Poor Nancy!

Oh mon dieu. Petite bites means "little dicks."

Leave it to a set of skilled brand developers to screw up and make all of our neighbors across the pond in France laugh hysterically at us.

Those stupid Americans... they probably thought.

Yep. Right they are. Because much to your likely surprise, this ad is for little quiches sold in the frozen food aisle at local grocery stores. It is not for a French penis enlargement drug and not for a new "small is in" campaign in France.

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via Wynkoop Facebook

There are some things that cannot be unseen.

It's times like these -- when one needs a really good joke about tea-bagging -- that one wishes Clean Plate Charlie had Daniel Tosh on the payroll. Wynkoop Brewing Company out of Colorado announced this week that it will begin nationwide distribution of its infamous Rocky Mountain Oyster Stout. "Rocky mountain oyster," by the way, is a euphemism for deep-fried bull testicles and the beer is brewed with 25 pounds of the local delicacy. Thirsty yet?

Fox News -- who already used all of the good quips about balls -- reports that the brewery will begin nationwide distribution of the beer later this month. It will be sold in cans, but only in two-packs, because Wynkoop is really seeing this joke all the way through.

See also:
- Stout Day is Thursday: South Florida Beer Experts Recommend Some of the Best Stouts
- Try Hemp Ale Tonight at Riverside Market (No: It Won't Get You High)
- Westvleteren XII: On Sale Today for $85 a Six-Pack

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Frosted Mini-Wheats via Facebook

Mom -- is that you?

Kellogg's has issued a massive recall of multiple lots of their popular Mini-Wheats cereals due to the possibility of metal shards in the product due to a malfunctioning machine at the plant.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the cereal giant issued the following statement:

 "According to Dr. David Acheson, an internal medicine physician and former Chief Medical Officer at the FDA Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN) with whom we consulted, the likelihood of these fragments making their way into the food is low; furthermore, the chances that any affected food will cause injury is low."

The WSJ also found a pretty amusing YouTube video, in which Midland13 picks up some Mini-Wheats with a rare earth magnet. Guess it's all that nutritious iron under the frosting:

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​A couple of years ago, Mark Bittman wrote about a recipe for no-knead bread from maverick baker Jim Leahy of Sullivan Street Bakery. Suddenly everyone from Martha Stewart to the Amateur Gourmet were making it, and home bakers from Oregon to South Florida were following along. Because of this incredibly easy recipe, it's now no longer hit or miss for an amateur baker to make a beautiful loaf.

With pizza such a thing right now, it's not surprising there's been much anticipation for the release of the Jim Leahy cookbook, My Pizza: The Easy, No-Knead Way to Make Spectacular Pizza at Home, based on the beautiful pies he bakes at Co. in Manhattan. Eater posted a stunning photo essay from the book paired with a Josh Ozersky video. Former Village Voice critic Lauren Shockey posted a Q&A with Lahey on making pizza at home.

His talking points with Shockey are quite interesting:
1) The margherita pizza is the most popular pizza in his restaurant and remains the test of what is a good pie.
2) Many of his recipes are inspired by pasta.
3) Chicken breast in any form does not belong on pies.

But the most noteworthy news is that Lahey acknowledged he had a wheat allergy -- awfully inconvenient for a baker. And right now, he's in the final stages of infecting himself with hookworm as a cure for wheat intolerance.

Lahey said the process involves "placing mail-order larvae on his skin under a bandage and waiting for them to burrow into his body and modify his immune system."
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​Science: Two test subjects swallow pill-sized cameras -- "M2A capsules," they're called, for "mouth to anus." One subject then eats a meal of "processed" foods, and the other eats a meal of "natural" food. (I put those words in scare quotes because all food is both processed and natural. But you get the gist. One of these meals comprises simple ingredients prepared simply, while the other is full of chemicals with unpronouncable Latinate names.) The cameras, each of which is equipped with a tiny light, record the digestive process. Some months later, the subjects switch -- the one who previously ate the "natural" meal now eats the synth crap, the former synthcrappivore eats the healthy stuff.
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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 »