Crowd-Funded Pre-Payment Platform
Update, August 2016: Fixed broken links and updated Microplace’s status “If you eat, you’re an investor” is the motto of Slow Money’s entry into the crowd-funding marketplace. Called Credibles – a word derived from “edible credits” – it joins Kickstarter, Kiva * , the now closed Microplace ** and others as alternative sources of capital […]