Bourbon Steak, a restaurant in Washington, D.C., serves what is known as the pork cupcake. This delicious looking slice of hog heaven isn’t on the menu, so if you go there remember to ask for it by name. The chefs take an over-sized cheddar and scallion biscuit and proceed to inject it with thin strips of smoked pulled pork.
It’s pork, it’s a cupcake, it’s a biscuit, it’s got cheese, it’s got scallion, it’s got my attention.
Here a few other food stories that caught my attention yesterday.
1. I’ve always wondered why there aren’t more recipe websites that allow users to find recipes based upon the ingredients they have on hand. You’re about to cook dinner and look in the fridge and realize all you’ve got are some mismatched veggies and couple of pork chops, or whatever. But you want to cook something. Recipe Puppy is a good place to start. Well, that site has now rolled out Ingredient Pairings. It’s a recipe search site that tells you what ingredients go well together. For example: basil, tamarind, or tomatillo.
2. Gwyneth Paltrow has a new cookbook out and by all accounts it’s equal parts useful and sweetly condescending. Like Paltrow herself (for some reason she is one of the few people I just want to punch in the face, don’t ask why).
Eater was nice enough to score a review copy and instead of reviewing the thing, which they say “is aspirational and sweet” but unfortunately the recipes are “not that different from the many other tomes out there,” they decided to run the best unintentionally funny lines from the book. Here are just a few:
- “One year I was given a birthday present I’ll never forget — a cooking lesson from Jamie Oliver.”
- “I grew up going to the island of Nantucket (off the coast of Massachusetts) at the end of every summer.”
- “We’ve got a wood-burning pizza oven in the garden—a luxury, I know, but it’s one of the best investments I’ve ever made.”
- “I basically love anything that comes in a hot dog bun… except hot dogs (sorry, Dad).”
Gwyneth and I have a complicated relationship.
3. The east coast Five Guys Hamburgers is invading Southern California and that has people speculating how their arrival will affect In-N-Out. There’s plenty of room in this world for mid-range fast food burger joints, so the impact should be minimal. The real question here should be why the fuck in In-N-Out still only in Southern Cali? Certainly they should have spread to other parts of the country. I just don’t get the business strategy.
4. So this is pretty funny. Pultizer Prize-winning food critic Jonathan Gold reviewed Olive Garden for his April Fool’s Day column in the LA Weekly.
I had no intention of eating lunch at the Olive Garden. I was planning to intercept the grumpy photographer at the door and spirit her to the Derby, a track-fueled steak house less than a minute’s drive down the street. We’d have a Sidecar or two. We’d laugh at how she’d been fooled. There would be leftover meat for her bull terrier.
Except that I was caught in traffic and ended up at the restaurant 20 minutes after she got there. She had commandeered a big table upstairs, and was already into the bread sticks, long, doughy things slicked with grease and oil.
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