microscopic noodle bowl.

Continuing my fascination with all things ramen, I bring to you the news that Japanese scientists have created the world's smallest bowl of ramen, using carbon nanotubes (which are not tasty, as far as I know) – it's only visible under a microscope.

"We believe it's the world's smallest ramen bowl, with the smallest portion of noodles inside, though they are not edible," [Professor Masayuki] Nakao said.

The hardest part was to keep the noodles from rising upright from the bowl "like alfalfa sprouts," he said. "The achievement was mostly for fun."

little fluffy clouds.

Speaking of ricotta, the New York Times food section ran a feature on the rising popularity of the fluffy stuff yesterday, along with recipes for ricotta crostini with fresh thyme and oregano and pasta with tomato broth, bacon, peas and ricotta.



Creamy/crunchy: Left, a photo of crostini topped with fresh house-made ricotta and tomato mostarda, from the NYT.

dr. cheezenstein.

As promised in this week's Food & Drink feature, here's a recipe for making your own ricotta cheese, courtesy of writer Michelle Gienow. Enjoy!

Ricotta

You'll need:

* Large, heavy pot (nonreactive; enamel or stainless steel is best)

* Thermometer (any kind of cooking thermometer; I use a candy thermometer)

* Cheesecloth (sold in grocery stores in the kitchen gadget aisle)

* One gallon of the best-quality whole milk you can find (It must be regular pasteurized milk; ultrapasteurized or UHT milk won’t curdle.)

* 5 tablespoons white vinegar (or lemon juice)

* Salt to taste (This ranges from none, if you are going to use this for sweet dessert ricotta, to as salty as you like it. I start with 1/4 teaspoon for a ricotta that is good for eating straight or using as pasta filling.)

(continued after the jump)

read the full post here.

yellow-bellied.

OK, so ... Chinese hackers suck. I've been AWOL, but I promise, fresh content is coming up.

nsfw: ‘is your girlfriend one a them salad-eating bitches?’

How often can you say about a cooking show that it’s NSFW? Thanks to MyDamnChannel’s Cooking With Coolio, that sorely underserved demographic seeking a profanity-laced cooking show can rest easy.

With a snazzy animated-cleaver graphic, a cranky sous-chef and two silicone-stuffed Sauce Girls, Coolio slices and dices (messily) his way through a variety of shall-we-say unchallenging dishes. (The title of this post is a quote from Mr. C’s intro to a caprese salad demo. He’s all about solutions, kids.)

More CWC science:
• “I’m pretty good with this knife … and I’m pretty good with a sword, nunchucks … a pistol …” Tony Bourdain wishes he could make the same claims.

• Chef Coolio keeps the salt in his pocket in a tiny Ziploc baggie.

• Coolio’s ultimate accolade: “This tastes better than yo mama’s titty!”

• Coolio’s version of Emeril’s “Bam!,” liberally repeated at top volume: “Shaka Zulu, muthafucka!”

yummy mummies.

In this week's issue, Holly Kapherr wrote a short feature on how you can not bore your mother this Sunday. (It's Mother's Day, hellooooo!) After the jump, a few more ideas, some less boring than others:


read the full post here.

'these cookies are black f***ing metal.'

Our favorite metal fan, Jason Ferguson, sent a link to The Black Oven, a hilarious blog that's a mashup of baking and black metal. Recipes for cookies, brownies, muffins and the like are prefaced with descriptions like:

"In a perfect world everything would be as stark and void of color as these cupcakes. They are baneful in their absolute disdain for your tastelessness, and are true misanthropes as far as baked goods go."

If Dethklok liked to bake, this is where they'd go for recipes.

kids under 3 free ... all you can eat.

A reader writes:

the free jazz of home cooking.

Kara Zuaro’s I Like Food, Food Tastes Good (Hyperion, $17.95) is probably my favorite cookbook of 2007. (Definitely top five, anyway.) Go buy it immediately. It’s a collection of recipes from bands – who knows better how to eat cheap, right? – in their own (often hilarious, sometimes sophisticated) words. More than that, it’s a window into the indie-rock underground and the sacrifices bands make to keep playing, and Kara Zuaro is my hero for collecting these recipes.

“Tato Mato” is John Darnielle’s (of Mountain Goats fame) contribution, and after the jump is a loose adaptation of this starchy-but-tasty poor-man’s meal. (Third and final recipe from the food-stamp challenge.)


read the full post here.

fueled by ramen dal.

This dal recipe, from Ismail Merchant’s Passionate Meals (Hyperion, $14.95), has never let me down – it's extremely cheap, extremely simple and low-fat to boot. Passionate Meals is a great book, not just for the recipes but also for Ismail Merchant’s filmmaking anecdotes. Sadly, he died in 2005, but he was the Merchant in Merchant Ivory Productions, the indie film company known for genteel literary adaptations. One of the many quirks of their company was that Merchant always did the catering on his sets to keep costs down.


Masoor dal recipe  – No. 2 from the food-stamp challenge – after the jump.

read the full post here.

fueled by ramen.

If you’re interested in any of the (extremely frugal) dishes I lived on during my monthlong food-stamp challenge, I’ll reproduce three of them here on Salivation Army: a delicious soup, a foolproof Indian dal and the infamous "tato mato."

All good, all cheap, all here.

After the jump, Mollie Katzen's red lentil-coconut soup.

read the full post here.