The Japanese LOOOOOOVE Kit Kats. But the Japanese also have some very different ideas about what makes a great candy bar. Weird Asia News has put together this infographic listing all the various flavors of Kit Kat available in Japan. According to them, there are 87 varieties available, and the flavors range from apple and bubblegum (made with blue chocolate) to mashed soy bean and grilled corn.

Some of them sound pretty good to me, like maple syrup and salted caramel, but I’m not so sure about cucumber or edamame.

You wouldn’t think chicken things would be so expensive, but maybe that includes the Coke.

Maine shrimp are small and sweet, and they are usually only available fresh for a few weeks in winter. The catch is traditionally sort of a holdover season for the local fishermen, who would otherwise not be fishing during those weeks. Last year, however, the state Department of Marine Resources decided that the number of shrimp was so abundant that they let the season linger on until May. The fishermen caught 13 million pounds of shrimp last year, but now officials are saying that the catch was waaaaay too big and has resulted in depleted stocks, so they’re limiting the catch to only a third of that – 4.4 million pounds. The regulators are using a couple of schemes to help stretch out the length of the season, but the conventional wisdom says that most of the quota will have been caught by the end of the month.

Lots of people in New England, myself included, eagerly anticipate the arrival of the little Maine shrimp every winter, but they’ll probably find the price pretty steep if the catch is only a third of what it was last year.

Online trend-watcher mag EcoSalon recently had this article about “The 10 Types Of Foodies”. It’s mostly on-track, although even the writer can’t really make any distinction between Number 1 and Number 10. I suppose her editor wouldn’t accept a “Top Nine” list.

I have to cop to being at least five of the ten nine at one point or another in my foodie phase. The one phase she’s missing, that I definitely went through, was the “knows every unknown spot in town”. In big cities, where there’s a lot of genuinely first-rate high-end dining, you earn a lot of foodie cred for knowing the local scene.

I consider myself sort of post-foodie now. I gave up serious cooking, I can’t afford high-end dining, and having tried all those local joints I can’t be bothered to go back to the majority of them. I never take pictures of food anymore. I rarely bother with wine, and now that I’m lactose-intolerant I have to curtail my cheese eating quite substantially. Being able to buy pretty much anything you could possibly want online has diminished the thrill of scoring hard-to-find items, and I was never much for weird exotic things in the first place. It’s a lot simpler.

If you’re Jewish, you know there is nothing that trumps tradition. And there is no greater Jewish tradition than going out to the movies and Chinese food on Christmas Day while all the goyim are at home for once, thank God.

Smithsonian Magazine food blogger Jesse Rhodes speculates on how and why American Jews developed such an affinity for Chinese food (A lot of which, let’s face it, is treyf. Oy! So much pork!). There’s even a link to a study by a pair of sociologists named Tuchman and Levine (such nice Jewish names!) looking at the interplay of Jewish and Chinese immigrant communities in New York City, with some frankly dubious assertions, but no mention of the obvious: the Chinese restaurants were the only ones open on Christmas!

Since Christmas and Chanukkah more or less crossover this year, does this mean even the Jews will be staying home on Christmas Day and eating latkes instead of eggroll? Who’s gonna go with me to the movies?

Whenever we make spaghetti, my wife complains that I don’t make enough, even though I usually make half a box (which, technically, should serve four). This spaghetti measurer ought to solve that problem.

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You’ll want to look at the larger version to see the detail, but it’s a three-dimensional graph of assorted recipes for baked goods plotted according to the amounts of the core ingredients of baking — flour, sugar, and eggs — are in them.

The Boston Globe explains that this is the work of Harvard mathematician Michael Brenner, stemming from his involvement in the groundbreaking “Food and Science” molecular gastronomy course there. Being a quant guy, Brenner noticed the distribution of various ingredients across recipes and wondered how they related to one another in graphic form. His plot shows some interesting things about the way baking recipes are put together, and, he suggests, might push baking into new areas as it shows untried combinations.