Happy Fourth of July everyone. To get you ready and to help distract you from your job for the remaining hours before the holiday weekend, I offer up these tasty links for your gustatory and procrastinatory enjoyment. I hope that you all have an excellent weekend and that you follow those wise words of advice from The Simpsons and “celebrate your country’s independence by blowing up a small part of it.”

101 Fast Recipes for Grilling: This one has been flying around the internets like wildfire 2.0, but it’s great, so I thought I’d repeat it here just in case you missed it. I know that lots of you will be firing up the grill this weekend (or at least standing near someone who will be), and this list has some great ideas if you’re sick of burgers and Ballparks. I particularly want to try #21: Quick Grilled Pickle and #85: Glorified Grilled Cheese.

The Food Lab: This is just one link, but it’s hours worth of good reading. Each entry in this new series on Serious Eats takes a thorough and scientific approach to a dish or a cooking question. The writing is good and the experiments are generally fascinating. Recent examples include using green food coloring to show how hot potatoes absorb seasoning better than cool ones and burning breadcrumbs to demonstrate the uneven cooking that happens in a convection oven. It’s great.

Dear FloFab: I don’t know what it says about me that two of these three links are from the New York Times. Maybe it makes me a member of the liberal elite? Whatever. I wasn’t going to leave you without Florence Fabricant’s sassy new food/etiquette advice column. She is one frosty biatch, and the results are hilarious. Her advice to a reader who wanted ideas on how to slow down her boyfriend’s eating? “Try being a wittier conversationalist.” Youch.

From my friend Daniel. Hope you like it.

Midtown Lunch is a blog dedicated to finding a delicious lunch near your office. It started out covering midtown Manhattan, but has now expanded to include downtown Manhattan and Philadelphia, with more cities on the way.

Along with my coworker and FJ contributor Chris, I am half of the team covering downtown NYC, and I would love for readers of this blog to do the following things: (1) Check it out. (2) If you work in one of these areas, add us to your bookmarks or RSS. (3) If you work in one of these area AND have favorite places to eat, let me know. (4) If you have friends who work in one of these areas, let THEM know about the site.

Thanks loyal readers!

Kevin

Every once in a while I find a site or article deserving of an entire post’s worth of discussion, but far more often I found something neat that grabs my attention that doesn’t merit nearly that much discussion. So that’s what this is for: Cool food-related bookmarks that I’ve never gotten around to sharing in a full post.

Up this week: Tips for how to save and organize recipes that you find online, food for people with their jaws wired shut, a gorgeous blog aggregator, and the way restaurants design menus to get you to order what they want.

Saving and Organizing Digital Recipes
I’m a little bit Type A, and I’m a lot Type A about certain things. In an ideal world, all of my recipes would be stored in some kind of tag-based online database, but the product I want just isn’t out there right know. I once actually – and no I’m really not kidding – tried to build a SQL database for my recipes, but I got bored and gave up. I’m still looking for a good way to organize  all of the tasty things that I find and bookmark online, but this is a decent start. I don’t have a Mac, so Quicksilver is unavailable to me, but I think the way she suggest using del.icio.us is interesting. I’d love to hear from other obsessives out there who have good ideas.

Food for People with their Jaws Wired Shut
The blog Jaws Wired Shut must be a godsend for people in its target demographic. I’ve never made one of their recipes, but I love how well they’ve defined a niche for themselves and stuck with it. They don’t post regularly, but the site is still alive; and like my high school biology teacher said of elephant guns, “it’s not something you’re likely to need often, but when you need it, you’ll need it rather badly.”

A Pretty Website Guaranteed to Make You Hungry
Just when I think my photography is getting better,  I find a site like this that aggregates gorgeous photos from food blogs all around the web, all of which put my pics to shame.  Just look at it. You’ll be hooked.

The Theories Behind Menu Design and An Example
Think a restaurant’s menu is just a pretty way of presenting what the chef is cooking? Think again, boy-o. Menus are complex and carefully thought-out ways to get you to spend more money. Based on psychological research and created with the help of “menu engineers,” menus take advantage of how your brain works to get you to order those high margin dishes that keep restaurants in business. The first link is an article from the times that gives a good intro to menu science and the second is an interactive analysis of the Balthazar menu from New York Magazine. Both are fascinating.

That’s it for now. I hope you like the links, and please share any delicious (de.lic.ious) links you may stumble upon. Or StumbleUpon. Happy Holidays.

Check it out.

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Here’s a really interesting op-ed from Michael Pollan, from this past Sunday’s NY Times. I’ve always known that America’s eating habits have dire consequences on America’s health, but had never quite put the pieces together as he does in this article, basically advocating pitting the food lobby against the health care lobby and seeing who wins (and hoping health care does).

The logic goes like this: America is fatter than other countries, which means America is also unhealthier than other countries. Under the current health care system, it’s in the health care industry’s interest for America to be unhealthy, because that’s how they make money (prescription drugs, medical technology, etc.), and because insurers can just dump patients with chronic conditions or up their rates. BUT, if the system changes, forcing the health care industry to provide for everyone equally, then it won’t be in insurers’ interest anymore for Americans to be unhealthy. They will want healthy Americans (shocker), and that means they won’t want fat Americans, and that means that they won’t want fast food, and other forms of junk food. And that means they’ll have to take on the food industry.

I like this op-ed because it does everything that foodie politics often fails to do: it mentions really concrete statistics, it follows a course of logic based in pragmatism, rather than emotion or morality, and, most of all, it offers an innovative, practical solution. I’m all for emotions and morality, but when it comes to sustainable food and health practices, money talks. I’m happy to see the ostensible king of food politics really starting to imagine some hardball.

I am a big fan of Google Reader, which is a very nice RSS reader, which, in turn, is a very nice tool that’s let you look at all the blogs you like to read in one convenient place. It makes your procrastinating much more efficient.

It also has a lot of handy little features, including the ability to “star” a blog post so you can find it easily later. This is very handy for those of us who troll blogs looking for things to cook. I’d been starring things for  a while without really sifting through them, until one day recently when I was entirely devoid of ideas for dinner. Flipping through the 25 or 30 posts that I had marked over the previous couple months, I was surprised to realize that over 75% were from just one of the dozen or so food blogs I read regularly: smitten kitchen.

While there are a lot of food blogs out there that I like, and I think each (including this one!) has something good and unique to offer, smitten kitchen is the level to which I (and I think Claire as well) aspire. The photography is stunning and the recipes are extremely well-chosen, a nice mix of things to whip together on a Tuesday night and more elaborate dishes fit for a Saturday dinner party.

These cold peanut sesame noodles fall into the former category and are a great springtime supper: quick to prepare, good cold, and providing a reasonably high dose of vegetables.

So, to help make my point, check out my photo above and this close up:

I’m definitely still learning, but I think these two photos are not half bad.

Now have a look at how gorgeous smitten kitchen’s Deb can make food look. I’m sure she has a better camera than I do (most people with a camera at all have a better camera than I do), and I live in a high-ceilinged extra-shadowy apartment. But hot damn, she makes food look good. So Deb, if you need an apprentice, please give me a call.

So after culling thorough my own little best of  smitten kitchen list, I decided on these easy to prepare, leftover-friendly noodles. With Deb’s endorsement, I skipped the toasted sesame seeds, and I didn’t miss them a bit. I also increased the amount of hot sauce and used, you guessed it, sriracha.

And actually, linking to that post makes me feel better about someday taking pictures and putting together posts as well as Deb from smitten kitchen. The early days of my posts on the Junta were filled with blurry, dark, or washed-out photos, and a lot of pics from Google images.

I’ve still got a ways to go, but the progress is encouraging. And it always helps to have a role model.

Peanut Sesame Noodles
Take (untouched) from smitten kitchen, who in turn adapted it from Gourmet, June 2002

Servings: Makes 6 side-dish or 4 vegetarian main-course servings.

For peanut dressing
1/2 cup smooth peanut butter
1/4 cup soy sauce
1/3 cup warm water
1 tablespoon chopped peeled fresh ginger
1 medium garlic clove, chopped
2 tablespoons rice vinegar
1 1/2 tablespoons Asian toasted sesame oil
1 tablespoon honey
1 teaspoon dried hot red pepper flakes or a splash of the hot sauce or chili paste of your choice

For noodles
3/4 lb dried soba nooodles (dried linguine fini or spaghetti will work in a pinch)
4 scallions, thinly sliced
1 red bell pepper, cut into 1/8-inch-thick strips
1 yellow bell pepper, cut into 1/8-inch-thick strips
Half a seedless cucumber, thinly sliced
1 cup firm or extra-firm tofu, cubed
3 tablespoons sesame seeds, toasted

Puree dressing ingredients in a blender until smooth, about 2 minutes, then transfer to a large bowl.

Cook pasta in a 6- to 8-quart pot of boiling salted water until tender. Drain in a colander, then rinse well under cold water.

Add pasta, scallions, bell peppers, cucumber and tofu to dressing, tossing to combine. Garnish with toasted sesame seeds and serve immediately.

Favorites anyone? Overlap is encouraged. I, for one, am a Minimalist, Farm-to-Glass Neo-Classicist.

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2008/07/21/080721sh_shouts_brenner