Food & Cooking Archives
Some may remember the photos I took at my friends Brent & Annette's wedding cake. They are among my most popular photos with this one having 82 views yesterday, 528 views this week, and 156,585 views in total. 564 people call it a favorite! The cake has appeared in several magazines and online stories and now the makers of the cake, Gateaux, Inc. will be appearing on the Food Network Challenge this Sunday at 7pm. They are competing with 4 other cake makers to make the best Dr. Seuss themed cake. Nerds, set your TiVos!
I have always been skeptical of "all natural" peanut butter because they usually leave out the sweetener. Parker's Farm All Natural Peanut Butter has replaced the more traditional brands in our house not only because it cuts out the high fructose corn syrup, but also because it is the best peanut butter I have ever had. It is made by a company right here in Coon Rapids, MN. I have heard it is available at CostCo sometimes and WalMart's as well.
Ingredients: Peanuts, Honey, Salt, Love, Care & Pride.
It is surprising how much interest there is in this cake. Several photos are nearing or have surpassed the 25k view mark and there are 127 people who call one a favorite. I have seen this on Digg, Reddit, joystiq, and TotalFark.com, among many others. It really makes me wish I had done something more than snap some photos of this great cake. In case you didn't see it, this was made by Robin of Gateaux Inc. Hit her up for your next wedding cake.
I have posted 5 more photos that I took with a macro lens on Jesse's D70s (check his photos out for more wedding fun, including Mouser with a moustache and me on the verge of being milked). Enjoy.
At perhaps the best wedding (congratulations Brent and Annette) I have been to, there was by far the best wedding cake I have seen. Other people tend to agree as the photos have been linked to from Boing Boing and Wonderland to name just two. That explains how some of the photos have nearly 7000 views and over 50 people calling one a favorite.
UPDATE: The creator of this cake, Robin, from Gateaux Inc which is located in Plymouth, MN. "was amazing to work with and of course is amazingly talented" according the the bride and I can't say that I could disagree. Just look at some of her other work.
The cake toppers were very hard to find. The bride looked for months and months and finally found a set on eBay.com; they were from Japan's "Nintendo Club"
Here is the whole set (with more to come as I get some closeup macro shots I took, uploaded.)
Before I get to dispensing today's links I wanted to announce a couple more posts to the
Alt Text Photo Gallery. Within the
Travel - Road Trips section I have posted two new galleries of some recent travels this summer / fall. The first is a
Labor Day weekend trip through the Badlands and Black Hills that Jena and I took with some friends and the second is
a canoe trip to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (my second and Jena's first time to a beautiful part of the world). I didn't do much in the way of optimizing or messin' with the photos but, I hope you enjoy them, nonetheless.
Now on with the links:
"If Kevin Garnett were only 5-foot-8, pudgy and going to work on a newspaper delivery truck, I doubt if many sports journalists would fret about his future."
-Mike Royko, Buffalo News, June 30, 1995
This post is the first draft of a list I am creating for family and friends to use so they may sample some of the better dining options Minneapolis and Saint Paul have to offer. This is by no means exhaustive and will be added to and modified as my restaurant experiences grow.
The Restaurants (in no particular order):
Matt's Bar
Chatterbox Cafe
Oceanaire Seafood Room
Manny's Steakhouse
Puerta Azul
Café Brenda
Bobino Wine Bar
128 Café
Modern Café
Jax Café
Café Havana
Gasthaus Bavarian Hunter
Shuang Cheng Restaurant
Al's Breakfast
Highland Grill
W. A. Frost & Company
Nicollet Island Inn Restaurant
Grand Ol' Creamery
Red's Savoy Inn and Pizza
Broadway Pizza (River Road in Minneapolis)
Have Potential? (I just need to go again)
The Sample Room
Mayslack's Music Lounge
Al Vento
Vintage Restaurant & Wine Bar
El Meson
Birchwood Cafe
Big E's Soul Food
Pizza Luce
Ecopolitan Restaurant
Afton House Inn (Afton)
La Belle Vie (Stillwater)
Dock Cafe (Stillwater)
(Phil's) Tara's Hideaway (Stillwater)
Conspicuously off these lists is great Mexican, Thai, and Indian fare as well sushi - its not that there are none because there actually are some great ones but I have yet to find a place that both serves great food and offers something in the way of ambiance - any ambiance. Feel free to suggest others. More to come…
The documentary Super Size Me has sufficiently persuaded me to severely reduce my already limited consumption of fast food. What's more it has opened my eyes to something I had never really thought about before in regards to the largest fast food chain, McDonald's — that they are, in fact, evil.
McDonald's most likely did not start out with evil intentions, nor do many of the people making the decisions, probably even realize the dastardly deeds they perform each day but I am here to tell you that McDonald's tactics for creating and retaining customers (children) are only marginally less despicable than using Joe Camel and candy cigarettes to create new smokers (also children).
What's more, as Super Size Me adequately conveys, fast food may be far more damaging than simply adding pounds to to their patrons and maybe raising their cholesterol. As it turns out that craving you feel for fast food may have been both cultivated over years of happy, comforting experiences carefully orchestrated by Ronald and his henchmen AND a function of the composition of the food itself. Ask any kid if they like going to McDonald's and they will more than likely give you an emphatic, "Yes!". That is because they are bombarded with enough messages from the time they first begin watching TV, that they can nearly universally recognize Ronald McDonald and tell you what toy is in the latest Happy Meal. They will also tell you how fun it is to go to the "Play Land" and that they would love to have a birthday party at Micky D's.
Of course as adults we forget all those warm, fuzzy feeling that we once had for the golden arches and make informed, rational decisions about where we eat and where we take our kids. Right? I mean yeah, we are much more savvy now. Well, as it turns out, we aren't. Because whenever we have a bad day or are feeling down, we turn back to the clown and similar eateries for a fix of good feelings — associations that have never died but still reside in our inner child. Doesn't that taste good, things are looking better already.
Tune in tomorrow Wednesday to compare the toxicity of a Big Mac and a asbestos.
This week I am introducing a new feature on Alt Text: The Theme. Themes will be a series of posts that are related in some way but are also able to stand alone without the other posts in the series. More importantly a way for me to focus my energies and actually write, rather than thinking of something to write about and then ultimately censoring myself before I hit publish.
This first week's theme is Amusement Parks and Fairs. Here are some links to content I will be drawing inspiration from:
Hey, what-the there's a new food pyramid?! You turn around for a second and they sneak a new food pyramid in on ya!
Last night I caught the Ani Difranco show at Northrup at the U of MN. I was a little disappointed in the show. Everything Ani sang was good, but she had a broken foot, she only played for an hour, and she didn't play Untouchable Face or Garden of Simple. Her new style, while still good, will take some getting used to.
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I was also able to revisit one of my favorite Chinese restaurants in the cities,
Shuang Cheng. One of these days I will have to stray from the Sesame Chicken however, they have so many seafood dishes to choose from. Consequently, Anne out-ordered us all with her spicy scallop dish.
Tonight I am going with my wife to try a restaurant I have been meaning to go to for quite some time.
Aquavit serves Scandinavian food that is actually good. I am looking forward to it.
I just found out that milk, something I love, something I make excuses to eat chocolate for, is actually enriched sweat. How disgusting is that? I found a couple
sources online corroborating what I heard while driving in the car. I must try not to think about that too much because I don't think I could bear not drinking my 3 glasses of skim
sweat milk a day.
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House Update: Jena and I sold our house today. After 44 hours on the market we got our asking price. Should we have held out for more? I don't think so. We do not have any contingencies on the sale and things worked out well. So why do I feel cheated? Jena and I did so much work getting the house ready for sale - the cleaning, packing, moving things out, hiding the dog for showings - that we feel cheated by how quickly it sold. Weird? Maybe. A relief? Definitely, my stress level just went down a notch. We move out July 1st and then await our new home to be finished. I will update you on that next week. Pray that I do not have to go to court with my new neighbor.
I think I will like
Vanilla Coke and somehow living in Minneapolis I get to try it a full day before the rest of the world.
Too bad living here doesn't afford me the opportunity to see Episode II "the way it was meant to be seen" - projected digitally. There isn't
a theater equipped with a digital projector for hundreds and hundreds of miles. They have them in Budapest, Hungary and Bratislava, Slovakia for pete's sake!
[The previous tidbits of info and links courtesy of
Broomeman.com]
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Updated house plans are now posted to the server. The plans listed below are of a much smaller file size but will more clearly show the plans:
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I have taken some photos of my blueprints (
per request). They are large file sizes and taken with
this camera if you would like to buy it.
There are some modifications to the plans being made. They are pretty subtle however. I will post a list of them along with some cleaned up plans that show details later today.
Krispy Kreme just opened its first store in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area this morning at 5:30 a.m. and there were people in line yesterday. Lucky for me one of my coworkers got in line at 5 and I am reaping the benefits of his will and determination.
Others might have
their own ways of celebrating Krispy Kreme. Me? I just let out a very Homer Simpson-like "MMMMmmmmmm*" [drool].
I only wrote MMMMmmmmmm because I can't spell the sound Homer makes when he is drooling over something.
We have always been told that piles of papers on desks and floors and anywhere we could place them was a very inefficient way to organize our work. We were told that files in file cabinets were a way to keep us organized.
This post/article makes a case that this is BS but there still might be a better way.
Of course they are producing just the product to be that better way (surprised?) and so I am eagerly awaiting,
Six Degrees, to see if it really can provide a better means of organization via the creation linkages between files, people, and messages used in managing projects, etc.
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I have added some links,
Boxes and Arrows and
Black Belt Jones, to the resources page (a page that really needs some more love and attention).
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Is certain food gay? An
article at Slate makes some compelling arguments.
