Lovecraft on Fiendish Deliciousness
McSweeney’s brings us these brilliant Selections from H.P. Lovecraft’s Brief Tenure as a Whitman’s Sampler Copywriter. Included are these Lovecraftian descriptions:
White Chocolate Truffle: What black arts could have stripped this chocolate of its natural hue? The horror of the unearthly, corpselike pallor of this truffle’s complexion is only offset by its fiendish deliciousness.
Nut Cluster Crunch: This eerie candy will test the sanity of all but those who possess the strongest of constitutions. Strange congeries of almonds, walnuts, and pistachios dance hypnotically within, promising to reveal their eldritch secrets to anyone foolish enough to take a bite of these ancient nut clusters!
Dark Chocolate Fudge: Dark! All-encompassing, eternal darkness! Human eyes cannot penetrate the stygian blackness of this unholy confection!
Chocolate Cherry Cordial: What deranged architect could have engineered this non-Euclidean aberration? I dare not speculate.
More at McSweeney’s.
via Serious Eats
Impending Doom
photo credit: Ariel Bariel Long via Dark Roasted Blend
Ah, the delicious schadenfreude of watching anthropomorphic eggs about to meet their demise.
Would it be too perverse to mention the best scrambled eggs on the planet in the same post as that photo?
Beer-Battered Deep Fried Bacon Cheeseburger
Elvis would be proud of this indulgence, created and photographed by the fiendish Texan responsible for Peppers & Smoke.
Grab yourself a pound of bacon, but don’t bother with beef - the foundation of this enticingly decadent culinary masterpiece is a pair of 100% ground bacon patties stuffed with mozzarella cheese. The coronary-inducing concoction is slathered in a beer batter and deep fried in oil before being served on a bun with pepper jack cheese accompanied by deep fried jalapenos.
I’m betting this would give the DB burger a run for its money.
Slashfood calls this recipe “too nutty to ignore.” I call it fiendishly delightful.
The DB Burger: Decadence on a Bun
I can honestly say there is little I miss about living in New York City. The Big Apple is nowhere near as sophisticated, exciting or interesting as the people who live there would have you believe, and it is far from being the epicenter for epicurean delights. Food critics will cry foul here, but the simple truth is I’ve had much better food of any variety outside of New York, with the one exception being Chinese food which seems absolutely dreadful outside of the five boroughs.
Of course the best Thai food I’ve eaten was in South Carolina, so New York doesn’t have a monopoly on fine Asian fare.
There are some shining lights in New York’s otherwise dull, tasteless image-driven restaurant scene. Henry’s End hosts an annual wild game festival starting in October and lasting through the holidays where I’ve sampled such exotic fare as Kangaroo, Elk and even Rattlesnake. The Doral Arrowwood aside from being an excellent weekend destination is home of the world’s finest Sunday brunch, which you can partake in even if you aren’t a guest.
But the one culinary extravagance that I will miss most is the DB Burger from DB Bistro Moderne. I never thought to bring along a camera on my restaurant excursions so I’ll present a picture taken by fellow DB Burger enthusiast Tone Chow:
As good as it looks, it tastes even better. The DB Burger is a decadently delightful combination of boneless short ribs braised in red wine, Foie Gras and black truffles stuffed in ground Angus. The bun is slathered with a out of this world horseradish mayonnaise and a tomato confit that complements the burger perfectly.
Don’t let the term “burger” fool you, this is knife and fork food and you’ll want to pair this with good dessert wine rather than a biggie coke. There is frankly not a way to convey exactly how delicious this meal is. All I can say is that if you’re around west 44th street for lunch this is the best $30 bucks you’ll ever spend.
Of course you can get the “Royale” which has double the truffle and costs $120 or so, which is still worth it. You don’t know decadence until you’ve eaten one of these and after you do it’ll change your whole perspective on what is and isn’t good food.
The Art of Gyros
William Swislow is the author of The Gyros Project, an online gallery of 246 photographs of gyro signs. He explains:
Gyros signs — the hand-painted pictures found at hot dog stands, pizza parlors and Greek fast-food joints — are modern-day icons, literally: devotional images produced by anonymous artisans to bring the faithful into communion with the object of their fervor.
While the signs themselves had my mouth watering, it is Swislow’s description of “The Gyros Experience” that captures the true decadence of the gyro:
Gyros is supremely sloppy, and dangerously volatile. The afterglow of gyros suffuses your being, oozing through every pore to fill out your aura as well.
… Externally crispy, internally soft, it encompasses meat that is as sacramental in its mystery as it is greasy, the true composition of the beef-and-lamb blend hidden in the dripping hours on the spit.
The final kick that pushes the sandwich beyond guilty pleasure into whole-body experience can be found in its tangle of onions topped by a huge wad of yogurt-garlic sauce, with tomatoes the crucial buffer that keeps the rush of salt and grease and tartness just this side of manageable.
Read more at The Gyros Experience.
via J-walk