Now these are some cute turkey cupcakes, as seen in Bridgett Lee's Flickr stream.

turkey cupcakes (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Boing Boing buddy Danielle Spencer points us to the winners of the "Turkey-shaped Jell-O® Mold: 2008 Competition," which we've posted here on Boing Boing for several years. My favorite is the S'Mores Turkey, above, because I can imagine myself eating it and rather enjoying it. Danielle's lofty writeups make the list even more fun. Behold, her appreciation of "Bubby's Matzoh Turkey."

In this stunning mis-en-matzoh-ball-soup, we are brought back to the original site of sustenance: the womb. Floating, trussed, lulled in a warm bath of chicken broth, we experience the original state of undifferentiated oneness, of satiety. Grand Prize Winner [by popular election] for "Best Overall Turkey" By Satya K. & Frank H.

Below, another outstanding entry, showcased in video: Turkey Festorama From Nepal!, by Michael Daube and William Purcell.

Pilgrim's blog -- 1623.

[I may not here omite how, notwithstand all their great paines and industrie, and the great hops of a large cropp, the Lord seemed to blast, and take away the same, and to threaten further and more sore famine unto them, by a great drought which continued from the 3. weeke in May, till about the midle of July, without any raine, and with great heat (for the most parte), insomuch as the come begane to wither away, though it was set with fishe, the moysture wherof helped it much. Yet at length it begane to languish sore, and some of the drier grounds were partched like withered hay, part wherof was never recovered. Upon which they sett a parte a solemne day of humilliation, to seek the Lord by humble and fervente prayer, in this great distrese. And he was pleased to give them a gracious and speedy answer, both to thier owne and the Indeans admiration, that lived amongest them. For all the morning, and greatest part of the day, it was clear weather and very hotte, and not a cloud or any signe of raine I to be seen, yet toward evening it begane to overcast, and shortly after to raine, with shuch sweete and gentle showers, as gave them cause of rejoyceing, and blesing God. It came, without either wind, or thunder, or any violence, and by degreese in that abundance, as that the earth was thorowly wete and soked therwith. Which did so apparently revive and quicken the decayed come and other fruits, as was wonderfull to see, and made the Indeans astonished to behold; and afterwards the Lord sent them shuch seasonable showers, with enterchange of faire warme weather, as, through his blessing, caused a fruitfull and liberall harvest, to their no small comforte and rejoycing. For which mercie (in time conveniente) they also sett aparte a day of thanksgiveing. This being overslipt in its place, I thought meet here to inserte the same.]

Of Plymouth Plantation by William Bradford.

May your Thanksgiving bring "no small comforte and rejoycing."

Now here's a festive holiday crochet project: a hat shaped like a scrumptious pie! They will see you in the street and they will shout, "Delicious head, delicious head, delicious head!" but you will only smile to yourself and think, "Yes, and the zombies love me too, for my brains are wrapped in a tasty layer of pie."

Holiday Pie-rets (via Neatorama)

Hugh sez, "We wanted to find out if three-star chef recipes were all they were cracked up to be, and if people like us (read - enormous geeks) could cook them. So we took one geek, one Gordon Ramsay recipe, a few hours, and a camera to film the results..."

Normal Person vs ... Gordon Ramsay (Thanks, Hugh!)

Here's something for the less culinarily-inclined this Thanksgiving: a beautiful, glistening perfect papercraft turkey for you to print and fold.

Fun Stuff: Papercraft Turkey Dinner (via Make)

Martha Stewart made mashed potatoes with Fatherhood star Snoop Dogg on her television show recently. About the very funny video clip above, she blogs:

[He] taught me some of his very own language called Snoop-guistics. He and his posse add ‘izzles’ onto the ends of words. It’s kind of a code, or a way of communicating so that others won’t know what they’re talking about. Example: fo shizzle is how they say, for sure. Snoop Dogg also shared –

* Crack-a-lackin – means get something poppin
* Chuuuch – means take God everywhere you go and everything will be all right
* All hood – means good
* Ball til ya fall – get as much money as you can before you die

Snoop makes Mashed Potatoes (Thanks, Shawn Connally!)

Oh, what won't intrepid NYT reporter John Schwartz do for space journalism! Snip:

There are many elements of [NASA's current Space Shuttle Endeavor] mission, which is devoted to further construction of the station and improvements that will allow the station to double its crew size from three to six next year. But the gizmo that is getting the most attention is the “water recovery system,” which will recycle the station’s water supply. That’s right: urine, sweat in the air, waste water and other forms of moisture will be fed into the system, distilled and sent back to the tap.

The system, created at a cost of about $250 million, will recycle about 93 percent of the water used aboard the station. The cost of lifting supplies up to orbit is so high, though, that NASA estimates the system could pay for itself in as little as two years. Similar systems would be essential to maintaining long-term bases on faraway outposts on the Moon and Mars.

The astronauts don’t have a problem with this system. As Sandra H. Magnus, one of the astronauts who will be among the first to drink water produced by the new system aboard the station, noted in a recent interview, our earthbound water has been endlessly filtered through bodies, evaporated and rained down again. “We drink recycled water every day,” she said, “on a little bit longer time scale.”

You'll have to read the whole piece to learn how the stuff tastes.

From Craft magazine: Fetus cookie cutter

My five-year-old daughter asked to set the table a couple of night ago. Here's how she set her place.

Here's a lovely Instructable from Scoochmaroo, explaining how to make an edible (well, more edible) brain out of a watermelon -- suitable for vegan zombies.

# Slice off bottom of watermelon so it won't roll around.
# Peel green skin off of the watermelon.
# Score brainy folds in white flesh.
# With a sharp paring knife, carve channels out of melon to resemble cortical folds.

Melon Brains (via Make)

Here's an awesome Parenthack: mash a banana in the peel, rip off one end and squirt it into your kid's gob like icing -- a no-spoon meal!

Throw a whole banana into your diaper bag before heading out the door. When it's time to eat, mash up the banana before peeling it - just squishing it a bit with your fingers does the trick. Then, peel open a small hole at the end (not the end with the longer stem). Squeeze the mashed banana into the baby's mouth like you're icing a cake. Voila - no spoon necessary, and almost no mess.

How to turn a whole banana into a no-mess baby meal (no spoon required)

Marilyn sez, "Astronauts returning from spacewalks have noticed a distinctive smell of fried steak on their space suits when they take them off. Who knew?!" Turns out, the cosmos is not vegan.

He said: “When astronauts were de-suiting and taking off helmets, they all reported quite particular odours.

“We have already produced the smell of fried steak, but hot metal is more difficult.

“We think it’s a high energy vibration in the molecule and that’s what we’re trying to add to it now.”

Space smells of steak, say Nasa (Thanks, Marilyn!)

I first read about Shopsin's Greenwich Village restaurant in Calvin Trillan's classic New Yorker tribute to it, and its owner, the eccentric, garrulous, cranky Kenny Shopsin. The last time I was in New York, I managed to eat there, getting breakfast with Teresa Nielsen Hayden at the new location in Essex Market. I was transported by some of the most satisfying food I've ever been privileged to eat.

Now, the notoriously publicity-shy Kenny Shopsin has written a book (with Carolynn Carreno) about the philosophy and history of the restaurant, called Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin, and it, too, is an utterly satisfying, utterly peculiar experience.

Kenny Shopsin's restaurant began life as a grocery store, purchased for $25,000 by his father for his peripatetic son (Shopsin describes himself then as a neurotic who saw a therapist five days a week). In the grocery store, Shopsin found a kind of frenetic peace in cultivating and deepening his relationship with his customers (one of whom, Eve, he married). Gradually, he added prepared food to the grocery lineup, then more and more, as the satisfaction of cooking for others seized his interest, until the grocery store became a restaurant.

The two things I'd remembered about Shopsin's from the New Yorker piece was that there were 900 things on the menu and that parties of five could not be seated, ever, even if they split into a three and a two (there's a lovely bit of verse explaining this rule in the book, written by an affectionate Shopsin's regular).

When Teresa and I ate there last summer, I was trepidatious about asking for some substitutions, given Shopsin's reputation for being a real hardcase with finicky eaters, but he was glad to try some new stuff for me, and the food turned out superbly. I had a kind of African groundnut stew with pumpkin, and a soya pumpkin-pecan spice malted that was so good, I can actually still taste it when I close my eyes. Shopsin himself was hilarious and warm, dropping the f-bomb more quickly and frequently than any other restauranteur of my experience. He talked over the food with us, asking Teresa why she hadn't eaten the taco-shell bowl her meal came in, listening carefully, and vowing to revise the recipe based on her feedback.

Shopsin's memoir is like the man: loud, opinionated, warm, exuberant and absolutely delightful. He had me when he revealed that he'd named one of his dishes solely to piss off Andrea Dworkin ("she's probably never heard of this dish"), but I really caught fire when I came to section on pancakes.

First, there's the revelation that Shopsin's pancake batter is Aunt Jemima's Frozen, and the lengthy explanation of why this is so. Then there's the gallery of pancake variations, including chocolate peanut butter, coconut, oatmeal, chorizo corn, post-moderns, spinach walnut and pear pignoli, all mouthwateringly good. It reminded me of nothing so much as the sloppy cooks that feature in some of Daniel Pinkwater's best books, like Borgel and Fat Men from Space -- Shopsin's is pure Pinkwater, like something that popped off the page.

Then there's the crepes: they're not crepes. They're flour tortillas, dipped in milk and flash-fried on the super-hot griddle (Shopskin reveals that he drilled out bigger burner-jets on his custom stove). He swears that French tourists tell him they're the best crepes they've ever eaten.

Shopsin's my kind of obsessive. He's kind of sentimental (his kids feature heavily in the memoir and recipes, and the book includes photos of them having diaper changes in the kitchen and even a Polaroid of an unidentified lad's naked, lacerated butt, labelled "7/10/77 sink accident"). He's addicted to excess and clutter and would rather answer any either-or question with "both." He makes an introspective, overwhelming obsession out of any physical task, and talks in awesome detail about the efficiency hacks he's discovered in order to allow him to serve 900 dishes from a kitchen the size of a walk-in closet.

Shopsin's memoir is eclectic and sometimes frustrating -- as when he recounts the stories of the friends whom he has written out of his life for some ancient sleight, right after telling you about the close personal relationship he once enjoyed with them and the recipes they inspired for him.

But this book is just purely magic. It's a manifesto for cranky, lovable, excessive individualism. It's a call-to-arms to woo the muse of the odd and thumb your nose at convention. And it's got some damned tasty recipes.

Seven ounces is the perfect size for a hamburger. One thing that people don't understand is that when a portion size is too big, it is just bigger, not better. When I am served an 8-ounce burger, I recognize that it is a nice idea -- somebody is trying to give me a lot for my money. But the truth is that I don't really want an 8-ounce burger. It is too much. And when you are eating something that is too much, there comes a point where you're not enthusiastic about it anymore. You can't even taste it. After a lot of consideration, I have determined that 7 ounces is the perfect burger size.

Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin, Shopsin's

See also:
* A small and beautiful restauranteur
* Eccentric diner-menu infodesign

Not Martha's got the recipe for brewing up these dome-cake spiders with spindly Pocky legs -- now that's Hallowe'en fun! Little known fact: cakes in the shapes of insects arachnids have no calories. Spider Cakes (Thanks, Marilyn!)

DeviantArt's Spippo creates elaborate costumes for My Little Ponies based on major media franchises -- Nightmare Before Christmas, Batman, Alien, and Star Wars, as well as many others! ~Spippo (via Neatorama)

Karen Hanrahan has been using the same McDonald's hamburger as a prop in her "Healthy Choices for Children" class since 1996 -- 12 years! -- and it's hardly aged a day in all that time. McDonald's should add "immortality" to its list of Unique Selling Propositions for its burgers (unless Karen has an ornate oil painting of the burger in her living room in which it slowly ages, grows mouldy, and decomposes).

The burger on the right, off the paper is a 2008 burger. I had to buy it to get the groovy paper and bag. The meat is a tad darker, the bun a little less golden but in 12 years it will look exactly like that too. Do you find this horrifying? McDonalds fills an empty space in your belly. It does nothing to nourish the cell, it is not a nutritious food. It is not a treat. I marvel at how McDonalds has infiltrated our entire world. A hamburger here tastes exactly the same in China or some around the world place.

1996 McDonalds Hamburger

Moogie made these ass-kicking shark-attack cupcakes (complete with body parts!) for a Shark Art Contest. First prize! Shark Attack Cupcakes (Thanks, Marilyn!)

These grapes from Sunset comes with a EULA: "The recipient of the produce contained in this package agrees not to propagate or reproduce any portion of the produce, including (but not limited to) seeds, stems, tissue and fruit." Grapes with an EULA

Marilyn sez, "Belgian conceptual artist Wim Delvoye makes salami floors that look like marble. Famous for tattooing a pig with Louis Vuitton symbols and for making a food digestion machine that produces vacuum-packed poo (for sale) at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp." Marble Floor # 102 (click "Marble Floors" in the top-bar) (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Fraske Design's got a great, simple tutorial for making your own Tetris brownies for hours of fun and pounds of flab:

Since I made these brownies thinner than normal, I also cut down the baking time. The baking process would have normally taken around 30 minutes, but this batch only took 10. I just kept an eye on the pan and took it out when it looked about right. The trick is to not let them bake too long.

Next, while the brownies were cooling, I mixed up my tetris color frostings into seven separate bowls. It turns out that Tetris colors have varied over the years, so I settled on matching the colors to the tetrads in the Free Tetris game online. My colors included yellow, orange, red, magenta, cyan, blue, and green. I achieved these colors mixing white vanilla frosting and food coloring accordingly.

How to Make Tetris Brownies (or Tetris Cookies) (via Craft)

Here's a funny short video of Chinese people being exposed to fortune cookies (an American invention) for the first time:

Americans find high emotional attachment to the slips inside their cookies, looking to them for winning lottery numbers and becoming upset when the fortunes inside are unfortunate. The Chinese, on the other hand, would often tell me after trying the curved vanilla-flavored wafers, “Americans are so strange, why are they putting pieces of paper in their cookies?”

Introducing Fortune Cookies to China (Thanks, Tim!)

A North Korean propaganda release claims that the hunger-stricken country has developed a "hunger-delaying" soy-protein noodle that doesn't induce the same carb-based hunger pangs that starch-based noodles cause:

According to the newspaper, which is seen as closely linked to the Pyongyang leadership, the new noodles have twice as much protein and fives times as much fat as ordinary noodles.

"When you consume ordinary noodles (made from wheat or corn), you may soon feel your stomach empty. But this soybean noodle delays such a feeling of hunger," it said on its website.

The noodles would be available soon across North Korea, the newspaper said.

An estimated one million people starved to death in North Korea in the late 1990s after natural disasters and government mismanagement devastated the country's economy.

N Korea 'develops special noodle' (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Confectionary Delights of Dallas offers this delightful Han Solo Frozen in Cake-onite cake -- tragic and delicious! Han Solo frozen in Carbonite (Thanks, Catherine!)

Carbohydrates don't just screw up your blood-sugar: they release free radicals that kill appetite-suppressing cells. The research is from a Nature article by Dr Zane Andrews, a neuroendocrinologist with Monash University's Department of Physiology.

"The more carbs and sugars you eat, the more your appetite-control cells are damaged, and potentially you consume more," Dr Andrews said.

Dr Andrews said the attack on appetite suppressing cells creates a cellular imbalance between our need to eat and the message to the brain to stop eating.

"People in the age group of 25 to 50 are most at risk. The neurons that tell people in the crucial age range not to over-eat are being killed-off.

Killer Carbs: Scientist Finds Key To Overeating As We Age

Geologist Maria Brumm makes a compelling case for considering ice-cream to be a sort of igneous rock:

Ice cream is an igneous rock. You begin with a liquid slurry containing a hodgepodge of chemicals, and by bringing it below its freezing point, you create something solid - or at least solid-ish. Good ice cream or sorbet needs a little give, a bit of liquid remaining between ice crystals so that you can comfortably dig into it with a spoon. This is what it looks like: [A scanning electron microscope image of ice cream. The ice crystals and air bubbles are separated by sugar solution From Clarke, 2003, "The Physics of Ice Cream" Physics Education 38 (3)]

Compare that to a thin section of glassy lava from the Pacific Northwest: [Small, separated mineral crystals in a glassy groundmass]

Much like igneous rocks, the same liquid mix can turn out very differently depending on what happens while it is freezing. The goal of most ice cream and sorbet is to have a smooth and creamy texture, which would be ruined by the presence of large ice crystals. To achieve this, you want to cool your ice cream so quickly that the crystals don't have time to grow, and keep the mixture stirred up while it freezes. There's a lot of energy involved in the transition from liquid to solid water, and a home ice cream maker can't do the heat transfer quickly enough to keep the ice crystals small, so you have to sit there and turn the crank until your arm is sore while the mixture slowly freezes (or invest in a fancier machine that will do the stirring for you).

The Igneous Petrology of Ice Cream (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Inuvikphil sez, "'In the future, man will travel in pneumatic tubes Also, apparently, eat prunes!' So nice to see authors in commercials. Ray Bradbury comes across as really personable here." Ray Bradbury Prunes Commercial (Thanks, Inuvikphil!)

CrazyPC's latest 5.25" drive-bay gizmo is a toaster for your PC. No more suffering with the indignity of raw bread, nor the insufferable pain of going to the kitchen. Um, might wanna be sure your heatsink is below it, and that your fan is up to snuff. Or invest in water-cooling. CrazyPC 5.25 Inch Bay Toaster

If you want to die of meat, you should hie yourself to HillBilly Hotdogs in West Virginia and try the 3.5lb "Homewrecker" dog. If you can eat it in four minutes or less, it is free (minus the health-related expenses arising from the act of consuming it).

The Homewrecker is a 3.5-lb. weapon of cardiovascular mass destruction. They start with a deep-fried 15", 1-pound dog and top it with peppers, onions, nacho cheese, chili sauce, jalapenos, mustard, ketchup, coleslaw, tomatoes, lettuce, and shredded cheese. Assured intestinal wreckage will run you $14.99. Finish it in under 12 minutes and you get a free burial t-shirt. Do it in under 4 minutes and your family will have an extra $14.99 for the funeral.

The Mother of All Hot Dogs--HillBilly's Homewrecker (Thanks, Marilyn!)