Everybody loves pie, and even those dessert hating weirdos out there like savory pies like chicken pot pie and shepherd's pie, but pie is also the leading cause of fatness and stupid diet-related New Year's resolutions so pie kinda sucks too.
But did you know there's an easy way to lose weight by eating pie?
This animated Cyanide & Happiness comic has all the details, and while their weight loss method may not work for everyone it's great for those who want instant results!
The 1950s Cold War craze for fallout shelters was a serious undertaking for the US government. Nuclear war with the Soviets seemed inevitable, and the prudent thing to do was prepare for it. While public campaigns urged families to prepare their own shelters, stocking them with food for a long period underground was going to be difficult, especially in cities where people did not have adequate personal storage space. What were all those people going to eat in crowded municipal shelters?
That coldly logical approach, combined with an extensive 1958 study by the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, led the government toward a single commodity as the foundation for its plan to feed a nation: The “parched wheat form known as Bulgur,” one of the simplest ingredients known to man. The main ingredient in dishes like tabbouleh, kibbeh, and pilafs, bulgur is nutty, nutritious, high-fiber, and supremely safe. “Bulgur was selected for this investigation because it is processed from a basic agricultural commodity, whole-grain wheat, which is plentiful in the U.S., low in cost, highly palatable, and reportedly very stable,” one government report explained.
That last thing stood out in particular, because it would need to hold up for years inside fallout shelters, awaiting the apocalypse. “Indeed a long shelf life may well be the single most important criterion for choosing bulgur in a stockpiling program,” the government reported. As part of its research, the USDA eventually landed on crackers as the best medium for bulgur-wheat rations in a bunker scenario; after 52 months of storage it reported merely a “discernible but inconsequential decrease” in flavor.
Coca-Cola is such a big hit around the world that some people refer to all colas as "Coke", and even though the syrupy brown beverage invented by druggist John S. Pemberton in 1886 is bad for your health it's still a classic taste people crave.
In fact, people like the taste so much they rallied to preserve the classic recipe when New Coke came out in 1986, and yet they kept selling New Coke as "Coke II" until 2002, hoping it would catch on because it was cheaper to make.
According to a recipe discovered by Atlanta historian Charles Salter, who found it among a pile of documents belonging to inventer John Pemberton, Coke contains lemon oil, nutmeg oil, vanilla, cinnamon caramel and coriander, among many others.
And one could say Coke also knew the recipe for success when it came to making oddball digi-character Max Headroom a star in the 80s:
The bizarre, pseudo-animated Max Headroom character was created as a virtual television star in the UK by record company Chrysalis in 1985. Sensing his appeal for young consumers, Coca-Cola licensed Headroom that same year and made him the center of their ad campaign with a series of commercials directed by Ridley Scott. According to Coke, the spots helped Headroom gain a 76 percent recognition rating among teenagers.
I've been a choco-gobbler since I was a kid, and I gobbled up novelty-shaped chocolate just like the rest, but some kids get a box of novelty chocolates and refuse to eat it because it looks cool.
Back in 1910 a little girl named Eileen Margaret Elmes received a tin full of Red Riding Hood themed novelty chocolates shaped like characters from the story, each of which was dressed in tissue paper clothing.
Eileen loved the little figures so much she refused to eat them, so she stashed them away and kept them relatively untouched throughout her entire life. She passed away in 2007 at 99-years-old, leaving her box of chocolates up for auction:
Inevitably, time has taken its toll on the chocolates made decades before sell-by dates were even invented. They display a white sheen of age that would put off the most ardent chocoholics but, when you open the box, the delicious smell of cocoa still fills your nostrils.And now, for the first time in a century, the chocolates have been publicly revealed at Hansons Auctioneers in Etwall, near Derby …The box of Little Red Riding Hood Pascall’s Chocolate Novelties will be sold on December 19 at Hansons Auctioneers, Heage Lane, Etwall, Derbyshire.
Foodies who like to sample dishes from all over the world have at least some experience with Indian food, and once they've seen how many interesting and exotic flavor combos Indian restaurants have to offer they're hooked for life.
But bland and unadventurous eaters in the world are afraid to give Indian food a chance, usually because they're afraid of spice, don't dig curry or have been told some BS about it being unsafe without giving Indian food a chance.
Vindaloo
Vindaloo is a south Indian dish with many variations. The version you’ll likely see in an Indian restaurant will include some kind of meat base cooked with red chilies, vinegar, garlic, and sometimes potatoes. In India, the dish is known for its unmitigated spiciness. But at your neighborhood Indian joint, chances are the heat has been tamed. Unless you ask for it.
Maybe if they knew Indian restaurants serve up more than curry they'd give it a chance? The Takeout created a "cheat sheet" to Indian restaurant menus that takes all the mystery out of strange sounding dishes like Vindaloo, Chana masala and Rogan josh:
With most Indian dishes, you can select your choice of meat. When it comes to rogan josh, lamb is the only option. The key to its smoky and sweet taste is the base, which consists of onions that have been browned in oil or ghee (clarified butter) until essentially caramelized, as well as the heavy dose of bracing, warming spices like whole cardamom and clove. You might see on a menu that the dish has chilies, but don’t worry—the chilies used in rogan josh are usually mild ones. If you’re at a good Indian restaurant, your rogan josh might be finished with a touch of saffron—an expensive spice with a delicate, floral flavor.
Why would anyone do such a horrible thing to a pizza? And what kind of candy are those Santa Clauses made of that they didn't melt like the candy canes? This disaster was Tweeted by yung g.
My guess is that this was done specifically for an internet picture. But it's far from the only dastardly deed done to a pizza that didn't deserve it. Besides adding candy, there are burned, mis-sliced, and mis-handled pizzas, and pizza hybrids from hell. For ardent pizza lovers, it's a horror story. See 17 Of The Most Disrespectful Things Done To Pizza In 2017 at Pleated-Jeans.
Have you ever gotten a piece of roast beef that looked like it might be starting to go bad because it had an iridescent sheen on it that looked like something you'd see on the side of a fish?
That metallic shine may have put you off and caused you to throw away perfectly edible roast beef just to be safe, but as it turns out that metallic shine has nothing to do with the meat being old.
In fact, the iridescence is actually caused by an optical phenomenon called interference:
Optical interference happens whenever a light wave reflected off one surface encounters a wave reflected off another surface close by.
In the case of lunchmeat, two sorts of interference effects are possible.
The first is called thin-film interference. Some deli cuts, especially cured meats, are rich in fat and oil. If this fat seeps out, it can form a layer on the surface and change the situation from a simple single reflection to a double reflection—one off the front surface where the air meets the fat layer and another off the back surface where the fat layer meets the meat.
This type of interference is what gives oil slicks their hues of purple and green, and what gives bubbles that warbling rainbow shimmer.
The second interference effect is called diffraction. Diffraction occurs whenever light passes through a repeating grid of equally-spaced slits or bounces off a surface of equally-spaced reflectors. This structure—called a diffraction grating—produces many reflection points, meaning that instead of considering how just two reflected waves interfere, we must consider the sum of a great multiplicity.
What does this have to do with lunchmeat? Muscles are made up of proteins that bind into strands, and these strands in turn group into long fibers, each about one or two micrometers in diameter.
When a muscle is cooked and ultimately cut, this repeating structure of muscle fiber is exposed, forming a natural diffraction grating for visible light. Any mixture of light incident on the slice of meat will encounter these well-ordered fibers and reflect only certain colors out at certain angles.
Whether you've rolled the dough a hundred times or just learned how to make chocolate chip cookies you can probably benefit from the knowledge of a pro pastry chef, especially if that knowledge is easy to digest.
Kyle Bartone is a pastry sous chef at Eataly in New York City, and he's got some genius tips to share with you that will make your adventures in baking much sweeter.
Let's start with the basics- ripening your cookie dough in the fridge for a day or two will give your cookies a better taste and texture, and after you've poured cake batter in a pan spin it and give it a few good taps to remove air bubbles.
And if you're going to decorate cakes and cookies you can save money by making your own piping bags out of parchment paper, and then you should take the money you saved and buy a multi-nozzled squirt bottle to keep your cakes moist:
"For large sheet cakes and rounds," says Bartone, "we give them a quick showering of simple syrup or booze to keep them moist." Most bakeshops use special squirt bottles ($14.99 on Amazon) that have multiple nozzles or showerlike lids to evenly soak their cakes. This makes sure the cakes stay super moist and don't dry out after you cut them.
My wife and I are always looking for ways to make changes in the kitchen so we don't waste as much food, and over the years we've gotten better about eating our leftovers and buying less food more often so it doesn't spoil.
But it's hard to keep track of how long foods last and where they should be stored, especially when we come across something new at the grocery store we'd like to try out.
Which is why we printed out these awesome charts created by meal planning service Cook Smarts and hung them on our fridge, so we know how long we've got to eat all that yummy produce and whether it should go in the fridge or be left out.
They also made a three-page guide dealing with frozen food storage that takes the guesswork out of which foods can be stored in the freezer, how they should be stored and for how long.
Do you have a beer swillin' buddy who claims they've come up with a hundred different uses for beer bottles and cans?
I sure do, and these crazy guys are always coming at me with beer-related crafts, household uses or life hacks that seem too weird to work, but most of the time they're actually on to something.
Caldwell's clever bottle and can upgrades include beer pong ready conical cans with pull tab lids, 2-in-1 cans that keep the Black from the Tan, and a side shotgun tab that'd make parties way sicker...because everyone would be puking.
The delicious cake called baumkuchen was once a staple of German weddings and Christmas celebrations. It comes in a peculiar shape, likened to a cross-cut slice of a tree trunk. A disc of baumkuchen reveals concentric circles, like the rings that show a tree's age. How do they do that?
Achieving this is a feat of unlikely cake engineering. The original method involves a spit turning over a fire. Thick batter is scooped, in heaping spoonfuls, directly onto the spit and spread across its length. As the batter drips and rotates, it creates craggy ridges, like the bark of a tree. When the batter turns golden brown, another scoop of batter is heaped on top, and the spinning continues. After 15 to 20 repetitions, the accumulating layers have formed rings that are imperfectly round and alternate between pale yellow and a toasty brown. The cake gets a glaze of warm apricot jam to seal in the moisture and prevent it from drying out, and then sometimes a crackly shell of chocolate or vanilla icing.
You can see a picture of that process here. Making baumkuchen over a fire for commercial use doesn't work well, as it is slow and produces inconsistent results. Specially-built ovens were used, but bakeries that make the cake are disappearing, because new ovens cost $100,000 and used ovens are hard to find. Read about the history and future of baumkuchen at Taste. -via Digg
Have you ever looked at the plastic food containers in your kitchen, and more specifically the lids to those containers, and thought there might be more to them than you know?
Well if you've had that thought specifically about those Glad containers with the raised circular section on the lid you were on to something- because they're made to hold containers for sauces and condiments.
Twitter user mamagraciee blew the internet's collective mind when she showed the lids being used to hold sauce and condiments, giving us all an aha moment and changing our food containin' lives forever.
And even though this is clearly genius to include in the lid of a plastic container Glad only advertised this function on the packaging of their To Go Lunch line, which is why many of us were unaware of its use until now.
The secret to losing weight is there are lots of secrets to losing weight, so you just have to discover what works best for your body type and try to stick to the plan.
My body type works best with a high protein diet, so if I cut the carbs and increase my lean protein intake I can lose weight without much effort at all. Other people can eat all the carbs they want and still lose weight, but sometimes it's the little changes that make all the difference.
Did you know the smell of vanilla can help you resist the temptation to eat too many sweets?
The study was done in St. George Hospital in London, and researchers found those who wore vanilla-scented patches lost more weight than those wearing no patch or a lemon patch. Researchers believe the sweet smell of vanilla helped appease the need for something sweet, and participants who smelled vanilla were less likely to overeat sweets.
It also helps to use common sense and keep your portion sizes smaller, stop eating when you're full and prepare less food so you don't overeat, but strangely dimming the lights can actually help you lose weight too:
Researchers found dimming the lights lengthened the eating time, suggesting a more relaxed atmosphere increases satisfaction and decreases how much food you eat. While this study was in a restaurant, dimming the lights in your own home could have the same effect on food intake.
The Awl is doing a series of posts on spices called The Anthology of Underrated Herbs. Yes, I'm sure they know spices and herbs are different things. Fran Hoepfner's contribution is paprika, specifically the custom of putting it on cottage cheese, which her parents do. Her entire interview with them about it is in the post.
Me: The Awl is doing a series of pieces on spices, and the best I could come up with, because we’re not an aggressively spice-heavy family, is that you both do a thing where you eat cottage cheese with paprika on it. I wanna know why the heck that is.
Mom: I think the cottage cheese with paprika is me. It’s my twist on it. Your dad would always season deviled eggs with a pinch of paprika.
Me: Right…
Mom: Originally, I thought it was Dad who put it on cottage cheese
Me: Okay…
Mom: I’m saying, somehow Dad got the paprika on the table for me to see it because, as you said, we don’t use a lot of spices. There was no paprika in the house when I was growing up, so Dad definitely brought that into the marriage.
By the end, all I could think of was how sad that people can actually grow up in America without spices. Hoepfner's mom didn't even have salt and pepper on the table when she was child. The only reason they have paprika now was because their son brought some back from a trip to Hungary. How important were spices in your family? I use paprika on quite a few dishes, but I like my cottage cheese with salt, pepper, oregano, and parsley, and maybe a little grated parmesan. Read the rest of the amusing interview at The Awl.
(Image credit: The National Dairy and Food Bureau of Chicago via Cardboard America)
In 1895, Joseph Demerath came up with a way to manufacture marshmallows in mass quantities, which made them affordable outside the upper class for the first time. This kicked off a marshmallow craze that lasted for the next twenty years or so -that is, if it ever went away. The Bunte Brothers were the first food producer to give away booklets of recipes to market marshmallows, and the custom spread to other marshmallow manufacturers who thought up hundreds of ways to use them in everyday cooking -including using them on sweet potatoes. Why this particular recipe became so popular involves an explanation of how sweet potatoes were prepared before marshmallows were available, which you'll find at Atlas Obscura.
