​Texas is ablaze today, wildfires ravaging Bastrop and threatening small towns outside of Austin. Fifty-seven fires are burning across 100,000 acres of Central Texas, and more than 1,000 homes have been destroyed since this latest rash of fires broke out on Monday. And in Austin, local bloggers are trying to do something about it.

It's a typical response from the blogger community in Austin, which is tightly knit and has always stepped up to offer support when it's needed, whether to area residents devastated by wildfires or to complete strangers like New York food blogger Jennifer Perillo.

Perillo recently lost her husband and was left with two small children to care for alone; food bloggers around the country rallied to help Perillo, including many Austin-based food bloggers like Penny De Los Santos (who is, coincidentally, in the process of moving to NYC). De Los Santos, a photographer for Saveur, is auctioning off an opportunity to go on assignment with her for a day, while other bloggers organized national bake sales and auctioned off their own high-dollar items for Perillo's benefit.

"That's how we, as bloggers, should be spending our time," said Natanya Anderson, president of the Austin Food Blogger Alliance. "To me, these are the kinds of things that show what organized bloggers can do." The AFBA was created earlier this year after local food bloggers had been spending increasing amounts of time assembling potluck dinners and charity functions along the same lines as the response to Jennifer Perillo's situation.

"We realized our collective power as a group to do good in the community could be harnessed," Anderson said over the phone last week. "There were a handful of people who had one-on-one conversations, but there's enough of us that we all talk to each other. If we did something a little bit more formal we could have a bigger impact on the community as a whole."

By this past Spring, the AFBA was born: a formal non-profit that seeks to support "each other and our community through classes, social events, and philanthropy." It's the first of its kind in the country.

More >>

Yes, this exact thing is taking place in Thailand right now. Except not really.

​The interesting thing about Google is that we ask it the kind of deeply intimate questions that we would never ask another human being, even a friend or loved one. Embarrassing questions; compromising questions; dark questions; questions that reveal our own hidden insecurities and prejudices.

It also reveals a certain hive mind tendency. Type in the very beginning of a question and you may find that Google automatically completes exactly the question you were rushing to ask. "Why are Russians so good...at chess?" How did you know I was going to finish that question with "at chess," Google?

But for each of these harmless, silly auto-completes, there are always several more that are tacky at best and downright ugly at the worst. "Why are Indians so smelly?" "Why are Irish people alcoholics?"

A vast web of stereotypes laid bare, courtesy of Google and its clever habit of transforming millions of users' search histories into one giant artificial intelligence capable of finishing your question before you can.

Of course, nearly every ethnicity, race, gender or country of origin you type into the Google search box results in the auto-complete question "Why are __________ so rude?" (Instinctive, sometimes insurmountable xenophobia pretty much always leads us to believe that every other culture is somehow ruder than our own.) It's nevertheless interesting to see what culinary stereotypes the average Google user carries with them, no matter how off-base or potentially offensive they are.

More >>

​Yesterday afternoon HISD held the School Lunch Food Show in the cafeteria of Jefferson Davis High School. Parents, teachers, students and the media were given the opportunity to voice their opinions on more than 80 new, healthier menu items -- with reduced levels of sodium, fat and sugar, and no trans fats or high fructose corn syrup, due to new federal standards for nutrition in schools -- in consideration for the 2011-2012 school year. I can't remember the last time I was so full. A few of the good, the bad, and the baffling selections featured below:

The Good:

• Cheese Flatbread Pizza - I used to love the rectangular sheets of pizza they served at my elementary school (AISD). But this was so much better. The flatbread gave the pizza a nice texture, and the cheese nicely melted over an ample supply of tomato sauce.
• Southwestern Veggie Quesadilla - These were surprisingly flavorful despite the plasticine appearance of the cheese
• Tamale Pockets (Chicken Chorizo and Bean, Cheese & Salsa Verde varieties) - A modern take on the old rock-hard lunch line burrito, the Tamale Pockets featured a softer shell and interesting, tasty fillings.
• Tomato Soup - Methinks I even spied a flake or two of basil floating around in there! Very nice flavor.
• Vegetarian Chili Mix - Yes, people. It had beans. And it was delicious.

More >>

Granted, it looks like pure death. But it's tasty!

​Poring over the short menu at the recently reopened Spindletop (1200 Louisiana, 713-654-1234) last week, something odd caught my eye. There, listed next to the cumin-rubbed rack of lamb, was a phrase I hadn't seen used in quite a long time: Mexican truffle.

Mexican truffle is a very rosy-sounding term for what is actually corn smut, better known in its native country as huitlacoche. But, said chef L.J. Wiley, "it doesn't taste like truffles."

"I think the reason people use the term is because it's a fungus," Wiley explained. "And for lack of a better term to describe it." Because although huitlacoche does have a striking earthy yet creamy funk to it that's not all that dissimilar from truffles, it's extremely far removed from them in terms of potency and price.

Wiley, who was recently the executive chef at Yelapa Playa Mexicana, offered huitlacoche on his menu with a skillet-fried chicken. It was a huge hit among his customers, most of whom weren't fazed by the term when seen on the menu. "A few people had questions about it," Wiley says, "but you just train the servers to explain what it is. I'm not going to say the servers didn't use the term Mexican truffle, but I left that to the servers to explain that it's a Mexican fungus with a funky, earthy flavor."

Like Yelapa, many restaurants in Houston -- such as Backstreet Cafe, Julia's Bistro and Hugo's -- have long served the item on their menus. And as a result, many Houston diners are far more accustomed to restaurants using the name "huitlacoche" rather than "Mexican truffle," which was first coined by the Los Angeles Times in 1988.

The following year, the James Beard Foundation held a now-famous dinner in which huitlacoche was the star ingredient. The purpose? To familiarize Americans with the delicious corn smut and to encourage use of the far fancier term "Mexican truffle." It was reasoned that upscale diners would be more receptive to the ingredient if it called to mind another high-end ingredient.

Back in the 1980s, the era of excess and pride in being completely out of touch with your food, this was a pretty great idea. And considering some of the awful (if hilarious) press it's received in the past, an image makeover was probably for the best.

But these days? It seems a little silly to me. Call a spade a spade. Right?

More >>

Photo courtesy of lifestyleasia.com

​Look carefully at the photo above. That's not a used, partially-filled condom. (Thank God.)

It's actually an entirely edible, fake condom on faux sand. And it's the brainchild of "Demon Chef" Alvin Leung of Bo Innovation, who created the presentation at Identita Golose, a yearly culinary convention and trade show in Milan.

Hong Kong-based restaurant Bo Innovation and Chef Leung are probably more well known to American audiences from an appearance on Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations, but both restaurant and chef are world-renowned for incredibly innovative and often futuristic dishes that take months to perfect and verge on high art.

However, it looks as if Chef Leung is about to be known for something even more befitting his rock-and-roll persona: the edible condom, which he's coined "Sex on the Beach."

More >>

You'll never know what gets you in Texas

Between tainted peanuts and fatal spinach, we feel like there have been a lot of Texas food scares lately. But it's the stuff we don't hear about that gave Texas a failing grade in a new study of how states report icky food outbreaks.

If you live in Texas and eat food, you will probably die, or at least become violently ill. That's what we're taking away from a study that gives the Lone Star state an "F" in reporting outbreaks of foodborne illness.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest studied ten years' worth of CDC data and decided that the more reporting of such outbreaks a state has, the more likely it is to have a swift-acting, effective public health system.

Because Texas only reported an average of one outbreak per one million people, we apparently blow. Our fellow flunkies in the back row include Arizona, Arkansas, Nevada, Indiana and Kentucky, and eight others. Wyoming, home to a few dozen people and a shitload of cattle, got an "A."

More >>

Snack time at the institution!

​By now, you may have seen the original Women Laughing Alone with Salads meme. Or perhaps its spinoff meme: Men Laughing Alone with Salads. No? Then please take a moment to acquaint yourself with these, my most favorite food-related memes in a while.

Ads are absurd enough as it is. When the stock photo used for the ad is removed from within the framework of the ad itself and is forced to stand alone, it becomes even more sublimely bizarre. Who are these mad women holding salads aloft and contorting their faces in forced glee? THEY ARE US.

At least, the us that we want to be after being surrounded with ads all day long. The us that we're told to be, eating these salads alone with ecstasy that borders on mania. Happy consumers! Happy, slim consumers!

This kind of existential little project -- removing the context surrounding an ad and thereby stripping the ad of its power, admitting that it's a subtle form of mind control -- may not have been what Hairpin intended when it put the initial series together. They may have just found these women amusing.

And they are. So in that same vein, we present our own take on the meme (one that's far more fitting for Eating Our Words): Women Being Suggestive with Burgers.

More >>

This...probably won't happen to your friendly local farm. Geez, Alex Jones...

​Yesterday afternoon, President Obama signed what's being called "one of the most expansive food regulation bills in living memory," the Food Safety Modernization Act (FMSA), effectively creating a new arm of the Food & Drug Administration that will allow the agency to actively attempt to prevent outbreaks of foodborne illnesses instead of simply responding to them.

Although only 5,000 people a year die from outbreaks such as these -- remember the E. Coli-infected spinach that killed five people back in 2006? -- a stunning 76 million people get sick from eating contaminated food each year in the United States. Seventy-six million. Per year.

To this end, the FMSA -- formerly (and more popularly) known as Senate Bill S. 510 -- seeks to actively prevent such outbreaks from occurring, and that begins with holding food companies and manufacturers accountable for any contamination of their products as well as inspecting both domestic and imported food on a regular basis. And, for the first time ever, the FDA will finally be able to force recalls of contaminated food. As Lauren Marmaduke put it last month, "all recalls to date have been voluntary."

Jean Halloran, the director of food policy initiatives at Consumers Union, put it best when she was quoted by Consumer Reports yesterday:

It's a great day for consumers. When common foods like spinach and peanut products have to be pulled from stores because people are dying, clearly, there's a problem. This legislation will go a long way toward making our food safer.

But what of the supposed "dark side" of the food safety bill? The side that its opponents claim will destroy the organic farming movement in the U.S.? The side that claims seed banks will become illegal? The side that has set up agricultural biotech conglomerate Monsanto as the Emperor Palpatine behind this new bill?

More >>

​The plant was filthy and infested with vermin, with holes as large as 2 ½ feet in the ceilings leaking water and runoff from the air conditioner units onto the finished product stored below. Records posted on the web by attorney Bill Marler show that executives at Peanut Corporation of America (a.k.a. King Nut and Parnell's Pride) were aware that their product had tested positive for salmonella on 12 different occasions dating as far back as June 2007, but they continued to ship it anyway. Even after people started dying. It wasn't until January 13, 2009 that a press release was issued announcing the voluntary nationwide recall of their peanut butter. Halfway down the document, the following statement appeared, underlined for emphasis: "None of the peanut butter being recalled is sold directly to consumers through retail stores."

But by that time the contaminated peanut butter had made its way into products from more than 200 companies that were being sold directly to consumers through retail stores, primarily in the form of candies and cookies marketed to children and served at nursing homes. In addition, companies like Westco Fruit and Nuts put off recalling potentially contaminated products for weeks, despite repeated requests from the F.D.A. In all, 20,000 Americans were infected with salmonella from peanut butter in 2008 and 2009, half under the age of 16, one-fifth under the age of 5, all thanks to the negligent practices of one plant.

More >>

Ground nutmeg: KILL IT WITH FIRE

​Just in time for the Christmas holidays, nutmeg has been recalled. Unlike the seasonally inopportune great canned pumpkin shortage of November 2009, nutmeg will be scarce for at least a little while thanks to a potential salmonella contamination. And trust me on this one: You do not want salmonella poisoning.

Ground nutmeg processed by the Mincing Overseas Spice Company out of New Jersey and sold under the Whole Foods 365 label or the Frontier label is the specific target of the nutmeg recall. The spice was apparently contaminated somewhere between its arrival in New Jersey from Indonesia and its shipment to Whole Foods and other grocery stores across the country.

Luckily, that seems to be the worst of the matter. Commenting on the situation via email, Whole Foods' Ashley Hawkins said of the contamination that "no illnesses have been reported." Still, any "bad" nutmeg you have on hand needs to be tossed.

More >>