Category:
Food

Follies of the Madmen #614

Posted By: Paul - Fri Jan 17, 2025 - Comments (0)
Category: Food, Robots, Television, Advertising, Australia

AI-powered spice dispenser

Not all things benefit from being AI-powered.

Now if this were part of a robot that could cook the meal, serve it, and then also spice it for you, that would be cool. But as a stand-alone gadget, it seems kinda useless.

More info: https://spicerr.com

Posted By: Alex - Thu Jan 16, 2025 - Comments (1)
Category: Food, Inventions, AI, Robots and Other Automatons

Dr. Garbee’s Wild Game Dinners

When Dr. Eugene Garbee became president of Upper Iowa College in 1952, he started a tradition of hosting an annual Wild Game Dinner. He had acquired a taste for wild game, and knowledge of how to cook it, growing up in the Missouri Ozarks. Some of the dishes that were served at his dinner:

  • Rattlesnake Paste on crackers
  • Moose Nose Hash
  • Roast Elephant Trunk
  • Raccoon Sausage
  • Fayette Sparrow Birds in Nest
  • Rotisseried Volga River Beaver
  • Minnesota Black Bear Roast
  • Hasenpfeffer of Fayette Rabbit
  • Walker's Ridge Squirrel Stewed in Onions
  • Charbroiled Muskrat Saddles
  • Roast Growler's Gulch Possum


Davenport Quad-City Times - Apr 16, 1967



He collected together his favorite recipes into a cookbook: For the Chow Hound With a Taste for Something Different... Dr. Garbee's Wild Game Dinners. You can probably find a used copy somewhere.



Some of his recipes:

Fayette Sparrow Birds in Nest
Take a raw potato, cut it in half, hollow out enough room for a cleaned sparrow, insert the bird, put the two halves back together again, tie the potato with string and wrap with foil and bake.

Mother's Squirrel and Dumplings
Mother's favorite recipe. She wanted the head left on. Mother always claimed the head — picking off the tender juicy muscles and finally breaking open the thin skull bones for the brains — was the most tasty bite of all, for her.

2 squirrels, with heads on.
¼-pound fatback (salt pork).
1½ cups of seasoned flour, half teaspoon of salt, half teaspoon of pepper.
½ cup of diced onions, or large onion slices.
1 large turnip or 1 or 2 large carrots, chopped.
Bouillon.
Dumplings.

Cut the squirrels into pieces, including the heads. Dredge in the seasoned flour in a paper bag. Fry out the fatback in an iron skillet or dutch oven. Brown the squirrel, add two cups of bouillon and cook for an hour or until tender. Then add vegetables and cook for 15 to 20 minutes. Add more bouillon if needed. Use your own favorite dumpling recipe.

Rattlesnake Paste
Cut rattlesnake in chunks two or three inches long. Cook in a small pressure cooker until tender. Add a bay leaf. Cook 10 to 12 minutes. Grind two or three times.
To one cup of ground meat mix in the following: three tablespoons bacon grease, melted butter or oil to which has been added a pinch of marjoram, rosemary and savory, salt and pepper.
Heat for a minute or two before stirring in the meat to make a rather thick paste. More fat may be added if desired. Cook in a double boiler for 20 to 30 minutes. Serve on crackers or thin sliced rye bread.

More info: wikipedia, iagenweb.org

Posted By: Alex - Fri Jan 10, 2025 - Comments (4)
Category: Food, Cookbooks

The Newbeats

Quite a shocking falsetto there!





Posted By: Paul - Fri Dec 27, 2024 - Comments (0)
Category: Food, Music, 1960s

Nyquil Chicken

In Sep 2022, The FDA published a statement warning people that they shouldn't cook chicken in Nyquil:

A recent social media video challenge encourages people to cook chicken in NyQuil (acetaminophen, dextromethorphan, and doxylamine) or another similar OTC cough and cold medication, presumably to eat.

The challenge sounds silly and unappetizing — and it is. But it could also be very unsafe. Boiling a medication can make it much more concentrated and change its properties in other ways. Even if you don’t eat the chicken, inhaling the medication’s vapors while cooking could cause high levels of the drugs to enter your body. It could also hurt your lungs. Put simply: Someone could take a dangerously high amount of the cough and cold medicine without even realizing it.

Social media searches for 'Nyquil Chicken' subsequently skyrocketed.

I believe the idea of Nyquil Chicken predates social media. David Letterman made a joke about it on his show back in Feb 1997. In response to viewer mail asking what to do to get rid of a cold, Dave pulled out a bucket of what he claimed was KFC's new "Nyquil-roasted chicken."

Unfortunately I can't find an embeddable clip of this segment. But if you subscribe to Plex's streaming service (which I don't), you can watch it.

Detroit Free Press - Oct 1, 2022



Posted By: Alex - Tue Dec 24, 2024 - Comments (0)
Category: Food, Cures for the common cold

Selling sad produce

In grocery stores, fresh produce such as bananas and tomatoes often goes to waste if it's become a "loose single." Shoppers think it's damaged or imperfect.

German researchers have come up with a way to address this problem: make shoppers think the produce is feeling sad because it hasn't been bought.

This is achieved simply by displaying an anthropomorphized picture of sad produce above the singles.



The produce has to be sad. Happy fruits and vegetables don't motivate shoppers.

Also, making produce sad works better than offering a price discount, because shoppers often assume discounted food must be bad.

More info: Anthropomorphic Sad Expressions Reduce Waste of 'Single' Imperfect Food

via Book of Joe

Posted By: Alex - Thu Dec 12, 2024 - Comments (2)
Category: Food, Fruit, Bananas, Advertising, Experiments, Psychology

Miss Turkey Stuffin

Happy Thanksgiving!

Actress Arlene Charles appeared as "Miss Turkey Stuffin" on the Steve Allen Show in November 1968. She claimed to represent the "Turkey Stuffing Board," which was actually an invention of the PR firm that set up her appearance on the show.

Source: Celebrity Stew by Leo Pearlstein



Posted By: Alex - Thu Nov 28, 2024 - Comments (0)
Category: Awards, Prizes, Competitions and Contests, Food, Thanksgiving

Atomic Bomb food tastes off

May 1955: Food tasters sampled a meal of French fries, vegetables, strawberries, chicken pot pie, cod fish fillets, and orange juice taken from a freezer buried 1,270 feet from an atomic bomb blast. While all the food was deemed edible, they said the orange juice and pie were noticeably "off flavor."

It's unclear why the food tasted off. Radiation shouldn't have changed the taste of the food. It was probably because they were told where it was from and their expectations led them to believe it tasted different. The researchers should have conducted a blind taste test.

Tampa Bay Times - May 11, 1955



Reno Gazette-Journal - May 12, 1955

Posted By: Alex - Tue Nov 26, 2024 - Comments (3)
Category: Food, Atomic Power and Other Nuclear Matters, 1950s

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