This handy infographic is for my charming wife, who sees nothing wrong with using the boning knife as a screwdriver or chopping vegetables with a paring knife.

The annual Paris Cookbook Fair tradeshow was held earlier this month, and Fast Company says that cookbook sales were up 10% in the U.S. and Europe in 2010.

I don’t know why, but I would have expected Attilla The Hun to be a big red wine kind of guy. This post from a group blog called Poemas del rio Wang offers a glimpse of what you might find on the wine shelves in your average supermarket in Azerbaijan. I wonder if they carry wine-in-a-pouch there, too.

Here’s a few kitchen products and reviews for your information and consideration:

• Serious Eats looked at a number of cookie sheets to see which ones they liked best and concluded that your basic no-frills aluminum half-sheet pan from Nordic Ware is still the best all-around choice.
• This 3-in-1 peeler got some attention when it came out a few months ago, mostly for its coolio design, but I have to say it seems to me like one of those things that looks a lot better than it performs, and the 2-star review on Amazon doesn’t dissuade me of that.
• Remember the Anal-Retentive Chef from Saturday Night Live? He would have LOVED this cutting board, which has gridded rulers and angles on it so you can keep every single bit of your mirepoix diced EXACTLY the same size. But does it come with its own cutting board cozy for storage?

My blog-buddies at GenXtinct caught wind of an Internet rumor that Quaker Foods was going to stop making Cap’n Crunch cereal, but they say that Quaker also heard about it and has launched a bit of a PR campaign to restore the brand’s awareness, including the inescapable Facebook page. I don’t know about you, but I would absolutely shell out four bucks for a bad-ass box of premium Cap’n Crunch like the picture above.

Vs.

Kansas Wine

If you must wear this cool swim cap, do remember to avoid zombies. (thanks, Gigi!)

I’ll take two, please.

I loves me some whoopie pies, and I loves me some caramel. So I gotta think that this recipe for salted-caramel buttercream whoopie pies just can’t suck. What? You’re not up to speed on the wonderment that is salted caramel? Quel dommage! Salted caramel is presently high on the list of trendy foods that every trendy foodie needs to know. It’s pretty much what it sounds like — caramel with a little bit of salt added as it is nearly cooled so that the salt doesn’t dissolve into the caramel but remains crystallized so that as you eat the caramel you get little bursts of salty flavor. The saltiness both enhances and contrasts the sweetness of the caramel. Obviously, you have to use salt that comes in large crystals or flakes, such as Kosher salt, to get the effect. The first time I ever tried salted caramel, it was in a gift box of gourmet goodies from France that my friend Tony sent me for Christmas about ten years ago. At first, I was underwhelmed, but it grew on me so that by the time I was near the end of the box of wrapped caramels, I was hooked. And as far as whoopie pies go, that’s just part of growing up in Maine (the birthplace of the whoopie pie). The whoopie pie filling recipe just calls for a little regular table salt, which I think would defeat the purpose of trying to recreate the experience of salted caramels, so you might consider going Kosher for these.

See the pretty birdie? It’s a pugo, also called a Worcester’s buttonquail, and it used to live on the island of Luzon in the Philippines. I say “used to” because the pugo has been listed as unobserved by ornithologists for some time and was thought to be extinct. Then this little fellow turned up in a hunter’s catch. This photo, in fact, is the only known photo in existence of a live pugo; previously there were only naturalists’ drawings of the bird.

And so what do you expect happened to this literal rara avis, who could quite possibly be the very last individual of his entire species? Oh, yeah, you got it…they killed and ate it.

Writing in the Times of London, columnist Camilla Cavendish complains about eating habits in the U.K. revolving more and more around fast food and take-aways from the supermarket and the value of rediscovering “real” food (preferrably local) as well as the joys of preparing your own meals at home. It’s a common charge these days in Britain, which is catching up to us in our gluttonous obsession with fake food. Here, of course, people who call for eating less fast food and getting back to cooking at home are castigated as looney liberals or elitist snobs, but in the U.K. they’re not quite so far gone yet that these sort of arguments can still be had in earnest and capitalize on the support of celebrity chefs like Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay. If you read the link I had earlier this week about the tomato workers of Immokalee, Florida, you’d see why it’s worth paying attention to in this country as well.

One more reason cooking is good for you: The Economist cites research by Harvard professor Dr. Richard Wrangham, who offers fossil evidence that cooking food is the mechanism that allowed the early hominids to experience rapid and significant brain development, resulting in the evolution of those hominids into modern homo sapiens. Coquo, ergo sum, as it were. I’ll bet Dr. Wrangham buys stuff at Cardullo’s.
Ogden Nash famously wrote “Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker”, so the obvious thing to do is combine them. Cybele the Candy Blogger recently posted about a pair of chocolate candies, one filled with whiskey and the other filled with orange-flavored Cointreau. Liqueur-filled chocolates are not big sellers in the American candy market, where we have to be thinking of the children all the time, but I love the taste of Cointreau over most other orange liqueurs and will have to set out looking for them sometime soon. Chambourd would be good, too, I imagine.
Unquestionably, Robert Parker has been the most influential person in the world of wine in the last half-century. But, as inevitably happens with figures who become so overwhelmingly dominant in their spheres, the time comes for backlash. Via Grace Lee, the Depraved Librarian, (who almost never posts anymore, sadly), here is a link to a story in Conde Nast Portfolio about the growing unwillingness among winemakers and wine merchants to subject their wines to his point-scale scoring. Much has been written about Parker’s notorious fondness for “big reds” and how his influence on American consumers has pressured a lot of winemakers, especially in France, to tinker with their formulas (Americian wineries tend to favor “big reds” in the first place, but between the change in tastes and the overall drop in sales for French wines, they’ve been compelled to be more reactive). Now there’s a reappreciation for subtler wines, and a desire among winemakers to not feel so much market pressure, and Step One for them is ignoring Parker.

Via Gael at Pop Culture Junk Mail comes this link to a piece in Time Magazine by Joel Stein wherein he, his wife, and popular wine critic Gary Vaynerchuk sampled and critiqued 50 wines, one from each state in the U.S.

It’s interesting to discover that there is apparently at least one winery in every state of the Union. Many of them do not have their own vineyards, they buy the grapes and then make their own blends of juices to produce whatever varieties of wine they hope to sell. Quite a few make wine from fruits other than grapes, and in those cases they do indeed often grow their own fruit. Most of the wineries only sell their products locally. Stein doesn’t say how they managed to choose the wines they sampled, or why one winery might have been chosen over another, so the rankings that he ends up with need to be viewed as only being representative of the particular wines involved and NOT the quality of winemaking in each state.

I tell you this because one of the wines they deemed “undrinkable” came from Massachusetts (see the image above). The wine, a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc called “Nobksa Red” comes from the Cape Cod Winery in Falmouth. But there are half a dozen or so wineries in Massachusetts, at least one of which I know produces some excellent wines.

Here’s an interactive gallery of all the wines they tried. You can click on each bottle for a closeup image and a short review of that particular wine, and you can also display them grouped by their ratings (excellent, good, bad, and undrinkable). One of their favorites was a Muscat from Jewell Towne Vineyards in New Hampshire, only about a half an hour’s ride from our house. They also make a port and a couple of different varieties of eiswein (ice wine). I think I’ll have to go check them out sometime.

Well here’s a new twist on buying wine online: AccidentalWine.com is sort of like the fire-damage department store chain of wine. They buy product that has such merchandising no-nos as damaged labels, out-of-date brnading elements, or other minor defects that do not affect the quality of the wine but do make the bottles unsuitable for conventional retail sale. Then they sell it online at discounted prices. If it works for TJ Maxx, it should work for them, right?

There are a couple of things to pay attention to, though. The first is that you don’t get to choose what wines you buy. They’ve very vaguely organized the wines they sell into three categories based on three sets of “tastes”, but the tastes aren’t even defined by readily identifiable styles such as “Big Reds” or “Citrusy Whites” or by region. One says “…very good wines with reputation and breeding but old fashioned pricing…”, another says “…great wines from around the world as one who appreciates the artistic works of great winemakers…”, and the third says “…great wines with good value, because the doctor (smart guy) demands I drink a glass of wine everyday. These prices help my budget.” That third category in particular makes me think of Two-Buck Chuck, but those are kinda fuzzy ways to identify wines. So you pick which categoy you prefer, and they send you a case (or as many as you want to buy, I guess) of whatever they have that fits that description. Kind of like telling a car dealer “I want something blue that seats four” and letting him decide whether he’ll give you a 2008 Mercedes or a 1953 Buick. At least with this wine thing, you *can* specify white, red, a mix, or a “surprise me” case.

Also note that “discount” does not mean “cheap”. You want Two-Buck Chuck, go to Trader Joe’s. A shipment of three bottles is $67.00 (not including S&H). That means you’re paying a little over $22 per bottle. The webite says that the average retail price of the wines they sell in the 3-packs is $84/bottle, so that is a pretty steep discount off the original price. Unless I’m buying a bottle for a special occasion, though, my typical price point for wine is more in the $12 range. I probably would try this with the hope that I would get some really nice wines for a price that isn’t totally out of my league, but if you’re not among the adventuresome wine drinkers, you might think twice.