Category Archives: Food

Butter Solo

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So last week I posted a bit about Han-Solo-in-Carbonite ice trays, and ordered one (along with some NERF armament). I didn’t have any chocolate around to try that suggestion, but I was able to make some pats of butter, which would be fun if you had a Star Wars dinner party. Or something. Spread on some Millennium Falcon-shaped English muffins!

Not sure what the best technique is. This was softened and scraped into the mold and then zapped in the microwave for 10 seconds, because I wasn’t sure the butter was quite soft enough to fill the body features.

I Didn't Know They Could Do That!

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A colleague came into my office yesterday to show me a naughty picture on her phone: food porn. Specifically, it was a chocolate in the shape of Han Solo frozen in carbonite. The image was vaguely familiar — I had linked to Star Wars ice trays recently, but the thought of using them as chocolate molds had not occurred to me. Presumably this is how the Darth Chocolate and Almond Stormtroopers goodies were made.

The Han Solo (and other) molds are also available at Amazon and Think Geek, where they actually note that it can be used for chocolate.

7 Han Solos (6 small and 1 large)
Still only worth one bounty

h/t to SB

Taken From Us Too Soon

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The Graveyard Of Shelved Ice Cream Flavors

Like most cemeteries, the Flavor Graveyard attracts its share of mourners and other visitors.

“It’s not uncommon,” Greenwood says. “You walk up to the graveyard here, and there’ll be fans that are up here putting flowers next to a headstone, or down on one knee, kind of paying their respects.”

I’ve never seen that kind of dedication in a droid before.

It's Not You. It's Me.

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Taster’s Choice: Why I Hate Raw Tomatoes and You Don’t

All my life, I’ve been vaguely ashamed of my dislike, probably because it was such a profound disappointment to my mother, and naturally I craved her approval.

But no more! I just discovered that I am not alone in the blogosphere when it comes to hating raw tomatoes. Kylee Baumie of Living Green just came out of the closet as a “mater hater.” So did Steve Bender, a.k.a., the Grumpy Gardener, and Chris Tidrick, who blogs at From the Soil. They recently discovered their mutual dislike while at a Garden2Blog event in Arkansas. Like Chris, I, too, carefully remove all bits of tomato from food and leave it on the side of the plate. Solidarity!

We mater-haters have to stick together. As Grumpy notes, “Telling people you hate fresh tomatoes is like saying you hate giggling babies or that you loathe the prospect of world peace.”

Count me in this group. We should have t-shirts made.

I’m also sensitive to the bitterness in the foods Jennifer mentions, so it may be that I have that gene, too.

Getting Freaky With a New Lubricant

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Shouldn’t it be a lubrican rather than a lubrican’t?

MIT’s Freaky Non-Stick Coating Keeps Ketchup Flowing

When it comes to those last globs of ketchup inevitably stuck to every bottle of Heinz, most people either violently shake the container in hopes of eking out another drop or two, or perform the “secret” trick: smacking the “57” logo on the bottle’s neck. But not MIT PhD candidate Dave Smith. He and a team of mechanical engineers and nano-technologists at the Varanasi Research Group have been held up in an MIT lab for the last two months addressing this common dining problem.

There are two ways to go with the idea of waste, I think. With the coating there will be less condiment thrown away when it is “empty”, but for a traditional bottle, not having the same effective viscosity means pouring a lot faster, which may mean more waste as you accidentally drown your food. With squirt bottles, I think you’re OK. But less consumer waste means you purchase less, so a bold prediction of mine is that the product cost will rise to compensate.