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More site housekeeping: I get quite a lot of emails that request certain recipes or ask questions of a general nature. Rather than reply in an email, which helps one person, I usually prefer to reply in the form of an entry here. So (though I may live to regret this!) I've made my list of upcoming planned recipes and other articles public. You can take a look there to see what I am working on or planning to write up. (There's a permanent link to the page from the contact form as well as in the footer about area of every page.

Not quite edible, but how can one resist an animated paper model of that august diety, The Flying Spaghetti Monster? This is the newest paper model by Rob Ives of Flying Pig, a UK company that makes paper animation and other fun paper model kits. This one is available for download/purchase. I have a few of their models and they are a bit fiddly to make, but once they're done they make adorable accessories for around the desk or cubicle. (Just be sure you put them in a place where someone won't sit on it...as happened to my Schoedinger's Cat.)

Rebecca Blood has a great post summing up the recent minor brouhaha about a popular 'quality' mac and cheese brand that originated with article in Salon magazine, vs. the standard of the genre that comes in a blue box. Rebecca focuses on the actions of the CEO, specifically his comments on a post on megnut, which are funny in the way he assumes that people will just take his marketspeak at face value.

The BBC News web site's Magazine section has an article today about the history of how turkey became fast food. While it's about turkey production in the UK, it's probably applicable to any nation that has large scale consumption, and production, of turkey meat.

In my quest for hydroponics growing options for growing potentially salty tomatoes, I stumbled upon this thing that looks like it belongs on the Jetsons: an Aerogrow Aerogarden Kit. Instead of hydroponics, it uses an aeroponic system, where the roots dangle in moist air. It looks great for growing fresh herb plants through the winter months and things like that...and the web site says it only uses the equivalent electricity of a 60 watt light bulb. I just love that futuristic-retro design too! If anyone has this, I'd love to hear about your experiences with it.

I was browsing in the kitchenware department of one of the department stores in town today, looking at the huge Zyliss display. Zyliss, as you probably know if you are into your kitchen gadgets, is a Swiss company that makes a lot of useful things. I have a number of Zyliss products in my kitchen, but my favorite one at the moment is the Soft Skin Peeler, aka the Tomato Peeler. This wonderful thing can take the skin off of any soft fruit like tomatoes and peaches with amazing ease. It even shaves truffles very thin!

I love tomatoes, and I love salt. So this post about growing hydroponic tomatoes with a weak sodium chloride solution on one of my new must-read blogs, News for Curious Cooks authored by Harold McGee, definitely caught my eye.

According to the post,

Google's fancy and free cafeteria has been buzzing the blogs recently, but here are some more lunch links. Mari - Diary has links to some Japanese web pages about shashoku, or company cafeteria food. Some examples: Montblanc in Hamburg, Germany serves what looks like a Dampfnudel (steamed dumpling) filled with cherries and served with custard and cream - as a main course! Softbank, a tech company in Japan, has a cafeteria that looks either terribly kitschy or very chic, depending on your point of view.

Just Hungry has had yet another site makeover. This is the fourth incarnation of the site in 3 years, and I think by far the biggest one. Besides a cosmetic facelift, it's been converted to a new backend engine, Drupal. Although Drupal is tad more complicated (for me, not you I hope!) than the blogging platform the site was running on previously, Movable Type (or the version before that which was on Movable Type's sister Typepad), I think it's going to make the site even better. Here are some of the changes that are in place right now.

I don't have much to say about the finale of Top Chef. Just this:

WTH???