Blandie

Know what? The global warming also makes your vegetables less nutritious than normal. Weird, because you have the greenhouse to protect your veggies from Nature and then it turns out, greenhouse effect make them less palatable. Max Taub of Southwestern U in Texas made the study analyzing 200 experiments:

Taub's analysis, detailed in the March issue of the journal Global Change Biology, found that when grown in elevated carbon dioxide levels, potatoes showed almost a 14 percent decrease in protein. Protein concentrations decreased by more than 15 percent in barley and almost 10 percent in wheat and rice. Soybeans had the smallest protein reduction at 1.4 percent.

The paranoid in me knew it that Wyeth, Dupont and other Chemical Brothers are behind this global warming to sell their products. Anyway to all you beer drinkers out there, here's the SCIENTIFIC way to make your friends think they are having more beers that they are actually quaffing.

Chekhov's Menu for Journalists

I have Choice Cuts: A Miscellany of Food Writing by Mark Kurlansky and there is a short menu for journalists proposed by Anton Chekhov. M.K. said that Chekhov must have been very young when he scribbled this:

MENU FOR JOURNALISTS
An eight-course meal

1. A glass of vodka
2. Cabbage soup and yesterday’s kasha
3. Two glasses of vodka
4. Suckling pig with horseradish
5. Three glasses of vodka
6. Horseradish, cayenne pepper and soy sauce
7. Four glasses of vodka
8. Seven bottles of beer

A drunk Russian

Nilasing na Hito

You must have tasted nilasing na hipon or drunken shrimp. This is shrimp bathed with cheap gin, either eaten fresh or fried.
But in Japan, they have nilasing na hito or drunken carp. The huge carp in Tonami town were caught and then forced to imbibe large doses of sake or rice wine. According to Mainichi Japan, "Filled up with sake, the carp at first turned belly-up on the surface of the water. But they soon recovered and swam off."

Patatas Politics

Mr. Potato Head is now the new Democratic Party endorser?





Guess the Pinoy politician who posed with this?

Cracked Balut

cracked.com featured the six most frightening foods starting with ant eggs in Mexico (we also have that), maggotty cheese from Italy, fish preserved in lye from Norway, mice wine from Korea and pacha, cooked sheep head from Iraq. Guess what's number one? Altogether now: Balut! Kevin Nadal, bring on da petition.

Larry Cruz

When we were in Larry Cruz's private resort in Magalang, Pampanga, I eyed this old menu with the revisions done. Larry owns the best restaurants in Malate and you can see the changing culinary taste of the Manilenos leafing through these old menu.

Korean Street Food (Patatas Naman)

This is called tornado which is a single potato spiralized and cholesterolized. But the presentayshun is Bauhaus:

I can not say the same with this another potato-based fried snack. They should call this Extreme Bolitas:

Wine

From Korea, we give you mouse wine

Kiwi

This is a kiwi:

This is also a kiwi:

Perplexed, or as Choy would have it, conundrumized? This is the interconnection:

Josh Closer

Did you hear about that Pinay who grabbed Josh Groban in Sydney and recorded the kinky-haired tenor's terrified face and blogged about it? No? Ask Ian Casocot. Anyway, Gobleth in our office was praying hard for a ticket and tried all her powers and came out nada. Until Ms. Letty Jimenez Magsanoc recalled an incident in Manor three years ago about Gob crazy over Josh and last week gave Gob a ticket like manna. Well, nag-leave si Gob early so she can be emotionally prepared and she was able to smuggle her camera. When the concert started, Josh was singing but Gob realized he was not on stage. Then Gob looked on her side and there he was, His Castratic Kinkiness, singing on the aisle. He was so close Gob could have grabbed him but his maskulado bodyguards made sure that the Sydney incident would not happen again. Sorry for Gob. Well, I was somewhere drinking Wolf Blass wine when Gob called at ipinarinig lang naman si Josh na tumitilaok live. I stared at my glass. It did not break. Sorry, Gob.

Patatas

Someone wrote Philippine Daily Inquirer complaining about the use of "Igorota" as a name for a French-friable potato variety. Oh well, from what I know, the only good potatoes happen to be Indians

Art Rice

A few months, we posted pictures of rice fields planted with different colored rice varieties. Someone shouted, PhotoShop. Last September 30, about 900 volunteers participating in a hands-on rice farming tour began the annual harvest of the Inakadate village (Aomori prefecture) rice paddy art, which this year depicted a pair of famous Hokusai woodblock prints created with four different varieties of rice. How great sana if the Ifugao rice terraces would look like this.

Baguio's Biggest Salad

I saw this in some tired website:

The residents of Baguio City took pride in having tossed what was believed to be the world's largest salad - a three-ton mix of assorted vegetables. On September 29, 2002 during the Tossed Salad Festival in commemoration of the city's 93rd charter anniversary, 67 students and members of the Baguio Association of Hotels and Inns (Bahai) mixed 2,976 kilograms of lettuce, carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, bell peppers and other vegetables in a tin and wrought iron bowl measuring 20 feet long, 10 feet wide and 2 feet deep. Some 13,657 people were able to partake of the P1.5 million mixtures. They paid P20 for each serving of the tossed salad with Thousand Island dressing and another take-out bowl of salad with a gourmet vinaigrette dressing consisting of apple cider vinegar and olive oil

.

I remembered covering that event. I wasn't really excited because I knew that some protocol were not met if we really wanted to be in the Guinness. The next time they set their dubious record, they had two containers. I made some comments in one local paper and got flak from some of the organizers. They later dropped the "Guinness" bid.
Maybe we can learn from this which happened only a few days ago:

A southern Spanish town has tossed what it claims is the world's largest salad, using 6,700kg (14,740lb) of vegetables. Twenty cooks in the town of Pulpi, in Almeria province, spent more than three hours mixing the ingredients - lettuce, tomatoes, onions, peppers and olives. The salad was prepared in a container 18m (59ft) long and 4.8m (15.7ft) wide. A Guinness World Records judge travelled from London to check whether the cooks had set a new record, Spain's EFE news agency reported. Lorenzo Navarro, the head of the Association of Businessmen and Storekeepers of Pulpi, which organised the record attempt, praised everyone involved. "Excellent coordination since the beginning made it possible to meet this challenge," he said.

Fugu

Not Fubu, Andy, but butete or pufferfish, the most expensive and dangerous sushi for kamikazes. Have not tasted it yet but saw dozens of stories from kamikaze fishermen and their families who die for eating them unbeknownst. Anyway, here's a YouTube from a sushi chef on how to prepare fugu sushi. Cris M, take notice:

Etag

It is way past lunch and who else but our friend Jack who entices us with etag at their country club? Hmmm asar.

How to Make Cardboard Siopao

Of course, China says the cardboard siopao is fake but few Chinese believe that it is a hoax. In fact, Weird Asia News came out with the recipe. Here goes:

Soak the cardboard in alkali solution. Chop it and add veggies, seasonings and real pork. Form into dumplings. Steam for 12 minutes. WAN advises you to ingest vinegar before eating to digest the paper so order vinegar as well.

Siopao 2

And now to totally ruin your siopao fetish. I watched two months ago this grisly movie. You think cardboard and pusa are bad? This one takes the cake or siopao. The title is "The Untold Story: Human Meat Roast Pork Buns." Stupid Title. Human na, pork pa. I only now know that the other titles for this classic are: Ba xian fan dian zhi ren rou cha shao bao in Hong Kong (Mandarin title); Bunman: The Untold Story; Human Meat Pies: The Untold Story; Human Pork Chop in the USA; and The Eight Immortals Restaurant: The Untold Story also in USA. But then what do you call human meat anyway? Human pork Chop?? Enough of that. The director is Herman Yau Lai-to. The movie is about a man who killed another man in a mahjjong game in Hong Kong. He moved to Macau and became a slicer (not yet a cook) in the Eight Immortals Restaurant. Then the owner of the restaurant accused the man of being a mahjjong cheat. He killed the owner and his family. He sliced and diced them and froze them and took over the restaurant. The policemen who were working on the strange disappearances were wondering why the man(Chan something) kept on feeding them siopao. Genius! Especially that part when the man confessed it all to the police. I heard Anthony Wong won the Chinese Oscar for his role as the siopao maker. I will lend you the DVD, Padma, as long as I don't hear Yeow somewhere.

Siopao I

Also from the Business Mirror, I learned that they are using cardboard in their siopaos in Beijing. They don't call it siopao there but baozi. A Chinese TV network showed one baozi maker chopping cardboard and using industrial chemical to soften and adding pork flavoring. OK. And yet when I was young, I was having a soliloquy on whether to eat the paper at the bottom or not. Then that persistent rumor about our siopao made of pusa. I would be discussing that in a later blog. Also, I came upon a story of a dinuguang siopao. it was supposed to be a celebrated crime case in China early this year.

How Do You Like Your Prince, My Dear?

French
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