UK still struggling with multiculturalism and tribalism

You weren't wrong. The dish is named after Alfredo di Lelio, who made it for Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.

I'd probably cop to that. The jarred stuff is really bad and I don't order it at restaurants because there are other things I'd rather have.

In other groundbreaking food news, Banquet has released chicken nuggets shaped like penguins. But I don't think it goes far enough.

Back when I was programming the world's largest automated poultry freezer (Yes, I've programmed from months in arctic conditions) I tried to convince the company's management that their vast automated pallet storage and retrieval system would be ideal for raising penguins in a vertical farm structure. They were already marketing their eggs that were rich in Omega-3's (from fish oil), and penguins were the next logical step. It's the bird that's also sea food, and they stand vertically so you could raise more penguins per pallet than you could with chickens or turkeys. And since they'd be raised in a giant freezer (larger than most basketball arenas), their poop would freeze solid instead of stinking up the neighborhood. Sadly, my idea was never even tested.

http://honestcooking.com/the-faroe-islands-world-class-seafood-and-fermented-sheep/

Man, that article really makes me want to visit the Feroe Islands even if the total eclipse is over.

I just ate tilapia en papillote with olives, garlic, crushed tomatoes, and shredded carrots and cabbage.

ETA: I made it because it takes about the same time and effort as baking Totino's pizza rolls.

For a trash fish tilapia does indeed taste pretty good. I understand they can even be grown in sewer water. Even in the worst quality water those things thrive.

I like the taste of them because they're pretty similar to bluegill and crappie, and are farm raised (in this instance).

I've also eaten Chinese frog legs while thinking "If pampered American frogs eat flies, what the hell do the Chinese feed theirs?"

It was not a pleasant thought.

That's easy to understand though. I joke and tell people that my dad thinks salad is simply a delivery mechanism for salad dressing because it is impolite to drink it straight from the bottle. The same is true of tilapia. Its taste is so mild that it's simply a protein based delivery mechanism for other things.

This week there was an article about growing chicken in the lab (they've already had some limited success with beef), and I think they should be trying much, much simpler organisms that are more primitive and thus easier to grow. Perhaps some kind of clams or other invertebrate, perhaps working their way up to lobster.

Once my wife found that out, she won't eat it any more. She loves fish tacos and since so many of those places use that fish, she's had a tougher time finding non-tilapia tacos.

Well, just wait till she looks up 'fish taco' in the urban dictionary.

Selena Gomez keeps begging me to come over for a fish taco but why should I?
There's a Taco Bell right down the street, and she knows this. She must be stupid.

Is this how it goes here then? Important topics turn into discussions on food right away. Some things, like racism, need to be taken seriously.

Well, your got your wop food, kraut food, nasty scandi food (each of the frozen countries has their own meatball), soul food, chink food, and food that might sound normal but is obviously Canadian, like maple roasted chicken.

But its not so much racism that's the issue as the overdone aversion to reality. Some groups do behave differently, quite distinctly so, and sometimes that has major ramifications that current society is refusing to deal with because everyone is afraid of being labeled a racist. This of course follows a period where assimilation was viewed with disdain, if not contempt, because it meant forcing people form other cultures to change their norms of behavior.

In a Youtube video I linked far above, Camille Paglia goes off on how the 60's culture was hijacked and turned inside out by people who wanted to view everything as just race and sexual relations. Intellectually, those two things were supposed to be just another tool to understanding a fairly narrow subject, not an entire worldview that explains the universe.

ETA: Swedish meatballs duh.
Norwegian meatballs
Finnish meatballs
Danish meatballs
Estonian meatballs
Lithuanian meatballs

Latvian meatballs - almost a self parody.

Go sit in the corner and think about what you have said.

You know there are 20-30 different types of olives commonly found. I find it hard to believe you find all of them icky.

I haven't been able to find them here (wish I could remember the name!) but the Italians whose base I lived on had this banging ass dish that was basically giant olives, stuffed with cheese and sausage and then deep fried.

Oh. Yeah.

Poor thing.

Italian stuffed olives (deep fried of course)
Crispy olives stuffed with sausage (deep fried)
Fried sausuage-stuffed green olives
Fried olives stuffed with Italian sausage and goat cheese

Appreciate the effort, but what are they called and where can I find them in Seattle. Those are the questions I need answered!

Well, you find you some giant olives (Cerignola, or perhaps Castelveltrano or Super colossal Spanish queens), then buy some Italian sausage, goat cheese, bread crumbs, flour, eggs, and some parsley, and then you get a deep fryer warmed up. Invite friends over. Have them bring some wine. Perhaps a nice Chianti.

A few months ago I was researching frost tolerance to see if there were any shortcuts to getting plants to survive a winter far, far outside of their climate zone, such as grinding up leaves of newly nipped frost-tolerant plants and spraying the juices (full of the various signaling chemicals) onto non-tolerant plants at the first sign of cold. But as it turns out, cold tolerance is an extremely complex set of genes acting in very complicated ways, evolved over hundreds of millions of years by plants far outside the tropics. This made me doubt that tropical plants would even have the receptors, pathways, and genes to even respond to the chemicals put out by frost tolerant plants, so perhaps the best option is to genetically splice all the fruit genes from tropical or Mediterranean plants into temperate plants that are already adapted to cold climates. So we need to splice olive genes into apple trees, or perhaps even northern pines, and have the central US, Canada, Europe, and Siberia growing them wall to wall.

Olive All'ascolana, apparently, but this is the only place I can find that serves them and the menu makes no mention of being stuffed with meat.

Chianti is unfit for human consumption.

That couple is from New York and Philadelphia, not Venice. My chat buddy's daughter was in Venice just last week and food was a big topic. They should look at a menu from a restaurant that's actually in Venice, or perhaps try a Facebook page for one.

Incorrect. Chianti is exactly for human consumption, along with a side of fava beans.

I just had some hamburger helper for dinner. If they cut the amount of salt in their "flavor packet" by 2/3rds it would still be too much.

There really needs to be a flat tax of $50 per box on any food which contains too much salt. While they were at it they could do the same thing with anything with added sugar.

Watch heart attacks and diabetes rates collapse after that while processed food actually becomes better tasting because they have to do something other than just put so much salt and sugar in everything people lose their sense of taste.

Actually, the tight link between salt and heart disease has been abandoned. It turns out you can eat about as much salt as you want without any health effects - other than lowering your risk of a cardiac event. NBC News link.
WebMD link

The previous low guidelines increased the risk of heart attack.

You are a liar. It doesn't say that.

I read an article one time of a guy that made Homemade Hamburger Helper by making his own seasoning blend ahead of time. The only thing he could make was the dried cheese stuff, but he just threw in real cheese. It was a while ago that I came across it, but I'm sure it's easy enough to find.

It's more that no one takes gturner seriously.

http://honestcooking.com/purple-potato-gnocchi-ricotta/

Purple gnocchi looks good.