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February 01 2012
Prime Burger Restaurant
I’m a sucker for documentaries on food, especially on seemingly random food places. Cause you know what, it always turns out that there’s nothing random about these places. Here’s one about the Prime Burger Restaurant in NYC.
PRIME from thismustbetheplace on Vimeo.
August 29 2011
When New Yorkers get ready for a storm
Some people hoard water, others are more interested in booze, writes Slate:
Hoarding of liquor, however, was another matter. “Short lines in the grocery store and long lines in the wine store,” reported a friend in an adjacent neighborhood. So I visited a few local liquor stores to see what kind of business they’ve been doing.
August 03 2011
The Best Thing I Ever Done
I like me some food (take a look at my foodblog, if you don’t believe me) and I always like slow, well-made documentaries. Enter “The Best Thing I Ever Done”, a very short documentary about one of the – supposedly – best pizza places in NYC.
The fact that it’s been closed the last few years (due to health and safety violations) and only recently re-opened hasn’t marred its standing with the pie-eating populace of NYC. And I think that’s perfectly fine.
June 24 2011
Preparing tiny (fake) food
Here’s a video of someone preparing tiny hamburgers, hot-dogs and fries (which aren’t edible). According to the video’s description, it’s a Japanese toy kitchen and cooking set (which unfortunately isn’t available anymore). What’s so incredible about this is that not just the food, but the processes during the preparation look so real. Like the frying of the fries, which really isn’t frying but just some sort of chemical reaction that creates the illusion of hot oil frying away.
As the people at Boing Boing put it: The mind boggles.
June 22 2011
The most disgusting dish
On Quora, there’s currently a question up that asks for the most disgusting dishes. While I don’t really like the idea of naming anything disgusting without going into detail about the cultural differences, I do find quite a few of the things people collected rather, well, disgusting. Like this:
Balut. A fertilized chicken or duck egg with a nearly developed embryo inside that is boiled alive and eaten in the shell.
I wasn’t sure if I should have posted pictures because they were so disgusting, so I decided on these small ones. These eggs are sold in Filipino Bodegas in my neighborhood, and there isnt a lack of buyers for them.
If that description isn’t enough for you, click through to the article to see above mentioned pictures. By the way, I’m actually quite adventurous when it comes to food, but I think I’d pass on Balut.
May 24 2011
Mesmerizing Food
Yes, I do like me some food! (I’ve got a foodblog for a reason). So I simply can’t pass on this video created for the Annecy Animated Film Festival, which features mesmerizing food (literally):
Grill pork like you’ve never grilled it before
Seems like there was a recommended temperature by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service for preparing pork (yeah, well, call me an ignoramus, but I always thought that’s some sort of consensus by cooks and stuff). And, according to HuffPo, it’s now officially been lowered to 145° F (roughly 63° Celsius). Here’s my favourite bit from the article:
“I’m glad they have the sense to make that change,” said Rob Weland, a chef at Poste Moderne Brasserie, an upscale restaurant in Washington.
Weland said he has always cooked pork to the lower temperature because chefs knew it was safe and the meat clearly tastes better. But he said it could take years for backyard grillers to adjust to the change.
“People have been taught this for generations and it’s going to take a long time to get this removed,” he said. “It will be good for the next generation not to be so fearful so they can enjoy pork in a way they may not have been able to in the past.“
(emphasis mine)
I wasn’t aware of how deeply rooted that sort of thing was with passionate backyard grillers, but apparently it is. Good luck to you, and may your future generations be able to enjoy pork the way it was meant to be!
May 20 2011
Flying Food
There’s something about good food. And there’s something about seeing good food. And there’s something about seeing good food flying through the air:
The clip was produced by Bruton Stroube Studios, which have also created an interesting video about a barber shop (which in turn reminds me of the NY Times “One in 8 Million” stories).
May 16 2011
Copper River Salmon
Rejoice, people of the US, for today is the official start of the Copper River Salmon season. But what exactly makes this sort of salmon so much better than others caught in Alaska?
I’ve found this piece written for The Atlantic, which gives some insight into the whole thing:
From a culinary point of view, the geography of the Copper River watershed has given its salmon an evolutionary advantage over others. The river is nearly 300 miles long and flows powerfully from glaciers high in the Chugach and St. Elias Wrangell Mountains. The upstream swim to the salmon’s natal pools requires enormous exertion, and because salmon stop eating once they re-enter fresh water, they have to rely on huge reserves of built-up fat to fuel their efforts. High-fat content means moist and flavorful flesh.
December 30 2009
Of Trees, Food, Nativity Scenes and Rain
So there we go. We’ve all spent weeks collecting presents and honing our social skills to survive the getting together of large quantities of human beings only for it all to be over in a mere two and a half days. That’s Christmas for you.
But, as always, it’s two and a half days that are quite rewarding. Spending time with people you like and/or are related to seldomly leaves you in a bad mood, especially if it involves trees adorned with shiny stuff, little sweet things commonly referred to as cookies (biscuits for the Brits among you), obscene amounts of poultry, tiny little nativity scenes you can practice your camera’s macro-mode on and of course brief bursts of thunderstorms on Christmas day.
For graphical representations of above ramblings, click the picture on top. For a brief glimpse of what the rain accompanying a thunderstorm looks and sounds like, watch the gripping feature presentation below. Enjoy.
40 Seconds of Rain from Richard on Vimeo.
November 27 2009
Stockholm, a tale of food and peril
So after more than two years of absence, I returned to Stockholm last weekend to visit my sister, her husband and two unruly but fantastic little Swedish kids. Contrary to my usual ways of taking at least 5000 photos, bugging everyone and their grandma to death, I actually took but a moderate amount of pictures, saving myself from being slaughtered by an angry mob of Swedes and half-Swedes.
As always, my days were dominated by my quest for food and drink, which is nicely reflected in some of the pictures I did take. I also met up with an Austrian friend, whose cousin introduced us to traditional Swedish saturday-night entertainment highlights such as one-room appartment skinhead parties somewhere in the outskirts of Stockholm, complete with pint-glasses of Captain Morgan’s and face-tattoos. One thing I learned that evening is that nights out tend to be so much better when suddenly your only hope is getting out alive. I need to find myself some perilous places in Vienna for jolly good evening entertainment.
Anyway, I did survive the party as I did drinking (another Swedish specialty) at Kvarnen, a pub/club in the heart of Stockholm’s Södermalm. Which reminds me: if you go and smoke a cigarette outside that place, make sure to not sway in any way, because security guys might think you’re too drunk and bar you from going back in. Which in no way happened to me, of course. Oh, and if it happens to you, simply walk away and go back in. Which I heard might work.
And finally, just to prove that I did not spend my days and nights on food and booze only, here’s something for my fellow Stieg Larsson fans. There are tours organized by the city museum called, aptly, Millennium-tours, where you’ll see many of the places featured in Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy. They are Sundays only, but you can buy a map of the tour, complete with explanations of the spots’ relevance in the books. Which is what we did, and, yes, I did take a few pictures. I felt like a fanboy, which, I’m unfortunately obliged to say, I guess I am.
Well, that was my rather concise but nonetheless extremely witty, entertaining and as always dramatic recount of my three day weekend in probably the cleanest city of Europe, if not the world. Enjoy the pictures.
November 11 2009
Martinigansl at DBM
The more loyal of my readers will know that I’ve had yet another blog for a while now. Called “Death by Martini“, it celebrates the greatness that is food and drink.
My latest entry, written mere minutes before this one, is sporting scrumptious pictures of the traditional goose served up on or around St. Martin’s day. Click here to see it with yer own eyes.
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