Prank Food

Yes, once again it's that time of year when I try to come up with a post that is in theme for this blog while still being in keeping with the hoax nature of April Fool's Day. 

In trawling the Internet, I found a number of posts on different, popular recipe sites that give recipes for making "April Fool's" recipes. Most of these are items that either: 1) look like an iconic savory dish but are actually sweet; 2) look like an iconic dessert but are actually savory, or, more rarely; 3) look like an iconic dessert but are actually a different type of sweet altogether. Buzzfeed, unsurprisingly, adds a few prank "recipes" that truly are unpleasant pranks, such as removing the cream filling from Oreo cookies and replacing it with white toothpaste.

https://www.food.com/ideas/april-fools-day-6200#c-15099

https://www.tasteofhome.com/collection/creative-recipes-for-april-fools-day/

https://www.allrecipes.com/recipes/1513/holidays-and-events/events-and-gatherings/april-fools-day/

https://www.buzzfeed.com/arielknutson/21-totally-sneaky-food-pranks-for-april-fools-day

Emmy, of the popular YouTube channel emmymadeinjapan, features a lot of foods that are "April Fool's" foods under these definitions, so I couldn't resist embedding one of her YouTube videos showing the making of such a dish; ice cream "drumsticks" that look like fried chicken.

Bon appétit!

What the Well-Dressed Barbie Doll is Wearing

Today is April Fool's Day, but this post isn't really an April Fool's joke, because what it shows is really happening--a strange crossover of clothing and food.

At a Cantonese hot-pot restaurant in Queens,  New York City, Barbie and Ken dolls are wearing meat!  Slices of prime rib, to be precise.  The video with this post shows both the dressing process and the eating process, which can be summarized as follows.  A Barbie doll with plastic wrap over her lower body is stood in a bowl of ice and has thin slices of meat methodically draped over her.  Diners use chopsticks to peel off the meat and dip it in a bowl of boiling water to cook it before eating it.

It only goes to show that truth can be much, much stranger than fiction.  Happy April Fool's Day!

Dinosaur Chow

Several years ago, I stumbled upon the blog Cockpit Conversation.  Cockpit Conversation is written by a woman who refers to herself as Aviatrix.  Aviatrix is a commercial pilot, and usually she writes about oddities she happens upon in the course of her job.  However, sometimes she posts about things that are simply humorous, such as Dinosaur Chow.

It appears that Aviatrix's friend writes a web comic called Dinosaur Comics, and one of his comics involved a dinosaur who invents a recipe.  In a burst of whimsy, Aviatrix decides to make the recipe herself and describe both the process and the final result.  

This would justify a loud "meh", except that the dinosaur's idea of nouvelle cuisine was to combine ice cream and meat.  You read that correctly the first time:  ice cream and meat.  To quote the dinosaur in the comic:

First, get five pounds of ground beef.
Then, get five pounds of ice cream.
Fold the raw meat into the ice cream, and brown in a giant frying pan.

Throw some eggs into this!
Then add some salt to taste, and more eggs to taste too.
Serve in a bathtub, and garnish with fifty dollar bills.

In redacting this fictional dinosaur's recipe for a (live) human audience, Aviatrix began by making only a fifth of the quantity (i.e.,  using only a pound of meat and a pound of ice cream, and garnishing with 10-dollar bills).  Second, she chose to put the meat into the pan first, and fold in the ice cream, because (in her words) "The difference is that had I followed the instructions exactly, no part of the beef would have browned in the pan the way some did before the ice-cream was folded in."  In other words, as she carefully explains, "What I was essentially doing was slow-poaching ground beef in sweetened milk, in the presence of guar gum, cellulose gum, locust bean gum, polysorbate 80, mono- and diglycerides and carrageenan [i.e., the ice cream]."

To her surprise, the end result was fairly tasty, if you enjoy Really Sweet Foods:

"The dish was astonishingly edible, considering it was invented by a fictional dinosaur and deliberately concocted to be as ludicrous as possible. It's pretty sweet, and this is coming from someone who ate Nutella out of the jar with a spoon for lunch. I would recommend decreasing the ice cream-to-beef ratio to perhaps 1:2, add more chili powder and other spices at an earlier stage of cooking and, as I mentioned earlier, play with the ice cream flavour."

I suppose the moral of this is that it's hard to go wrong in combining eggs, sweets, and meat, but overall I'm not inclined to test the recipe myself.  It does make a splendid subject for a blog post on a day, such as today, dedicated to the ludicrous.

EDIT:  (5/9/2017)  It just occurred to me that a recipe like this would be a *perfect* use for garlic ice cream.

Art Made From Food

Happy April!

I like to celebrate April Fools Day on my blogs by writing about hoaxes, or phenomena that look like hoaxes.

With that in mind, I took a stroll through the Internet last night, and found...20 Examples Of Food Imitating Art on Buzzfeed.com. These are renditions of famous works of art in various food stuffs, ranging from Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring rendered entirely in jellybeans, Van Gogh's Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat done in leeks, Michelangelo's Creation of Adam scrimshawed onto a banana, gummy versions of the Venus de Milo, and much, much more. The works range in complexity from what have to have been fifteen-minute specials by people with talent (e.g., Munch's The Scream done in melted ice cream on a plate) to kitsch (e.g., Trumbull's Declaration of Independence done at three-quarters lifesize, carved from a single huge block of cheese) to insanely detailed mosaics (e.g., Warhol's Gold Marilyn Monroe picked out in thousands of Nestlé's Smarties).

Each of these food-imitations show impressive talent, if not first-rank artistic genius.  Enjoy them, and enjoy the rest of spring.