The Carnivore Project

Omaha Beef

The Carnivore Project has a new favorite team - the Omaha Beef. The Beef are in the ninth year of professional football, playing as part of the United Indoor Football Association. Home games are played at Omaha Civic Auditorium, nicknamed (I love this) "The Slaughterhouse" and their mascot is "Sir Loin". What's not to love?

Not only the Beef, you know, the Beef - they're also really good. After a hard-earned road win over the Sioux City Bandits (laaaaaame), the Beef are riding a seven game winning streak, and sitting (at 8-2) with the best record in the league. GO BEEEEEF!

Support the Omaha Beef at www.beeffootball.com.

Note: The Omaha Beef are only the new favorite real team of the Carnivore Project. The favorite imaginary team will still remain the Kansas City Beef, of the London House Rules Fantasy Football League.

Daniel Lambert

If even half of what they say about Daniel Lambert (1770-1809) is true, he would still weigh 26 stone.

Pickles

He's gone without mention so far, but Anne's cat, Pickles, has now been residing with us in London for several months.

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Fin Fang Foom

One of Jack Kirby's peculiar nightmares from the early 1960's, Fin Fang Foom is a massive dragon, based loosely on an Occidental bastardization of Chinese mythology - or, more likely, a commercial desire to emulate the Godzilla property.

He lies dormant for centuries, is awakened by Standard Monster-Awakening Causes (nuclear weapons, hikers, evil corporations), romps around for a while - generally bellowing his own name - and then is put back to sleep by the local superhero fortuitously (and invariably) locating magic herbs.

(Yup. Magic herbs.)

Of all the bizarre Marvel monsters, Fin Fang Foom is arguably the most surreal. He laid dormant for decades (in reality, that is), until, bizarrely, now.

Apparently there's something about the big green dragon in purple pants that resonates, against all odds, with the modern comic book reader.

Death of Mr. Noodle

On January 9th, 2007, Momofuko Ando passed away outside of Osaka, Japan.

In 1958, this heroic inventor single-handedly created the instant ramen noodle - an instant success (pun, regretfully, intended). Flying in the face of all commonly-held medical wisdom about MSG, Mr. Ando enjoyed a bowl of instant ramen every day for lunch up until his death at an impressive 96 years old.

There's a special place in culinary heaven for this gentleman - even now, he's probably being gentled ushered to it by six generations of poor-but-sated college students.

Ramen noodles have earned Mr. Ando an eternal place in the pantheon of human progress. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Give him ramen noodles, and you don’t have to teach him anything. (Lawrence Downes, New York Times)

Mojave Hot Stuff

One of the sites I've stumbled on through the 'Top Listed BBQ Sites', is a competitive BBQ team in southern California, 'Mojave Hot Stuff'.

As well as competitive cookery, Mojave Hot Stuff take catering service to a whole new level - not only offering home made BBQ food, but also knife-sharpening, sauce-brewing and competition-judging. And, according to the testimonials on their site, they do it all very well.

Their Hero status, however, is conferred because of this resource on their web site: an exhuastive list of regional BBQ recipes. It's absolutely phenomenal - everything from Missouri beef rubs to over a dozen variations of Louisiana Cajun and Creole. They provide Arkansas mustard sauce, Alabama white sauce, Carolina rubs and many, many more. It is a well-researched list of surprising quality.

As well as being quickly bookmarked, I'll be tapping this resource when it comes to re-writing my old (pre-Typepad) article on regional BBQ. Thanks guys.

Weird Meat

Above all else, the Weird Meat Project has a brilliant use of nomenclature. There's just something insightful, meaningful and thoroughly iconic about adding 'Project' to the title of a website. Immediately, it makes you think, "This isn't a crappy web diary about unicorn poetry, this is a project." Pure genius.

Over and above the stunning branding, the content is terrific. The Weird Meat Project is the journal of an ex-vegan from California. Having cast off the shackles of an all-curd diet, he now freely traipses around the world tasting bizarre cuisine. He tracks down the strangest food he can find - spiders, rats, parasitic fungi, etc. - and unhesitatingly digs in.

It's a compelling and original story, and, like with the competitive eaters, I'm strangely jealous. Although, just to be perfectly clear, I'm relieved it's not me. This man eats spiders so the rest of us don't have to.

Unfortunately, the nomadic nature of the Weird Meat Project entails infrequent posting, but it's worth the wait.

A.I.C.E. (Association of Independent Competitive Eaters)

I find competitive eating equally alluring and disgusting. Although I'm awestruck by a man that can eat three dozen hot dogs in under a minute, I also find it a little disconerting to watch the man pound the hot dog into a baseball-sized lump, dunk it in water, and swallow it whole.

Enter the Association of Independent Competitive Eaters - who hold to the code of 'Picnic Style Rules'. These rules 'acknowledge the tradition, culture and heritage of a particular food item'. That is, eat it the way it was meant to be eaten. This is truly brilliant as it restores the appreciation of food to the gluttony of competitive eating.

A.I.C.E. sponsors and tracks a host of events through the year - from latkes to hamburgers, milk and cookies to meatballs. Pick a dish, and they'll be looking to guzzle it. The contestants seem to be real characters as well - one of the requirements for being a ranked 'Food Warrior' is to hit Entertainer Status, in which you're commonly identified by your chosen nickname. Check out the personal page for Chowhound Chapman for an example of one of the chosen few. 

For those of us that aren't yet ready to go pro, but like a hearty meal, the web site has one final invaluable resource - a list of challenges. Frequently updated, this is a list of all the restaurants that challenge their patrons with ridiculous dishes. For example, eat ten gallons of ice cream and win a t-shirt. Or, my personal favorite, the 220 oz steak. That's 14 pounds of meat...

The Vat Creature Revisited

Proving that I have an impact on a substantial portion of my readership, I've absolutely craved KFC recently.

Fortunately, a rest stop halfway to Stratford was able to provide. I duly queued for 10 minutes behind some of the roughest people I've ever seen outside of Luton Airport. Eventually, someone behind the counter hit the 'Colonel's Special'-shaped button on the register and handed me a steaming box of chicken.

With visions of Vat Creatures dancing through my head, I bit in.

The stuff is just vile. Honestly.

Putrid flows of urine-colored grease dribbled on either side of my mouth, and the meat itself seemed be washed with some sort of nonbiological yellow/gray color. And, incidentally, the fries were cold.

So, alas, my dream of the Vat Creature is dead - mercilessly slaughtered by the grim reality of the actual Kentucky Fried chicken.

The Vat Creature

My first introduction to the Kentucky Fried Vat Creature is one of the defining memories of my childhood. To this day, my mind still easily conjures up a Matrix-like landscape, populated with fields of featherless, pale organic matter, simmering eternally in hydroponic vats.

Just think of the fragile stomach of my imaginative 10 year old self, biting into the piping hot, tender flank-meat of a crispy fried chicken. A precocious friend, infinitely more worldly, introduces to me the legendary vat creature – a basketball-sized chicken breast, pulsing like a giant heart, no beak, no head, no wings, but possibly dozens of legs, sticking out from its back like a porcupine.

B-12

There's a new false idol in town - vitamin B-12.

Apparently, if you don't have enough of this particular vitamin in your diet, horrific things happen to you. Such as irritatibility and (sometimes) even exhaustion. As this site puts it, it's been 'implicited in a spectrum of neuropsychiatric disorders'. It all sounds fairly grim.

However, there is good news. You can be spared a fate worse than death (or at least, some irritability) by eating your meat. That's right folks, this recent addition to the family of pseudo-scientific, self-perpetuating health fads is only found in meat.

Awesome.