As a recent New York transplant, I have been wanting to resurrect my green thumb for some time, but I find myself slightly overwhelmed by the difficulty of finding a community garden with open plots.  I’ve heard stories of people waiting for more than five years for a plot to open–with wait times like that,Read more »

The Japan Times brings it with a cool list of onomatopoetic Japanese food words (from one of which, incidentally, Pacman got his name). CF also this list from the LA Times a couple years ago of French food-themed idioms, as well as an illustrated multi-language list from SeriousEats, excerpted from this book. Rupa Bhattacharya, CulinaryRead more »

So Pizza Hut plans to change its name to “The Hut,” capitalizing on what I suppose you could call its iconic architecture. That’s not entirely unremarkable, following as it does in the wake of what seems to be a trend of restaurants-that-serve-unhealthy-food-rebranding-to-remove-all-reference-to-unhealthy-food (cf Kentucky Fried Chicken). And I eat at “the Shack” and “the Wallah”Read more »

We’re hearing a whole lot less about a global food crisis these days than we were a year ago. No longer do we read week-in-week-out of food riots in the developing world or grain shortages or skyrocketing inflation. Publishers are printing fewer books with apocalyptic titles like ‘The End of Food,’ ‘Stuffed and Starved,’ andRead more »

Mid-June in the garden is a thriving time, when flowering tomato, pepper and squash plants give signs of good things to come. In the meantime, I’m thankful for an early harvest that provided handfuls of radishes for summer salads — and, just this week, lots of little beans in every size and shape. English peas,Read more »

Continuing once again with the food pareidolia thing, a friend of Jonathan‘s snapped this picture over the weekend. While it’s hard to tell whether the popcorn is simulating something else or whether something else is simulating popcorn, I’m hoping for the sake of food safety that it’s the latter.* Which I guess would make itRead more »

(Ok, actually it’s beef.) And, though I’m grateful to El Pollo Loco (caution, sound) for digging through the 37-page ingredient document to reveal the hidden chickencow, gotta wonder what the motives were there, especially with this comment from EPL’s president and chief exec: “I can assure you that you won’t find any beef in ElRead more »

Canning, kitchen gardening, gourmet comfort food: There’s hardly a food trend these days that doesn’t owe something to the recession. This month’s most attention-grabbing trend, street eats, is no exception. From Austin to San Francisco to NYC to Portland to D.C. to Seattle, across the country a new generation of food trucks and carts isRead more »

As a kid, I looked forward to three things about my summer trips to my grandparents’ 160-acre Iowa farm: hiding out with my favorite book in the abandoned chicken coop, letting the calves suck my thumb, and feeding piglet runts from a baby bottle. Other than that, I thought everything about farm life was utterlyRead more »

Here at FN, we’re all in favor of home-made popcorn, but you probably shouldn’t be trying this at home. And no, I have no idea why he’s not wearing a shirt. [via] Rupa Bhattacharya, Culinary Writer