News to Chew

Credibility is what it’s all about, and when all else fails, what do you do? You put out your own wine label. Such is the case with 1980s iconic hair rock band, Whitesnake. Fronted by throaty David Coverdale, the band always seemed to lack that music cred even with chart-topping hits like “Here I Go Again” (remember the Tawny Kitaen videos?). Mind you the News to Chew editorial staff are big Whitesnake fans, never passing up the chance to crank up the FM radio when “Fool for Your Loving” surfaces. Yeah, the ’80s were great.

Anyway, now the band (yes, it is still around) hits the shelves not with a new album but with a more refined product, a 2008 Whitesnake zinfandel corked by the Dennis de la Montanya vineyard in the Russian River area of California. And how is it? Well, at $30 a pop, it ain’t no Two-Buck Chuck. Or as the esteemed Mr. Coverdale says:

“It’s a bodacious, cheeky little wine, filled to the brim with the spicy essence of sexy, slippery Snakeyness … I recommend it to complement any & all grown up friskiness & hot tub jollies …

Is this love? … I believe it is …”

Cheeky monkey he is, isn’t he? I’d say Whitesnake has finally arrived.

Just some news to chew on.

We at News to Chew are lactose intolerant, so we consume soy milk out of necessity. I mean, how else are we to enjoy our Cap’n Crunch and grande lattes every morning? So, it amused us to no end when we came across the recent faux pas/Freudian slip from Fox 5 anchor Rosanna Scotto in her ad lib to come up with another name for soy milk during her Good Morning New York broadcast.

OK, seems there’s some talk allowing the word “milk” to be associated with an animal’s lactating excretion (i.e. cow’s, goat’s, mother’s), so soy milk needs another identifier. And as only can be found on local news, the banter between anchors was at once embarrassing and hilarious.

As co-anchor Greg Kelly suggest changing the name to “soy juice,” Scotto blurts out, “or soy jism!” Now, as all men, Penthouse Forum readers, or Howard Stern fans know, jism is a common slang for ejaculate. What makes the impromptu verbal ejaculation so amusing is that it came (pun intended) not from the male, but from the female in the group. And the fact that Kelly’s suggestion or the word juice prompted Scotto’s retort of “jism!”

Hmmm…could it be that Scotto often uses the word in her bedroom banter? Naughty, naughty girl! At the same time, we can’t promise the next time we order up a coffee drink we wont let slip to order a grande latte with a shot of soy jism. Thanks a lot, Rosanna.

Just some news to chew on.

Check it out for yourself below.

OK. We’ll be the first to admit it – the crew at News to Chew has been bereft at our duty of poking a fork into food news of late. But we’re back, and we’re recharged and ready to point out the weirdness that is food.

Anyway, aside from bacon, chicken wings are one of our favorite foods. Ever. Buffalo wings, hot wings – it’s the perfect bar food, chomping down, primal gnawing at the bone: Nom, nom, nom, nom. And we’ve noticed over the years that chicken wings are offered up everywhere. Hell, 7-Eleven serves ‘m up.

Mmmmm…Nom, nom, nom, nom

Now, supposedly there’s a chicken wing shortage going on when the crisis hit the news last fall. But apparently, it’s ongoing because USA Today ran yet another chicken wing shortage story, saying the once lowly throwaway body part is in such demand that prices have skyrocketed.

Apparently, we are over our breast obsession – we have become insatiable over wings.

The primary factor driving up wing prices is the growing number of restaurants, including many national chains, that are adding wings to their offerings, says Richard Lobb, spokesman for the Washington-based chicken industry trade group the National Chicken Council.

According to the Agriculture Department, the average wholesale price of wings in 2009 was $1.47 a pound, up 39% from 2008 and the highest it has been, adjusted for inflation, since the mid-1970s.

So, what’s the alternative? A four-winged chicken? Cool as that might be, some people would be creeped out by such a mutant.

Boneless Buffalo wings? Shame on trying to co-op the name. It’s wings or nothing for us, and yeah, we’re willing to pay the higher prices – but not in a foodie kind of way. It’s a small price to pay for keeping in touch with our primal instincts. Grrrr….nom, nom, nom. That’s why.

Who knows? Maybe one day the breast will be the throwaway part of the chicken. And then we’ll become breast obsessed again. Mmmm…nom, nom, nom….

Just some news to gnaw, er, chew on.

So, you get saddled with cooking the Thanksgiving turkey, but you also have to transport it to Grandma’s house 200 mies away. A real pain, right? Well, cooking is all about efficiencies, especially something as stressful as Thanksgiving dinner. So, why don’t you just roast the turkey on the way to the gathering – in your car’s engine. Really. We’re not kidding.

Actually, it’s the idea behind the book, Manifold Destiny (Simon and Schuster), by Chris Maynard and Bill Scheller, who created this the guide to cooking on your car engine. According to a USAToday.com article, the book explains how to prepare, foil wrap and tuck an uncooked dinner into various places under your car’s hood so that your casserole or roast is sizzling hot and waiting when you arrive.

Now, is it possible to tackle a whole turkey dinner under your hood? Well, sorta.  But a breast, complete with potatoes, shouldn’t require much more than 200 miles or so. And you’ll have the full aroma of a roasting turkey and potatoes during your entire drive.

Check out the full recipe for “To Grandmother’s House Road Turkey” right here.

Just some news to chew on. And Happy Thanksgiving from the News to Chew staff.

We came across this New York Times article recently about how no matter how pretty a bakery cake can look, its sentiment can get completely ruined with pastry misspellings. Oh, you know you’ve seen them – the first birthday cake spelled “Frist.” Stuff like that.

More importantly, the article pointed out a popular blog, Cake Wrecks by Jen Yates, that documents cake disasters from your bakery around the corner. We’re talking Cake Boss gone to hell. We check out Cake Wrecks and came away chuckling – not only were many of these “designs” of dubious merit, but we especially love the narrative supplied to the pictures. It’s right up our snarky alley, indeed.

But back to the NYT article – gotta love this one:

Best Wishes Suzanne

Under Neat that

We will Miss you

Reminds us of that old joke: “Repeat after me. ‘I (your name) …’” and then you repeat “your name” instead of saying your name. Better yet:

When a customer brought in a USB flash drive and asked a bakery to print out a digital picture from it to use on a cake for an office party, the baker instead made an edible version of the flash drive itself. A picture of the resulting cake, accurately frosted in silver and black, is probably the most forwarded image on the blog. (see image above)

No shit. And until they invent a pastry icing bag with spell check (Hmmm? Light bulb moment?), it looks like Jen Yates at Cake Wrecks is never going to be at a loss for fodder.

Just some news to chew on.

BOOKMAN: Who doesn’t have instant coffee?
JERRY: I don’t.
BOOKMAN: You buy a jar of Folger’s Crystals, you put it in the cupboard, you forget about it. Then later on when you need it, it’s there. It lasts forever. It’s freeze-dried. Freeze-dried Crystals.

There’s some sort of irony or something going on here. You know, Starbucks – it of the McDonald’s-like ubiquity – conditions the world that so-so, overpriced brewed coffee is something we can’t live without. So when SB came out last week with their (heavily advertised) VIA instant coffee, it struck the News to Chew news desk as, well, weird.

C’mon. Instant coffee? From Starbucks?

That’s like saying, “Ya know, we’ve branded ourselves as the best coffee around, but we’ve expanded and overexposed ourselves to the point of mediocrity so we’re going to pull back your expectations with this new product we have – instant coffee.”

I mean, my parents drink instant coffee – a product of their generation. And they’re in their 80s. So, Starbucks is taking on Taster’s Choice or Nescafe? Maybe it’s a brilliant marketing strategy – they’re closing outlets everywhere, so now they’re entering a more dormant revenue stream.

Now, the Starbucks advertising and hype is saying you can’t taste the difference between VIA and their fresh-brewed coffee. So NTC decided to give it a try. And the verdict? Not bad, actually. In fact, it was better then the fresh brewed you’ll get at certain times of the day at Starbucks. It might be worth keeping a few packs in the cupboard at work or home.

Who knows? Maybe instant will be the new coffee trend? And then Folgers Crystals will be the new hipster anti-VIA coffee?

Just some news to chew on.

At News to Chew, we are of the thinking that bacon makes anything better. And we are proven once again to be right from this report in Britain’s the Argus: A rasher of bacon was found in a returned book to a library in Worthing by a librarian. The lender had the will power to use a slice to hold his or her place in the book, but apparently had to return the book before finishing – both the bacon and the book.

Now, it seems using bacon as a bookmark isn’t all that unusual – there seems to be a website devoted to the odd items people use to mark their place in their books. As Laine Farley writes:

The list of found items ranges from expected objects like tickets, letters, grocery lists, bobby pins, photos and money to more unusual items such as bullets, condoms and a laminated cockroach. A recurring theme is finding a slice of bacon, sometimes cooked, sometimes raw. In one case it was described as “book jerky” because it had been in the book so long.

News alert: we never knew a slice of bacon is actually called a rasher. See? Bacon makes you smarter, too!

Just some news to chew on.

If you ever wondered how much professional football players can eat, then here’s a good example direct from News to Chew headquarters city, San Diego. As is often the tradition with NFL teams, each year’s highly touted, first-round draft pick is obligated to buy dinner for his veteran team mates. Well, San Diego Charger rookie linebacker Larry English recently brought his mates to dine out and thanks to linebacker Shaun Phillips’ tweet, we get to see the check for dinner: $14,508.67.

Yes, you read it right, $14.5K! Then again, English signed for some $13 million, so he can afford it. In fact, according to Yahoo Sports, Shawne Merriman says that after he was drafted, his rookie dinner cost him $32,000. On the other hand, QB bust Ryan Leaf refused to pay up so Junior Seau stole his credit card to pay the bill – a measly $3,000 by comparison.

Best part? The bill shows one person ordered a raspberry sorbet. We guess they needed to cleanse their palate between troughs.

Just some news to chew on.

Now, we at News to Chew are not averse to obscenely unhealthy fried foods (topped with bacon, at that). But when we heard about this from one of our NTC stringers, well, we grabbed our chest in anticipatory pain. Because the thought of eating deep-fried butter is just…wrong.

Our friends at Slashfood.com tracked down the purveyor, deep-fried state fair maestro Albert Gonzales:

Gonzales, who has twice won top honors in the State Fair of Texas’ annual contest for best new midway food, is back this year with deep-fried butter, a dish that’s drawing gasps from even the most hard-arteried eaters. The snack will go up against fried peanut-butter-cup macaroons, deep-fried peaches and cream, fried stuffed peppers and fried pork chips with gravy for the Big Tex crown this Monday.

And it comes in four flavors.

Ya, that’s right, four flavors of deep fried butter: original, garlic, cherry and grape. According to Slashfood, Gonzales wraps butter in dough before frying, so the finished product resembles an especially greasy biscuit.

“It’s similar to having a dinner roll with a lot of butter,” Gooding says. “It’s very good.”

Well, OK. It can’t be any worse than the Krispy Kreme deep fried chicken sandwich, right? Right? We’ll just be ready to dial 911 after we try it.

But we draw the line at deep-fried bacon fat. Really, we do.

Just some news to chew on.

Well, if ever there was a mismatch made in heaven it is this: Taco Bell in Bangalore, India. It’s even weirder than seeing Taco Bell in Mexico City. But yeah, that’s what you’ll see come October, when Yum! Restaurants, one of the biggest fast-food franchisers, launches the Fourth Meal to an unsuspecting Indian public.

According to a report in the Business Standard, Yum! is looking to tap the young consumer segment with Taco Bell’s Mexican offerings as part of its effort to increase its footprint in the estimated $1-billion Indian fast food market.

“The first Taco Bell restaurant will be opened in Bangalore sometime in October. It will offer the latest Mexican delights customised for the tastes of the Indian consumers,” Yum Restaurants India Managing Director (Indian Subcontinent) Niren Chaudhary said. “The Indian customer is waiting for new concepts in the quick service restaurant (QSR) segment. Besides, the Mexican delicacies will have a sure market in India with their spicy food,” Chaudhary said.

Yeah, uh-huh. Of course, the Taco Bell presence might appeal to those American tourists, eager to relive a “Slum Dog Millionaire” experience but with a homesick craving a delicious enchirito, or chalupa. Curry? Forget that! Get us a volcano taco!

We just wish Taco Bell had Padma Lakshmi munching their food instead of Carl’s Jr.

Just some news to chew on.