cheap mondays: the chick-fil-a edition.

Sorry I didn't hear about this yesterday, but mark your calendars for next week … and the week after … for free chicken sandwiches. Hellz yes.

Attention Chick-fil-A fans:

stan van gundy, sauce boss.

The Onion nails it again. Were it not for the intentionally clunky Photoshopping, I almost would have bought this story of how Orlando Magic coach Stan Van Gundy hands out copies of barbecue cookbooks "to inspire them and provide insights during road trips." (What can I say, I'm not a sports fan.)

choose life. choose a job. choose fried banana pie.

Foodspotting is a website that lets you search for dishes, not restaurants, in a simple social-media interface. Foodspotters around the world post "sightings," which can be searched by city or by dish. Looking for pork belly? Find it in Brooklyn, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Toronto or New South Wales, Australia. Salted caramel ice cream, guava doughnuts, crab ramen, hamachi sashimi and, yes, fried banana pie jostle alongside grocery-store subs and Starbucks lattes, spanning the spectrum of the food-obsessed from serious gourmands to simple obsessives.

It's not perfect — searching for "Tokyo" brings up restaurants in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo along with the Japanese city and any restaurant named Tokyo as well — but there's a nice randomness to the stream of images, almost like gastronomic free association. The truly gorgeous shots and spectacular dishes, though, get driven up in popularity by way of user-awarded "noms," so there's hope that the boring stuff (really? You uploaded a picture of your morning Starbucks?) will get sidelined by a discerning user community. (Fingers crossed…)

The best part is that the iPhone app just launched — this is a concept made for mobile. The only problem I can see is there are hardly any sightings from Orlando! Sign up and start nomming, people.

gaga: bad romance, worse cooking.

Lady Gaga's "Telephone" video (featuring Beyonce) is a fun-filled romp through the poison shop, with stops for honeypots and whitebread along the way.

Let's make a sandwich!

the power of prayer.

I prayed and prayed. "Please, God," I cried to heaven. "Please make it stop. No more. No more of this, I beg you."

God, in the form of the New York City Department of Health, heard my entreaties and moved to make it so.

No more human breast milk cheese will be served at Klee Brasserie — that's right, HUMAN BREAST MILK CHEESE — and one hopes this will stanch the flow of news stories, blog posts, and tweets about the vile substance — vile in conception, if not in actuality. I feel no desire to know if it does in fact taste disgusting. If this knocks me down a rung on the Curious Gastronaut adventure ladder, so be it.

The food blogs have been drowning in mildly nauseating chat about lady-milk cheese — and not just the fig-and-mommy-dew plate at Klee; you can get the stuff at various West Coast outposts (of course) and cheese caves, as well as in La France (bien sûr).

If you want to know more, click on "flow," above, weirdo. But no mas for me. I'm out. Amen.

green lobster.

Today Orlando Business Journal reports that Orlando-based Darden Restaurants, owners of the Red Lobster, Olive Garden, LongHorn Steakhouse and Seasons 52 restaurant chains, has unveiled plans to build eight new restaurants to LEED standards.

(LEED = green design like energy-saving appliances, low-flow faucets and toilets, recycled building materials, carpets and paints that don't emit toxic gases, and so on.)

Which is great and all, but I'd like to see them extend that eco-consciousness into their food sourcing. Where does their beef come from? How is their fish caught (or farmed, ugh)? Do they serve organic vegetables or rGBH-free dairy products? When you're running an organization on such a gigantic scale as these restaurant chains, that kind of extra expense — the extra expense of not cutting corners — can seriously affect the bottom line.

So we'll see: Is this the first step toward a commitment to sustainable practices or just so much more greenwashing?

incredible, edible.

It's Monday, it's cold (well, sorta. But don't say that to any of your friends up north), and in about eight hours, you're going to be facing the eternal first-night-of-the-workweek dinner dilemma. I dunno about you, but hell no, I'm not going to come home and start slicing and chopping and stirring and dirtying four pans on a Monday night. Yet there's the voice in the back of my head reminding me that we ate out three times over the weekend, and the chilly, tired, drag-ass part that just wants to slouch on the sofa with a warm bowl of something.

Eggs.

Eggs are your friend at a time like this: fast, easy, full of protein.

And luckily for you, there are a few places in town that you can actually get farm-fresh local eggs easily. On Monday nights (ahem), the Audubon Park Community Market sells eggs. And I just found out that Infusion Tea has been selling farm eggs for a while now — just phone first to be sure they have some in stock. Farm eggs, if you've never had one, are amazingly different than supermarket eggs laid by battery hens — the yolks are deep orange, and the taste is much richer.

If you're feeling extremely lazy (see above), a poached egg over a bowl of rice (brown, or if you have it, black), with butter and salt (not too much, now) and a couple of turns of the pepper grinder, is quick and about as easy as it gets. (Especially if you have poach pods.) You should really eat a green vegetable, you know, so maybe stir half a bag of spinach right into the boiling rice, or steam it and toss it on top. The still-runny egg yolk will mix with the pat of butter and make a sort of sauce that ties it all together.

If you have some corn tortillas around, some cheese (cotija, queso fresco or even Monterey Jack) and a jar of tomatillo salsa, you can make chilaquiles. There are a million recipes for chilaquiles, so Google around — and there are a million variations, but we're basically talking about eggs soft-scrambled with tortilla strips, salsa and cheese. Simple, tasty. You can add shredded chicken, avocados, cilantro, red onion if you want to complicate things.

Or, if you're feeling slightly more ambitious, here's a good easy recipe (from food52) for khagina (Persian scrambled eggs). Yes, you'll have to chop an onion and a tomato, but you can cut up the herbs with scissors, as well as the chili peppers. (Be sure to wash off those shears after you snip the peppers or you'll get a nasty surprise next time you use them.)

crop mobs.

What's the best way to break in your brand-new Red Wing boots AND make good use of your Brooklyn facial hair (i.e., to keep your face warm)?

Crop mob!

The latest trend among the (sub)urban agricurious is once-a-month volunteer farmwork, on small farms struggling to stay in business in the age of industrial food production. Our own calendar editor, Trevor Fraser, has spent weekend days working at small farms in Yalaha and other Central Florida towns; he has also, like many of the young people in this New York Times article, considered making the jump to full-time farm internship.

It's easy to make fun of hipsters digging in the dirt (hey, I did it myself a few grafs ago), but in truth the trendiness of the local-food movement has bumped up against the slow decline of the family-run farm to create a whole happy new model of American farming.

when harry met salad.

I'm not sure how much of a blog post it is if I just point you to someone else's blog post. (If you feel cheated, just let me know … maybe I'll make up a gift bag for you! Maybe not! Who knows.)

Ennywez, so I ran across this post on When Harry Met Salad, and thought I'd point y'all to it because A) cauliflower is cheap/in season right now, B) baby it's cold out there and what could be better than crispy, cheesy, bubbly pie for dinner, C) hello, MOST AWESOME BLOG NAME EVER.

So here you go. Do keep in mind that it's O.G. Moosewood, i.e., vegetarian but oh-so-calorific. But you're cold. You need calories to keep you warm for, oh, the next week or so. Eat pie.

totem of horror, part 2.

• One (1) bottle of Harlem™ Kruiden liqueur
• One (1) canister of Country Choice Organic Irish-style steel-cut oats
• A wipe-clean softcover first edition of Jasper's Kitchen Cookbook: Italian Recipes and Memories from Kansas City's Legendary Restaurant, by Jasper J. Mirabile Jr. (Andrews-McMeel Publishing)
  
• An assortment of Twang™ beer and margarita salts, including lime, lemon-lime, sweet & sour chili, and "Mango Slam"

one more reason i'd have to call nude nite tasteless.

Although this totem of horror probably tastes just fine, shaped as it is out of "46 lbs of cake and 55 lbs of ganache." It was created/displayed/{shudder} eaten (maybe?) at Nude Nite, which the proud creator calls "Orlando's largest art event." Um. Yeah.

All respect for the technical achievement, I guess. This is probably too advanced for Cake Wrecks (Jen? Thoughts?) though I'm thinking the Cake Boss/Ace of Cakes crews might take issue with the way this "cake" resembles the scary papier-mâché sculpture created by Linda Fiorentino in After Hours (below).

Actually, I'm not convinced that that isn't just a chick covered in chocolate frosting, a la Karen Finley (or Goldfinger).

Specialty bakers! All about "could I," never about "should I."