Bright green valley.

​Two summers ago I accompanied my friend James "The Amazing" Randi on a speaking tour of northern Europe. We visited Scandinavia and the Baltics, and enjoyed a quick southerly jaunt to the Netherlands. Our final engagement was in Reykjavik, Iceland, in the middle of the Atlantic.

Reykjavik is a modest city, a little more populous than Fort Lauderdale. (Iceland is the size of Kentucky with roughly one tenth the population.) Its architecture is lovely but spare -- far sparer than that of any mainland European capitol. Iceland needn't rely on manmade monuments to impress, for the Icelandic landmass itself is more dramatic than anything made by human hands, and it monumentalizes concerns far grander and less temporal than our own. On the drive from the Keflavik airport to Reykjavik, you encounter a shallow but endlessly long ravine which is actually the point of departure for the Mid-Atlantic and Eurasian tectonic plates, which move apart at a rate of about a meter per year, pulling with them the two halves of the ocean as well as the continents of Europe and North America. Nearby, you find vast fields of rough volcanic rock, covered in low sulfuric mists ejected from boiling pools just below (and occasionally atop) the soil. Elsewhere, you drive over a ridge and come face-to-face with a bright green valley that seems all out of proportion to the ordinary rules of human sight-lines. Your eyes follow distant rivers for what seem like ten, twenty miles, until the rivers open up into far-distant marshlands and shallows. Never has your eye captured so much territory at a glance, and the astounding quantity of earth arrayed before you is made harder to contextualize because of the near total absence of trees, which would otherwise be a handy indicator of size. The soil of Iceland is too new to facilitate much vegetation, beyond the occasional shrub and the ubiquitous coating of pillowy moss.

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​Balut is the unofficial national dish of the Philippines, and it's disgusting. I know this because I've eaten it. Granted, my balut might have been indifferently cooked -- the Japanese chef who made it remarked that he'd "never eat that thing in a billion years" -- but balut's an easy dish, almost unscrewuppable, and if my own portion wasn't quite representative, it was close.

Here's what it is: a fertilized duck egg cooked in boiling water. Usually it's soft-boiled -- everything inside the egg that isn't a fetal bird ought to be either gooey or liquid. The diner cracks the top of the egg, gulps down the fluids within, and then devours the fetal bird like a shooter. In the Philippines, this ritual is performed daily at the finest fine-dining establishments and at the slummiest hawker stalls. When I first heard about balut, I knew I needed to perform that ritual myself, and as soon as possible.

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No amount of alcohol will make this safe for you to try at home.

​Most of us take great measure to ensure that what we put down our gullets won't come back up to haunt us later. Stevie Starr, the Scottish performer perhaps better-known by his rather vivid stage handle, "The Regurgitator," isn't most of us.

Starr, who's been working the professional "regurgitation circuit" -- for lack of a better term -- for more than 20 years, will appear at 8 p.m. Wednesday, November 2, at Seminole Casino Hollywood for a free performance in the event pavilion.
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​When I first got here, one of many questions in my loop had been what the hell is smoked fish dip and why do people here eat it?  More >>

Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution continues with its third episode. This one was jam-packed! It included Jamie's food quizzes for students (See above and tell me the guacamole Q&A isn't a l'il bit funny). But seriously, a lot going on in this episode. It starts with Jamie's culinary class at West Adams Preparatory High School preparing an alternative lunch at their school. The team is super-psyched to share their whole wheat pasta mac n' cheese, salad, and roasted chicken with the school, but before they can, they get pushed to a far corner of campus. A school leader tells them they had to put them as far from the cafeteria as possible so as not to be seen as competing with cafeteria food. He also informs Jamie that his class is no longer allowed to cook. A bit of an obstacle, eh?

No worries, Jamie pushes on,  teaching students about food and where it comes from. His lesson? The ice cream sundae. He goes so far as to create his own authentic sundae using what really goes into the artificial toppings. He brings in the live lac bugs that shellac is made from (used to make sprinkles and hard candy shiny!) as well as hair and duck feathers (used in cookie dough ice cream to keep the cookie dough soft). He tells the kids if you see long words that you don't understand on the ingredient list, just don't buy it. "Dead simple," Jamie says, before treating the kids to his own simpler sundae which uses 9 ingredients instead of 271 (his includes milk, cream, sugar, crushed strawberries, and caramelized sesame seeds).

But all that ice cream talk was far from where the emotional core of the episode was. The most dramatic turn came with Deno of Patra's fast food restaurant...

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Move over, royal wedding goers -- the Japanese have topped you on the stylish head gear. Theirs can help us diet!

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If you're a fan of chef Jamie Oliver, you may have tuned in to ABC's premiere of Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution expecting that same young buck messing around with food to feed his mates and having a jolly good time. No, no, no -- Jamie is older now, a father of four, and looks downright miserable for most of the episode, not just because he isn't getting anywhere with his quest to improve what American kids are eating but also because people in L.A. don't seem to care. He wants to transform school lunch food in L.A. but is barred by the School Board from even entering any of the schools in the district.

That said, if you are drawn to -- I don't know -- horror or to, say, shows where people eat truly disgusting ingredients, you may want to tune in. Case in point, pink slime.


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The Irish people have a long and sordid history with their potatoes. In the 1800s, potatoes had a bad rap, associated with the Irish Potato Famine that killed more than 1 million people. Potatoes are standard with nearly every Irish meal: boiled, sliced, or fashioned into a pancake.
For the past 100 years, they've become a tradition in Pennsylvania, but it's not what you think.
Irish Potatoes candy are not Irish, nor do they contain any potato product. They're actually little balls of coconut, rolled in cocoa and cinnamon powders.

Produced by a Pennsylvania confectioner called Oh Ryan's, Irish Potatoes are available only seasonally, around St. Patrick's Day.

By Erin Hilburn

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If you can get past the fact that

By Erin Hilburn

Check out this pair

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By Erin Hilburn

Half eaten, whole lot of awesome.

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Photo Courtesy of Jeff Kaplan

​Click here for the first 101 cheesy, sexual innuendo jokes.

Schoolyard humor aside, a micro-bottler from Pompano Beach wants you to enjoy his Mr. Q. Cumber -- a 90-calorie soda, flavored with cucumber extract. Owner of Global Beverage Enterprises, Jeff Kaplan, asks: Why ruin a perfectly good meal by choosing a traditional high-fructose soda? Let's face it: Other than the widely popular Coca-Cola or Pepsi products, indie sodas aren't as easy to find -- even from local bottlers like Kaplan.


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