Recently in the food section:

As I listened to a recent podcast of the excellent The Splendid Table from NPR, I heard mention of an interesting new product: the knork.

You've heard of a spork, right? The combination of a spoon and a fork you may have gotten the last time you went for some fast food?

Well, someone's gone and combined a fork with a knife.

How? Basically they taper the edges of the outer teeth of the fork to make them into mini-knives. I might actually order one of these just to try it out!

I stumbled upon Janet D. Stemwedel's (of ScienceBlogs) foray into building gingerbread houses using sustainable building design practices. The gingerbread house was for the Bake for a Change contest.

Unfortunately, the Flickr group only has one contestant's entries. I'm really excited to see other contestants' entries, though.

Modern Toilet in Taipei serves food on toilet shaped bowls, and has toilets for seats:

The money quote:

"It's newfangled and funny, we've never eaten on toilets before, even at home!"

What, you don't eat on your home's toilets?

Via: Trifter.

From Never Bashful With Butter, comes the addition of bacon to the quintessential chocolate chip cookie:

This whole thing started the other night when my husband and I were having a conversation about what foods could and could not be made better with the addition of bacon...

...Typically, I would never advocate the addition of meat to a sweet cookie, but I've always viewed bacon as "the candybar of meats" so I only felt slightly weird about it.

Amazingly enough, these cookies are DELICIOUS.

Being mostly vegetarian, I can't try these myself, but perhaps the adventurous among you might find the recipe behind the link interesting.

A nice article on the beauty and deliciousness of a well made biscuit de chocolat coulant: that finicky, all pervasive, but rarely executed correctly "molten chocolate cake" on restaurants' menus.

Yet, when actually molten, I know of no other dessert as capable of making most adults as gleeful as children...there's something about that self-saucing pudding-ness that's immensely satisfying.

(Thanks, Clarke.)

Update: added the link. Forgot it the first time around. Doh.

Food company Podravka hired agency Bruketa & Zinić to come up with a striking way to release their annual report: called "Well Done" it must be baked to be read.

Are you a wine-sipping hippie? (like me?)

Perhaps you'd be interested in the carbon foot print of your wine, as researched by Dr. Vino. The really interesting part is the wine-carbon line that runs down the US:

There’s a “green line” that runs down the middle of Ohio. For points to the West of that line, it is more carbon efficient to consume wine trucked from California. To the East of that line, it’s more efficient to consume the same sized bottle of wine from Bordeaux, which has had benefited from the efficiencies of container shipping, followed by a shorter truck trip. In the event that a carbon tax were ever imposed, it would thus have a decidedly un-nationalistic impact.

I'm going to have to add a few bottles of Bordeaux wines next time I'm out shopping.

Taco Bell is at it again - they're promising a free taco to everyone in the US if a base gets stolen during the World Series. Via kottke.

The man described as the "Willy Wonka" of Britain's chocolatiers has resigned after engaging in an "act of truffle-squishing" in a rival store.

A statement from Hotel Chocolat said: "This was an extraordinary act of truffle-squishing. We can only guess at what provoked it."

I very much enjoy stories like these - the ones that make me laugh from their utter ridiculousness. Via boingboing.

Serious eats had the wonderful Mario Batali come and share his thoughts on how to perfectly apply sauce to a bowl of pasta:

A sauce should just cling to the noodle, very much like salad dressing to a perfectly dressed salad. That is to say there's nothing at the bottom...

Americans overdress their pasta 99.8% of the time.