Valentine's Day for Geeks: Dalek Cookies

This goes out to my fellow single friends who could use a little extra love today. See, Daleks love you! (They may also want to exterminate you, but hey, that's a minor complication. At least they brought you a still-beating-and-impaled heart as a gift! Aww, how sweet.)

Daleks. So romantic. Happy Valentine's Day!

Cookies courtesy of Geek Sweets. I first saw them months ago and have been itching to post them ever since!

Shrimp, Avocado, and Strawberry Salad

My college roommate Alex and I used to cook dinner well after midnight on a regular basis. He came to visit me from Ann Arbor this weekend, and following longstanding tradition, we ended up at the grocery store late one night and came home with a large bag of shrimp. Post-midnight dinner turned into a multi-course affair utilizing lots of our crustacean finds. This was the starter.

Shrimp, Avocado, and Strawberry Salad

Servings: 2
Active Time: 5 minutes
Total Time: 5 minutes

Ingredients:

• 10 large shrimp, cooked
• 1 avocado, sliced
• 6 strawberries, sliced
• 1/4 teaspoon sugar
• garlic powder, to taste
• fresh black pepper, to taste
• sea salt, to taste

Divide strawberries evenly into 2 bowls. Sprinkle with sugar. Place half avocado and 5 shrimp into each bowl and top with a sprinkling of garlic powder, pepper, and salt.

100 Foods To Eat Before You Die

If you're on Facebook, chances are high that you've seen the Food List Challenge being passed around. The makers of the app say, "We think most people will have tried fewer than 20 of these 100 foods to eat before you die." Which I'm sure is just a ploy to get people to click on something that will allow a third party to read their personal information. Being the ornery person I am, I found the list floating around the internet instead, which I present to you below in all its glory.

What I've seen is that most people have actually eaten around 30-50 of the items on the list, not 20. Like any good overachiever, I come in at 91/100 - only good for a lowly A- that would earn the ire of my Asian parents. (Just kidding. We're grading on a curve here, right?)

Here's the list - post how you did in the comments!

1. Abalone
2. Absinthe
3. Alligator
4. Baba Ghanoush
5. Bagel & Lox
6. Baklava
7. BBQ Ribs
8. Bellini
9. Birds Nest Soup
10. Biscuits & Gravy
11. Black Pudding
12. Black Truffle (I have, however, been obsessed lately with white truffle salt.)
13. Borscht
14. Calamari
15. Carp
16. Caviar
17. Cheese Fondue
18. Chicken & Waffles
19. Chicken Tikka Masala
20. Chile Relleno
21. Chitlins
22. Churros
23. Clam Chowder
24. Cognac
25. Crab Cakes
26. Crickets (I'm adventurous, but I draw the line at insects. I don't even want to look at them, much less put them into my mouth.)
27. Currywurst
28. Dandelion Wine
29. Dulce De Leche
30. Durian (This also happens to be one of my favorite things in the world.)
31. Eel
32. Eggs Benedict
33. Fish Tacos
34. Foie Gras
35. Fresh Spring Rolls
36. Fried Catfish
37. Fried Green Tomatoes
38. Fried Plantain
39. Frito Pie
40. Frogs' Legs
41. Fugu
42. Funnel Cake
43. Gazpacho
44. Goat
45. Goat's Milk
46. Goulash
47. Gumbo
48. Haggis
49. Head Cheese
50. Heirloom Tomatoes
51. Honeycomb
52. Hostess Fruit Pie
53. Huevos Rancheros
54. Jerk Chicken
55. Kangaroo (Granted, this was in jerky form - I'd love to try fresh kangaroo, though they're so cute you have to feel kind of bad eating them.)
56. Key Lime Pie
57. Kobe Beef
58. Lassi
59. Lobster
60. Mimosa
61. Moon Pie
62. Morel Mushrooms
63. Nettle Tea
64. Octopus
65. Oxtail Soup
66. Paella
67. Paneer
68. Pastrami on Rye
69. Pavlova
70. Phaal
71. Philly Cheese Steak
72. Pho
73. Pineapple & Cottage Cheese (I'm counting this because I've had both separately on countless occasions. Putting them together doesn't seem terribly different.)
74. Pistachio Ice Cream
75. Po' Boy
76. Pocky
77. Polenta
78. Prickly Pear
79. Rabbit Stew
80. Raw Oysters
81. Root Beer Float
82. S'mores
83. Sauerkraut
84. Sea Urchin
85. Shark
86. Snail
87. Snake
88. Soft Shell Crab
89. Som Tam
90. Spaetzle
91. Spam
92. Squirrel
93. Steak Tartare
94. Sweet Potato Fries
95. Sweetbreads
96. Tom Yum
97. Umeboshi
98. Venison
99. Wasabi Peas
100. Zucchini Flowers

Happy Chinese New Year!

Kung Hei Fat Choi! May the Year of the Dragon bring you many culinary adventures.

This adorable bento box is brought to you by Bento, Monsters - can you believe that Ming wasn't happy with how he turned out? I think he's incredibly cute. Happy New Year!

SOPA and PIPA

This is a non-food related post.

If you visited Kitchen Lore yesterday, you saw that we were participating in the SOPA Strike along with 75,000 other websites (update: make that 115,000 websites) including Google, Wikipedia, Mozilla, Craigslist, and Wordpress. The SOPA Strike is over and Congress has been continuing to drop its support of the bills, though the numbers are still pretty close (67 supporters, 72 opponents). It looks like we made a difference, though the fight's not over just yet.

If you still don't understand what the fuss is about after all the internet craziness that happened yesterday, here's a succinct post about why both acts are bad for the internet and fail to accomplish their stated goal of addressing piracy.

This is important - contact your Congressional representatives if you haven't already (if you did - thanks!).

And now we head back to our regularly scheduled posts.

Alien Sculpted in Banana

At least it's not bursting out of your chest. Did you realize the first movie came out in 1979? Anyone feel old yet?

Photo courtesy of Imgur.

Pepsi Says Mountain Dew Can Dissolve Dead Mice

In a bizarre legal move, Pepsi Co. is claiming that Mountain Dew is capable of dissolving dead mice. A man in Madison County, Ill. "claims that after opening and beginning to drink soda he purchased from a vending machine at work, he tasted something foul. He claims he spat out the soda to reveal a dead mouse." I'm not sure how you can drink such a large gulp of soda that a mouse carcass would escape notice at first, but that's beside the point. In November 2009, Ronald Ball filed a suit against Pepsi Co. for over $50,000 in damages, and the case is going to court next week.

In an affidavit, Pepsi's expert witness testified that Ball's claim is false, writing that the mouse would have turned into a "a jelly-like substance" by the time he opened his can of pop 74 days after its bottling:

By 30 days of exposure to the fluid, all of the mouse's structures will have disintegrated to the point the structures (excepting possibly a portion of the tail) will not be recognizable and, therefore, the animal itself will not be recognizable. Instead, after 30 days in the fluid, the mouse will have been transformed into a "jelly-like" substance.

Even if Pepsi wins the case, I'm not sure that you can actually count this as a win overall. A can of mouse-dissolving acid to go with your fries, anyone?