Snack Tray: Knit Wits, Tex Mex, Chat and Chew, and the Fastest of the Fast Foods

What's shaping up as the unlikeliest craze since cupcakes? Knitting. And the doyennes of darning are Nashville's Ann Shayne and her New Yorker buddy Kay Gardiner, whose Mason-Dixon Knitting site is the last word in wool on the Web, with more than 150,000 loyal readers and counting. In advance of their appearance next week at the Southern Festival of Books, they've gone all honky-tonk on us—with a cheatin' song, no less. Hey, sometimes you need something bulkier than an afghan to warm up those winter nights.

• The bad news: Today is the last chance you'll get to eat lunch at Radius10, as the popular Gulch dining spot is discontinuing lunch service. The good news: the move is freeing up chef Jason Brumm to start Riverwalk Catering Co., which promises the "smokin' good Tex-Mex" we were hoping he'd bring to the Belmont area. (That's the second catering-company launch we've heard this week, after F. Scott's new subsidiary Zelda's.) A press release says the company will launch Oct. 13, with more details coming soon. In the meantime, don't panic: Radius10's beloved lunchtime fish tacos will move to the dinner menu.

• Want to know how your favorite (or least favorite) fast-food joint stacks up in terms of service time, order accuracy, speaker clarity and menuboard appearance? The results are in at QSR magazine, which ranks the nation's top 25 fast-food chains. Not surprisingly, Chick-fil-A takes top honors as America's best drive-thru, scoring a perfect 10 in order accuracy—but perhaps more interesting are the low scores. Rock bottom: Popeye's, with dismal .1 scores in menuboard appearance and speaker clarity. Still like the spicy, though.

• Then again, I may have to reevaluate my capsicum jones after this British newspaper report, excerpted by A Man's Gotta Eat: "An amateur chef died the day after eating a 'superhot' chilli in a bet with his friend over who could make the hottest dish, an inquest heard. Andrew Lee, 33, suffered heart failure the morning after he ate the chilli. Toxicology tests are now being carried out to see if the forklift truck driver suffered a fatal reaction to the dish or whether anything else contributed to his death." Joltin' Django still makes it sound preferable to drinking a Yuengling Lager.

• Ever heard of Wade's Chat and Chew Diner? Me either, until Eric and Katie posted an update on Nashville Restaurants. Evidently it's been there at 1200 Buchanan St. right off D.B. Todd Blvd., just waiting to corral passers-by with a cafeteria line serving oxtails, pig's feet, meat loaf and other meat-and-three staples. Plus the chat sounds pretty chewy, starting with this frank assessment of Titans QB Vince Young's recent plaints: "You can boo my ass all you want for $30 million a year."

Birthday Steak-Out

It's a certain Gnome's birthday, and someone's treating him to a steak dinner. Knowing how the Gnome hates extravagance, where would you take him for a moderately priced meal of meat and potatoes?

Snack Tray: Breads of Many Sizes and Dueling Porn

Buried Lead Dept.: Way down at the bottom of Lesley's ode to the bounty of peas at the Nashville Farmers' Market—shelled peas, unshelled peas, crowder peas: PEAS!—this little tidbit is tucked away: "Also, be sure to drop by the Schrock Family Bakery stand....We took home a *mumble* as well as a loaf of fresh cracked wheat bread and a loaf of something called salt-rising bread." Boing-g-g! I've been looking for salt rising bread around here for years! The fine, cake-like artisanal bread, far less chewy than sourdough and with a milder yet richer taste, relies on the bacterium Clostridium perfringens instead of yeast as its rising agent. On cold winter mornings before school, I'd wake up and smell the buttered slices toasting in the oven while my mother cooked bacon—the bread makes simply the best BLT on earth. I now know where I'll be Saturday morning.

• "Like sex porn, gastroporn addresses the most basic human needs and functions, idealizing and degrading them at the same time. 'You watch porn saying, Yes, I could do that,' explained [porn still photographer Barbara] Nitke. 'You dream that you’re there, but you know you couldn’t. The guy you’re watching on the screen, his sex life is effortless. He didn’t have to negotiate, entertain her, take her out to dinner. He walked in with the pizza. She was waiting and eager and hot for him.' " From a stimulating 2005 Harper's article by Frederick Kaufman, who explores a comparison many have made but seldom in such detail: food porn vs. real porn. (Terrorist fist bump: Steve H.)

• If I hadn't been cruising Slashfood, I might never have learned of the existence of the flagel. No, not the squagel—the flagel, the bagel's flatter roadkill variation. "After the bagel is boiled, but before it goes into the oven, it gets flattened," sez Slashfood. "This might sound silly, but it offers its own set of rewards. Since it's thinner, it's easier to eat as a sandwich. It also means more outside bits to nibble on and less fluffy insides—much chewier." Now if they could just come up with circular Krystals....

• Of note: two of the worst restaurant write-ups I've read in some time, here and here. At least the latter has a happy ending.

Welcome to Dinner-Music City

Oddly enough, the narrator of this video calls Star Cafe meat-and-three in Goodlettsville "one of the few places in Nashville that offers food and entertainment in the same location."

What the $#@&? This is Music City, for crying out loud. You can't order a bag of Funyuns and a Snapple without someone breaking into song. What about Bluebird Cafe, Sambuca, The Standard, F. Scott's, Kalamata's, Ri'Chard's, French Quarter Cafe, B.B. King's and Family Wash, for starters?

Let's make this man a list of restaurants with entertainment, stat.

Snack Tray: How to Get a Vegetarian in Bed Without Really Trying

The way to a man's heart is supposedly through the stomach, but most guys are looking for a different transportation route—an expressway to the vagina. Their GPS to the G-spot comes courtesy of Cooking to Get Lucky, a webcast cooking show designed to make your dining partner the last course on the menu. "A lot of girls out there love healthy food," the blurb copy leers. "If you want to get into bed with one check out this episode!" The promised "dishes to help you seal the deal without the grass & tofu" include halibut baked with ginger, parsley and olive oil followed by chocolate-dipped strawberries and "pompagne" (pomegranate and champagne—cab, please). I'm guessing the Goldfinger-era Sean Connery is the only man who could parlay this dubious feast into a Kama Sutra smorgasbord, but I'd love to be proven wrong—preferably before the pompagne pouring. Any thoughts, ladies? (Hat tip: Boinkology.)

• While I'm doffing chapeaux, I would never have found Boinkology without consulting The Clothes That Got Me Laid, the blog devoted to two things I know less than nothing about: fashion and sex. (Rumor has it the author does one of the best shows on 91 Rock.) Had Sex and the City been as much fun as this compendium of hot encounters in hot clothes—which might as well take place on Omicron-4 in the Zenobite galaxy for all the relevance it has to my life—I might not have sat through it whistling with my fingers in my ears.

• Since you still have a few days to share your experiences during Nashville Originals Restaurant Week, let's prime the pump a little. Get your juices flowing by checking out this past post from Boston Dreams and Michelin Stars: a nicely orchestrated course-by-course heavyweight bout between two Nashville favorites. "In the red corner, the challenger from Elliston Place, a walk-in dinner on Friday night at Ombi. And in the blue corner, the defending champion and pride of the 37206 zip code, a reservation on Saturday night at Margot Cafe." What follows are "five rounds of toe-to-toe culinary boxing action"—and if only one walks away with the title, the other still sounds like a contender.

• Thanks to Nashveggie for sharing the news that Pennsylvania-based frozen-treat purveyor Rita's has opened an outpost at 4219 Lebanon Road in Hermitage. (Another will be coming soon to Mt. Juliet, according to Rita's site.) Rita's serves a full menu of custard, cream ices, gelati, cookie-ice-custard hybrids called Blendinis and fat-free Slenderitas. But the shop is best known for its Italian ices, in flavors ranging from lemonade and passion fruit to wild black cherry. Call 874-9500 for more info.

• It took me the better part of my adult life to warm up to Almond Joy candy bars, and I still can't say I relish the texture—it's like sinking your teeth into some kind of squishy beetle. (Coconut in general polarizes people more than any other food I know, except maybe beets.) But the recipe Ulika has for homemade AJs (not to mention the photos) looks like the awesomest thing in the history of awe, starting with the sugar-toasted almonds pressed into the "fun size" coconut logs. Bonus points for that caption lower down on the photo of Mr. T.

• Aunt B. has learned Carrington Fox's two dirty secrets. I mean, besides that her nom de porn is Valentine 76.

Help Dean Robb Torture Sean Norton

I Just had my first face-to-face conversation with Dean Robb at Miro District Food & Drink today. Nice guy, fast talker, quirky sense of humor. While describing the process for making the fresh ricotta that accompanies the grilled peach appetizer, he segued into a story about kitchen pranks he used to play on the staff at Bottega in Birmingham.

When a new kid showed up to work, Robb would haze the rookie by asking him to fetch an obscure utensil, such as a polenta stretcher. The polenta stretcher is very expensive, Robb would say, and only restaurant don Frank Stitt has access to it, so go tell Frank you need the polenta stretcher (or some equally fictional and moronic utensil). Now go, and don’t come back without it!

In these parts, that’s what we call sending someone on a snipe hunt.

Since arriving in Nashville as executive chef of Miro and sister restaurant Watermark, Robb has inflicted this humor on the staffs at both tony eateries, no doubt punking Watermark chef Sean Norton in the process. I’m glad I’m not the one asking Norton for the dough repair kit while he's putting the finishing touches on an order of antelope with spiced berries, but it all sounds kind of fun.

So here’s your chance to taunt Iron Fork chef Sean Norton and the rest of the crew at Watermark and Miro. What apocryphal kitchen utensils can chef Robb send them to find? I’m thinking about a garlic de-veiner, a grit fork or a Rube Goldberg contraption like the one pictured above, but I can’t wait to hear what Mr. Pink comes up with.

Snack Tray: Stepford Wives Love Fructose!

My fellow Americans, can we stand by one more nanosecond and permit the Swift Boating of our sweetheart of the heartland? We refer, of course, to the backbone of American nutrition, high fructose corn syrup. Why, it's just liquid goodness fresh-squeezed from Mother Nature's bounteous teat—and yet some corn-hating meanies want to demonize the magic elixir. Well, it won't happen while the Corn Refiners Association is on watch. The CRA, a kind of NRA for the FFA, has struck back with a pro-fructose website, SweetSurprise.com, and a series of commercials that tells the truth about corn syrup—that only uptight women and dorky guys would dare question its nutritional value; that hot skinny babes evidently down the stuff by the flagon; and that Big Sugar's nefarious brain-clouding on the subject evaporates the instant it is challenged. Shuck this, Michael Pollan.

• If not for AlwaysHungryAB, we wouldn't have found this blog post, which relays the news that the five-year-old Christopher Pizza Company on Demonbreun's Restaurant Row will soon close its doors: "I'm not psychic or anything, but there were signs that day-to-day operations were not running with their usual amount of dysfunction. Things that should take days to fix (and would normally take weeks to fix) were taking months to fix. More than anything, I could tell the boss had changed....The question most people have asked me is: why close? I'm not sure I ever got a straight answer from Christopher on that one. My own personal (and by no means official) theory is that Christopher had the choice to renew his lease with jerk landlords (who are raising rent) and he declined." Make sure you click the very odd links.

• What do you get when you mix equal parts apple cider, banana liqueur and Drambuie, add limeade, then top it off with a stout portion of root beer schnapps? The name says it all.

• Speaking of which: "Escamoles are the eggs of the giant black Liometopum ant, which makes its home in the root systems of maguey and agave plants. Collecting the eggs is a uniquely unpleasant job, since the ants are highly venomous and have some kind of blood grudge against human orifices. The eggs have the consistency of cottage cheese." On Cracked.com's list of the six most terrifying foods in the world, this is only No. 6.

• Can you truly call yourself an omnivore? The true test can be found in this fun timewaster—courtesy of Kira at Food Alla Puttanesca, who posts side by side two lists of 100 foods any self-respecting omnivore should have under his belt. The first, which originated at Very Good Taste and quickly circled the globe, gathers a sampling of diverse dishes from poutine and umeboshi to the good old PB & J. (My score was a woeful 56/100.) The second, from Tigers & Strawberries, compiles a strictly vegetarian list running the gamut from artichoke-spinach dip to paw-paw. (Score: 76/100. Yesss!)

Snack Tray: Nashville's Olympics of Pastry, Ham Sushi, and a Different Kind of Mint Condition

Yes, this magnificent phoenix-like structure is made entirely of chocolate and sugar—and Joy Ramirez at Joy of Cooking has other photos just as awe-inspiring behind the scenes at last weekend's Amoretti 2008 World Pastry Team Championship at the Gaylord Opryland Convention Center. The competition gathered nine teams of world-class pastry chefs from China to Russia, then judged their spectacular creations on grounds of taste, artistry and procedure. Joy drove the Italian team around town and served as their translator, which means they likely had a great time even if they came in fourth overall. We won't spoil which team won, but I wonder if the winning chef did the Michael Phelps gorilla roar when the results were announced.

• Crema, Rachel Lehman's wonderful new Hermitage Avenue coffee shop, has gotten me hooked on the savory burritos they stock from East Nashville's Sweet 16th Bakery. According to their blog, they're now carrying stout blocks of mac-and-cheese also from Sweet 16th. If they're as good as the cheddar scone I had this morning—subtly cheesy and lightly sweet, with a texture more reminiscent of my grandmother's cheese biscuits than a crumbly scone—maybe I can hit the place on the way home. Watch also for Crema's monthly coffee classes, with "Espresso 101" slated for 3:30 p.m. Sept. 27.

• For your next movie, I strongly recommend adding to your Netflix queue the 1992 Mexican film Food as Metaphor for Life ("Youngest, unmarried sister in family pours all of her energy and passion into cooking, which is so potent that it causes instant paralysis for anyone who eats it"). It is, of course, not to be confused with the 1987 Danish film Food as Metaphor for Life, the 1986 Japanese film Food as Metaphor for Life, or the 1994 Taiwanese variation Food Metaphor Life. Courtesy of the most glorious timesuck I've found in months, the Parallel Universe Film Guide. Hat tip: Miami Steve Haruch.

• Easy, stomach: Newscoma has a post about what passes for Japanese cuisine in her neck of northwest Tennessee: ham sushi rolls. (Like ours is terribly different, Lannae argues in writing about one longtime Nashville institution.) Then again, my mind was just blown by Cleveland Pete's lunchbag sandwich of choice: peanut butter and ham.

• Urban legend, my ass.

Show Us Your Nuts

Sure, you’re a big country star, and “regular rules” such as the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the Law of Averages don’t apply to you. Otherwise, what's the point of being a celebrity? We know, Monsieur Possum, that the biggest celebrities can reinvent punctuation, bending it masterfully to bring it in line with the demographic.

But if apostrophes don’t matter, then why is this almost-about-food joke funny?

Guy walks into a psychiatrist’s office wearing nothing but plastic wrap. Doctor says, “I can clearly see your nuts.”

Now, readers, I know you have a great food joke. Bring them on, because a laugh, like a snack, is best when you share it.

Show 'Em What You Got

We've said it before: Bites has the funniest readers around. Here’s a creative exercise to keep your chops up, so to speak. Write a caption for this cake, featured at the uproarious site Cake Wrecks. Your humor will be admired by all, and perhaps we can find some crap to foist off on a worthy prize to award to the most creative entry.

When you’re done, swallow your coffee first, then go read the real caption to indulge in a gut-shaking laugh.

Snack Tray: French Fries And Hummus Had A Baby, and The World's Best Award-Winning (Fake) Restaurant

"Imagine the three-way love child of polenta, french fries and hummus and meditate on that for a moment…." Oh, I am, believe me, and not just because I haven't eaten breakfast or lunch. That bit of triple-X food porn (along with the accompanying photo) comes from cook eat FRET, where Claudia trawls through Lidia Bastianich's cookbook Lidia's Italy to find this recipe for panelle. Made with chickpea flour, the panelle is cooked, cooled on a sheet and cut, then pan-fried in olive oil to produce the puffy little triangles above. Thanks, CEF, for the tip that our local Whole Foods carries the necessary garbanzo flour.

• Ready for the latest menu updates from Milan's hottest restaurant of the moment, Osteria L'Intrepido? Too bad: the joint doesn't exist—although that didn't keep it from winning an Award of Excellence from Wine Spectator magazine. In a culinary scandal that has apparently just reached the tipping point, author Robin Goldstein submitted for consideration the bogus restaurant, a bogus menu, and a bogus wine list stocked with wines the magazine had earlier judged as sub-par, accompanied by a $250 entrance fee. Lo and behold, the fake food won a real award. The best account I've read is at The Epi-Log on Epicurious.com, where Michael Y. Park weighs both Goldstein's ruse and the magazine's rebuttal. Most curious, though, is this question near the conclusion: "Should [Wine Spectator] only hand out awards to restaurants staff have personally visited, even though that involves an incredible number of practical issues?" Um, let's put it another way: Should a critic hand out an award to a place whose food he's never tasted? If so, Carrington, Little Miss Martha Stewart Living Radio Return Guest, your job just got a hell of a lot easier.

• How's it hanging over at the Frist Center Café? A little askew, if you ask Melissa at Strawberry Beret and Frank at Nashville Eats Its ABCs. Frank doesn't care for the Caribbean barbecue sauce on his grilled pork chop ("Nasty is what it is") but has high marks for the homemade potato chips (what I've always ordered, and liked). Melissa—well, for some reason after reading her post, I've got "Let's Call The Whole Thing Off" stuck in my head.

• At Fixin' Supper, another Nashville vegetarian falls off the wagon and lands in a skillet of ground beef. Her flesh-deprived taste buds must have mistaken it for bacon.

• Scott and Erin at Hungry Times Two leave today for England and Scotland. God knows why, but they plan to eat there. "Foodwise, we're very interested in searching out authentic pubs, fish 'n chip shops, and Indian food," they write. "Our itinerary is: London, Bath, maybe Canterbury, Ayr, Isle of Arran, Glasgow, Loch Lomond, and Edinburgh." Wish I knew someone close at hand with some knowledge of British food...say, someone who recently became a regular contributor to Bites....

• Speaking of whom, a laurel and hearty handshake to Jim Myers, a food writer with few peers, whose entry "Bravo Fluffernutter" was the 5,000th comment posted to Bites. He truly could not have done it without you. And neither could we.

Snack Tray: Crunk Fish, Robinson Crusoe's Condiments and Okra Minus Slime

It's Friday, so the heart naturally yearns for a deluxe Nashville hot fish sandwich: planks of fried whiting piled high with yellow mustard, hot sauce, onion and pickle and toothpicked between endearingly inadequate slices of lunchbox-issue white bread. This monster is the Giant King of Nashville hot fish sandwiches, as Eastside Fish's Donald "Bo" Boatright will be the first to tell you. We found this photo and Michael Stern's accompanying write-up at Roadfood.com, and you can find the real deal at 2617 Gallatin Pike, where Mr. Pink heartily endorses the hot wings as well as Nashville's coolest fashion accessory, the "Crunkest Fish in Town" T-shirt. Call in your order at 227-8388.

• Worst-Case Scenario Dept.: You get home, your refrigerator has died, and all your condiments are now Petri dishes of angsty bacteria. Which ones do you restock? Ulika has a list of desert island dressings no kitchen can survive without, even if I'm currently surviving without some of them (sweet chili sauce, Cheez Whiz). My own additions to the list: soy sauce, Cholula, Louisiana Gold, and the most glorious of all enhancement aids, Omni Hut Teriyaki Sauce.

• At Nashville Restaurants, Sweetgrass Smokerie incurs the undying wrath of a Sicilian simply by taking its spicy smoked tofu on a pretzel roll off the menu. I would think anything that obliterates tofu could only be a diner's friend, but Katie the Veggie Eater does not agree. Even so, the "grits tots" they tried across the patio at Edisto (which caused a mild disagreement, if you can have such a thing with a Sicilian) sound like fried lumps of genius.

• Maybe it's because the venerable Abelmoschus esculentus stands up to drought like the Iron Mike of the vegetable kingdom, but okra seems to be in the air these days. (Not literally, thank goodness, as driving would be difficult.) The latest to take notice is Natalie at Fear Ye No Carb, who provides a roasting recipe that she says does away with that off-putting okra slime. But isn't the slime part of the appeal? If I ran the American Okra Council (if there were an American Okra Council), I would market it as vegan escargot.

• Speaking of vegans, Yvonne Smith, Nashville's Traveling Vegetarian, is up for a 2008 Veggie Award for "Favorite Veg Website" from VegNews magazine. We at Bites do not advocate ballot-box stuffing...well, yeah, actually, we kinda do. So vote for Yvonne before Aug. 31 and make sure you fill out at least 50 percent of the ballot. All write-ins must be vegan, which is a polite way of saying "Famous Dave's" is not an acceptable candidate.

Snack Tray: Ugly Mugs and a Death Rain Monsoon

Thanks to Rebekka at The Sugar Bar (where we stole this photo) for the heads-up that Ugly Mugs Coffee & Tea is finally open in the Walden building at 1888 Eastland Ave., across from the East Nashville Portland Brew. The official grand opening is tomorrow, Saturday, Aug. 16, and owners Jarod and Courtney Delozier promise giveaways, free samples of Sugar Bar goodies, and live music starting at 5 p.m. Hours are Monday-Saturday 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., Sunday 7 a.m. to 3 p.m.

• Uh-oh. Looks like Blair's Death Rain Chips nearly claimed another victim at East Nashville's Mitchell Deli, where Diana from Tempus Est Nunc had to save her husband from a bag of Satan's own buffalo-wing spuds. The problem wasn't the heat—her husband is allergic to the chicken fat in the chips—but leave it to Blair to incorporate new methods of attempted homicide in every bite. If you really want to cauterize your sphincter, try Cosmic Chile's recipe for Habanero Death Rain Burgers. Care to guess the secret ingredient?

• I am loving the Olympics, but I join the international chorus asking what happened to the national sport of Spain and Finland. I refer, of course, to vegan hunting.

• Ever stood by and fumed as an officious restaurant manager busted an employee's chops for some minute transgression? The Boredest Girl in Nashville has a sweet and remarkably satisfying little tale that I'll file away for future use. It beats the time in high school I spat in a pitcher of Coke and gave it to some idiot frat kids who were harassing the waitress at Sir Pizza.

• Speaking of Sir Pizza, a tip of the lance to Joltin' Django at another favorite blog, A Man's Gotta Eat, for his fine appreciation of one of Middle Tennessee's most underrated pies. Square slices, square cubes of pepperoni, squarest damn jukebox I've ever seen in my life—but I love that toothsome crust with the crunchy edges and the bits of burned flour on the bottom. And I can't get enough of those juicy little chunks of pepperoni, which have spoiled me for the crimson poker chips that dot most pizzas. (Bonus points at the Bell Road location for that sweet-ass commando video game that dates back roughly to perestroika.) My oath of fealty is to you, Sir Pizza!

Snack Tray: Food Safety Pops a Schlitz, Lesley Does London And Other Tidbits

Many thanks to Ulika Food Blog for introducing me to the magic of Dr. Carl Winter, "the Sinatra of Salmonella," who spreads the word about proper food handling via animated song parodies. The one on the Ulika site, which heralds the danger of food-borne bacteria to "We Will Rock You," is a classic on arrival. (Sing it with me now, boom-boom-PAH, boom-boom-PAH: "Buddy, you're a young man, dumb man, careless/And you're gonna make someone quite sick someday/You got spores on your plate/They'll incubate/There's trouble if you cross-contaminate/Miii-crobes, they will KILL! YOU!") But the one above is no less effective for playing to every kid's love of Kenny Rogers, using the Don Schlitz standard "The Gambler" to convey the hazards of improperly thawed ground beef. Maybe it sounds goofy, but if not for "Schoolhouse Rock" I wouldn't be able to sing the Preamble to the Constitution.

• Over at Lesley Eats, I had to rub my eyes when I ran across this sentence: "For a variety of reasons (including a much more organic food supply), the food in England just tastes so much better. Brighter. Every bite does a little dance on your tongue." What?!? This doesn't sound like the England I remember from 20 years ago. Back then, the only time the food danced was when you pinged it off a garbage-can lid. (If that's dancing, the boiled sausage I chucked after one pasty bite was freakin' Gene Kelly.) Of course, I was in Brighton, then the land of the questionable meat pie, and Lesley was in London's spectacular Borough Market, home to some of Europe's most fetching produce. Props to our girl for representing us so well—she even sipped tea with her pinkie extended.

• I had been planning to fry some green tomatoes this week, but Nicole Sauce has pretty much convinced me to try a sautéed green tomato and summer squash ensalada instead. You add onion, crushed Corn Flakes (or corn meal) and Cajun spice to the diced squash and tomato and fry it all up into a large frittata-like patty, then halve it and serve it over lettuce and cilantro topped with salsa and sour cream. I picture something like a Korean seafood pancake, only studded with colorful al dente veggies.

• The next wave in food criticism comes from the awesome Onion AV Club, where a new "Taste Test" feature yields a priceless exchange between writer Josh Modell and a poster who goes by the handle Zodiac Motherfucker. The field of battle is something called Blair's Death Rain XXX Hot Habanero Chips; the Zodiac's discourse starts at "MAN UP AND FACE THE RAIN" and mushrooms into a volcanically obscene all-caps tirade. (Try reading it aloud in the voice of John Goodman in The Big Lebowski.) Confidential to ZMF: the name is Noel "Murray," dimwit, and he could rip out your larynx just by scratching his earlobe.

Bacon Never Sleeps

Wakey wakey, eggs and bakey. Mmmm...can't you just smell that aroma of sizzling pork wafting from your alarm clock? Brent Rolen sent us a link to this Mathlete report (see swiped photo above) on a clever little gizmo timed to cook a bacon strip under halogen lamps inside a clock radio. When the alarm goes off, the radio issues not a shrieking siren but the irresistible smell of yummy bacon. In theory, you'd wake up hungry and nostalgic for Mom's pre-school breakfasts. In practice, you'd probably wake up thinking the house was on fire and bolt into the front yard in your underwear.

What this sounds like is the ultimate stealth device for the overnight conversion of vegetarians. It's a diabolical Invasion of the Body Snatchers scenario: Unsuspecting herbivores go to bed with visions of tofu dancing in their heads, until the seductive perfume of Hormel's finest slowly fogs their senses. Their taste buds are no longer their own. Next thing you know, they're licking the grease off discarded Baconator wrappers and gazing lustfully at the cover of Charlotte's Web.

And you can't have bacon without something tall and cool to wash it down, right? Here's a little something to quench your pork-stoked thirst: bacon vodka. Still not sated? How about a nice chocolate bacon bar. Or bacon chocolate-chip cookies. Or maybe just a nice chaser of bacon beer.

You can run, plant eaters, but you'll have to stop sometime. And when you do, the clock will be waiting. The alarm is already set. The hour of bacon is at hand.

Alphabet City: Eating Through Nashville One Letter At A Time

Every week somebody tips me to another cool Nashville food blog, and my hat is off to Claudia for passing along Nashville Eats Its ABCs—the ongoing adventures of Frank, Hank and Eddie, three intrepid culinary explorers who have vowed to eat their way across Nashville in alphabetical order. I picture them as Nashville's answer to the Warriors, bopping their way home from Arnold's to Z's Deli across a hostile cityscape studded with steam tables.

Right now they're on at least their third crossing at E for Ellendale's, the Donelson lunch buffet housed in a spacious old Elm Hill Pike residence. As reported, the variety of selections sounds a little iffy—buffalo wings, Swedish meatballs, vegetable lasagna, pork tenderloin and cheese fondue?—but Hank assures us that all is well:

Buffets scare me. That’s a fact. So when we walked into Ellendales and saw that the lunch buffet was the main attraction...I had my reservations. However...after taking a walk down the buffet line...seeing a cook swapping out dishes for freshly cooked ones...and realizing this wasn’t your fried shrimp, chocolate pudding and pancakes buffet...I went for it. The food was actually really good. Some of the highlights included fresh fruit and salads (boring)...some mighty fine Swedish meatballs (I don’t know what makes a meatball Swedish...but let’s just go with it), oversized buffalo wings with blue cheese, cheese fondue, chocolate fondue and a couple pasta dishes. I pretty much got a little bit of everything...and enjoyed almost all of it. For $10.95...it was actually a pretty good deal. Add to that a health score of 98 and the fact that it’s fairly easy to get to off the highway...I’ll probably be back.

The guys mention that they've had trouble finding restaurants beginning with Q, X, I and Y. (I notice they haven't done Yanni's Mediterranean Grill, so heads up.) If there's an eatery out there having a hard time getting publicity, you might consider temporarily adding an X before your name. Just a thought.

Snack Tray: Tasty Tidbits For A Freaky Friday

Think of this post as an online See's Candies sampler—a box of assorted goodies you can peruse at your leisure, until you either have to get some work done (or pantomime it brilliantly enough to fool your boss) or your eyes gently flutter to a close.

• At Tupperware Avalanche, Fluffernutter provides a recipe for an eye-catching summer drink: cucumber ginger limeade. By "eye-catching" I mean "bizarre enough to make me spray coffee across my keyboard"—until I realized it's not terribly different from either a Pimm's Cup or one of my favorite flavors at Las Paletas. The recipe calls for three limes, but Fluffernutter (peering directly into my heart) adds, "or 1/3 cup frozen limeade concentrate." My only complaint is that I'm guessing vodka is a much more crucial ingredient than she thinks. As for her point about the return of the tautology, it is what it is.

• As with most every delicacy Claudia displays on cook eat FRET, her egg yolk ravioli reminds me of some exotic sea creature in a Jacques Cousteau special: beautiful, mysterious, unapproachable, and unlikely to be encountered by me in my lifetime. If, like me, you want a visit to a strange science-fiction universe where (a) not every meal includes frozen chicken tenders, (b) food is to be consumed and enjoyed at a leisurely pace, not during commercial breaks in Scooby-Doo, and (c) people actually seek out the proper ingredients instead of settling for whatever approximation is 10 for $10 at Kroger, grab a space helmet and decompress. Be warned, though: After these photos, re-entry is a bitch.

• If that's not vacation enough, on Joy of Cooking Joy Ramirez has a lovely travelogue of her journey to the Italian town of Asiago, nestled in the Alpine foothills not far from the Austrian border. After watching Claudia pursue just the right ricotta for her ravioli, it's doubly tantalizing when Joy gets to taste a freshly made, still-warm batch on arrival in a local cheese factory. And is that giant wheel of cheese real, or something cooked up for a gag in a Mars Attacks! sequel?

• Since I won't let Bites go more than six hours without a hot-chicken reference—one more reason you should pray for Carrington's safe return—I direct you to The Great Nashville Hot Chicken Exploration, a band of iron-gutted Indiana Joneses whose mission is to try all the hot chicken Nashville has to offer. How did I miss the news that The Scoreboard near Opry Mills is the latest to serve Beelzebub's bird? The Exploration hasn't tried it yet, so I guess the opposite of a race to the poles is on.

• Congratulations to Heather W. at Nashville Foodies for combining two of life's abiding joys: drive-in movie theaters and Oreos. Lucky Tullahoma has the Montana Drive-In, where patrons can enjoy not only movies under the stars but also a concession stand that offers deep-fried Oreos two for a dollar or five for $2. Laugh all you want—I'm sure they laughed also at the Galileo who discovered the corn dog. "When you bite inside," Heather writes, "the cookie has become soft, I assume from the steam from cooking, and the result is delicious." Note to Heather: make a short roadtrip to the awesome Stardust Drive-In in Watertown just outside Lebanon. It should be a breeze for anyone brave enough to try concession-stand ribs.

• This is new only to me, but The Dry Spot has what may be the best WTF fortune-cookie message I've ever read. At least since the fake ones Penn & Teller made that said things like "That lump is cancer" or "Don't get on the plane!" If you've found an equally odd message, send it in!

Sip and Listen: Help Stock a Coffee House Music Library

Here's a pleasant time-suck activity for a lazy Friday. Over at the blog for Ugly Mugs, the East Nashville coffee house that should be opening any day now across Eastland from Portland Brew, the proprietors are asking customers to help them select the joint's music library. Specifically, they want suggestions of one album (or more) that is a must-have for any self-respecting java emporium.

You can guess the usual suspects: John Mayer, Jack Johnson, Norah Jones, Feist—the capo di tutti capi of the Starbucks Mafia. But Derek Webb gets as many votes as Nick Drake. Sufjan Stevens, Sigur Ros and D'Angelo rub shoulders with Prince, Gillian Welch and Bob Marley.

So: what music would you want to accompany that first steaming sip of Sumatran gold? Or does the music you generally hear in coffee houses make you want to grate your eardrums with an emery board?

Chadwick's, Shmadwick's

Forget you ever saw that last post. Coincidentally, $1,200 will also buy you a once-in-a-lifetime (re: paramedic service not included) repast from Mr. Pink's House of Bitchin' Cuisine, located in vibrantly transitional Woodbine. We are not responsible for stolen items, injury or appetizers.

Your multi-course meal will include a poached jumbo egg of finest Alabaman hen, perched atop a halved Entermann's English muffin with a Knorr's instant hollandaise sauce reduction. After those three courses, you will be treated to a carafe of Woodbine's unique mineral water (the "Storm Drainage" blend) fresh from the tap, with a complimentary cookie provided by our pastry supplier, Chip Zahoy. An extra $300 gets you not only valet parking but also my 1986 Chrysler LeBaron with the original sideview mirror (right only).

That's Mr. Pink's House of Bitchin' Cuisine, where the fine dine in Woodbine. "When you just can't open a can."