Eideard

A German pensioner who received a tin of American lard 64 years ago in an aid package has only just tasted it, after discovering that it is still edible.

“I just didn’t want to throw it away,” said Hans Feldmeier, 87. I love my fellow pack rats.

Food safety experts in Rostock, his home town on Germany’s Baltic coast, said the pig fat was still safe to eat.

Mr Feldmeier was a student in 1948 when the US was running a huge aid programme to rebuild war-ravaged Germany. He kept the tin of lard for emergencies…

A food expert, Frerk Feldhusen, said the lard was rather gritty and tasteless and hard to dissolve, though quite edible. Mr Feldmeier provided some black bread to go with it.

The red, white and blue tin of Swift’s Bland Lard bore no expiry date.

Eeoough!

After all, it works for cheese and most wine.

Har! Even with the typo, it’s funny.

Thanks, Gasparrini

Magically Delicious!  Unicorns may manage their elusiveness but they left behind some fanciful evidence of their existence and I was able to recreate their leavings.  

This unicorn poop, in reality, has a funny story.  I told my mom that I was making some “Unicorn Sneezes” and she said “when are you going to make your unicorn sh*t?”  And then it hit me…Great idea, Mom!  It will take a dirty spin and become unicorn poop, instead!  She doesn’t want the credit for encouraging me,  but I still thank her…

The real deal – it’s made of sugar cookies, rainbow dragees, rainbow star sprinkles, white sparkle gel, and rainbow disco dust.

Thanks, Ursarodina – who, AFAIK, has never made or consumed any of these.

Click to enlarge

Three years ago, Edge collaborated with The Serpentine Gallery in London in a program of “table-top experiments” as part of the Serpentine’s Experiment Marathon . This live event was featured along with the Edge/Serpentine collaboration: “What Is Your Formula? Your Equation? Your Algorithm? Formulae For the 21st Century.”

Hans Ulrich Obrist, curator of the Serpentine, invited Edge to collaborate in his latest project, The Serpentine Map Marathon, produced in conjunction with DLD, Digital – Life – Design… The multi-dimensional Map Marathon featured non-stop live presentations by over 50 artists, poets, writers, philosophers, scholars, musicians, architects, designers and scientists.

Click here – to see images from that collaboration.

Thanks, Cornelia

Norway’s holiday butter shortage leads to criminal solutions

Two Swedes have been arrested by Norwegian police for smuggling more than 250kg of butter into the country, offloading one consignment for more than £25 a packet.

The two men, from the Northern city of Umea, managed to make their first delivery before a police patrol stopped their van on Saturday evening.

“They allegedly sold the coveted butter packets in Beitstad Steinkjer before they drove north along the county road 17,” police officer Lars Letnes told Norway’s Adresseavisen newspaper.

“Then they were stopped by a police patrol, which found 250kg of butter in the small van.” A sudden spike in demand has left Norway with a butter shortfall of between 500 and 1,000 tonnes, leaving the country’s citizens facing Christmas without their seven traditional varieties of home-cooked biscuit…

The arrests follow the seizure earlier this month of a 90kg consignment found stashed in the car of a Russian man at the Norwegian-Swedish border. The Norwegian police plan to destroy the confiscated butter.

They could always switchover to lard. That’s the traditional way to handle shortages of plaque in your circulatory system in New Mexico.

People walk past an activist during an Animal Naturalis demonstration to promote vegetarianism in central Barcelona.

Uh, OK.

Cookware taken in evidence

Police have arrested a woman in Pakistan on suspicion of murdering her husband, chopping his body to pieces and boiling it in a bid to get rid of the evidence.

Zainab Bibi, 42, allegedly told authorities she killed her husband Ahmad Abbas because he tried to sexually assault her 17-year-old daughter from another marriage.

She told police she sedated her husband by mixing sleeping pills in his tea and strangled him with rope before dismembering him.

Police say they discovered her plot after neighbours complained about a bad smell coming from her home.

The alarm was raised by Bibi’s landlord, Behzad, who lives on the ground floor of the two-storey Green Town house. He was so upset by the bad cooking smells coming from upstairs that he went up to complain.

Police claim that he found Bibi at the stove, cooking a korma with flesh from her husband’s arm and leg – because she believed it was the only way to practically dispose of his body…

“It occurred to me that if I cooked the body in parts with spices and aromatic ingredients that would curb the stench.’

But she insisted she had no plans to eat the resulting dish, or to feed it to others, adding: ‘I had a plan to do away with the cooked stuff by throwing it in a gutter. I would say to people that it had spoiled…’

The rest of Mr Abbas’s body was found in an aluminium trunk on the premise.

You never know when you might need to add extra ingredients to balance out a recipe.

There’s a shop I’d love to visit

A butcher shop employee in the German town of Braunschweig inadvertently handed a customer a bag containing more than 2,000 euros in cold cash rather than the cold cuts she usually gets.

The 79-year-old pensioner paid five euros for her package of cold cuts and veal steaks. She said she was surprised to find more than she bargained for when she opened the package at home.

“I was completely flabbergasted,” the pensioner told Bild newspaper. She called the butcher shop but it had already closed. So she called the police, who later returned it.

The owner of the butcher shop had packed the day’s take in a paper bag and placed it, as he usually does, next to the cash register. The employee mistook it for the customer’s cold cuts and unwittingly handed her the package.

The honest pensioner got a 100 euro reward from the butcher — and a free basket of sausages.

Good for you, Gran.

A group of schoolgirls claims to have discovered exactly what makes the perfect egg-and-soldiers breakfast.

The young eggheads from Sherborne Girls School in Dorset say Delia Smith was right all along…the perfect boiled egg does take six minutes.

The team of twelve science students took part in an experiment commissioned by the Royal Society of Chemistry and led by Professor Hal Sosabowski, principal lecturer in Chemistry at Brighton University. Setting out to test one of the nation’s all-time favourite breakfasts, the boffins confirmed not only the optimum time for boiling an egg but also the key variables that make up the perfect dipping soldier.

Their finds included:

*Margarine makes a stronger dunking soldier than butter
*White bread makes more effective soldiers
*Optimum toasting time is 2.5 minutes
*The perfect soldier dimension is 1.5cm in width
*The perfect boiled egg takes six minutes…

Sixth-form student Rosanna Younger, 17, came forward with the hypothesis that “applying margarine to toast will produce stronger soldiers than applying butter”.

She said “It has been really interesting to identify a strong trend in such a short time. We kept the experiment simple, focusing on one aspect of boiled eggs and soldiers. “I love butter on my toast but I might just have to swap over to margarine in future to ensure strong soldiers..!”

The school’s aim is “to provide a rich, all-round education enabling girls to enjoy fulfilling and active lives, have open and enquiring minds and develop the character and courage to make a valuable contribution to a changing world”.

I would suggest an additional variable in their consideration of butter vs. margarine coating the soldier in this recipe. What was the butterfat percentage in the butter they were using? I imagine that a higher bf-rating than the usual OTC stuff might make a difference.

[And who would be silly enough to challenge Delia over boiled eggs]

 
The man credited with creating Doritos will be buried along with some of his beloved snack chips…

Arch West died September 20 of natural causes at a Dallas hospital. He was 97. His remains were cremated, and the family plans to bury the urn inside a burial box at a local cemetery on Saturday.

The family requested that friends and relatives who attend the graveside service be allowed to toss Doritos around the box as a tribute.

“He would think it is hilarious,” said his daughter Jana Hacker, a resident of the Dallas area. “The cemetery does not mind because they are biodegradable…”

West, a marketing executive for the Frito-Lay, as eager to produce a salty snack chip after sampling a crunchy, “tortilla-type chip” at the roadside stand while on vacation in Southern California in the early 1960s, Hacker said.

“The company didn’t really like the idea, but Dad managed to direct some (research and development) money into the project,” Hacker said.

The rest is crunchy, tangy history…

Global sales of Doritos were about $5 billion in 2010, Gonzalez said…

Rock on, Arch!

And he maintains the tongue-in-cheek tradition of folks like Fredric Baur the inventor of Pringles. When he died in 2008 at 89, his family honored his wishes by placing his ashes in a Pringles can before burying them…