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Brits and country-fair attendees may believe otherwise, but not all things are better fried. This includes pig parts, most chicken and half the other stuff restaurants are passing off as upscale, down-home, heart-attack-inducing recession fare (though not you David Chang, I'm sure your fried chicken is unreal).

Everyone knows a bad fry-job. The batter paves your stomach, the grease lingers on the tongue. Yet a fried tidbit can also be a thing of beauty, and a perfectly fried doughbit the best of all. Both flavour and texture can be elevated by a dip in the hot-oil jacuzzi.

My explorations began with Hanukkah, that Old Testament fry-fest. One month into my fry-based experimentations, I'm fairly sure that there is nothing quite like a homemade doughnut. The house smells like a carnival. The doughnuts are eaten piping hot, crunchy on the outside, sweet and bubbly on the inside, with a slight yeasty chew. (On this recipe I boost the nutmeg and add orange zest for extra oomph.) Second bite reveals a spurt of jam, bite three a proper powdered-sugar moustache. It inevitably takes you back to your first fried-dough experience (1995, Dunkin' Donuts, Penn Station, school trip, French cruller).  read more »

When someone says Fairtrade, what springs to mind? Probably coffee, bananas, cocoa, maybe cotton–inexpensive staples, all produced and traded in environmentally and socially “fair” ways. So far, so dull. What about booze? Enter FAIR, the world’s first Fairtrade vodka.

The Fairtrade initiative began in the 1980s, when saving the world from poverty became fashionable thanks to events like Live Aid. The aim is to help poor farmers in the developing world by paying an above-market price for their product. (It is a soothing conceit, though not everyone is convinced such measures make the world a better place.)  Britain's Fairtrade Foundation certifies products as "Fairtrade" if they meet international standards set by Fairtrade Labelling Organisations International. TransFair USA and TransFair Canada are the North American equivalents.

Thousands of products are now certified as Fairtrade, but alcohol has been slower to emerge. Wine is the front-runner, with over 300 that carry the Fairtrade logo. A recent addition is Poterion Communion Wine, created specifically for trade-conscious clergy. There are also over ten Fairtrade beers and ales on the books, but only three spirits, all rum.  read more »

Some pork. Around 250kg of it, in fact, in the back of my car. Readers of my account of a virgin amateur gentleman swineherd in the current issue of  Intelligent Life might recall the pork's first trip in the back, when it was alive and en route to three months of determined foraging, feeding and occasional escaping in my back garden. My experiment with pig farming has transformed this patch of land into a fair imitation of the battlefield at Passchendaele.

Such slaughter was much on my mind as I returned from the abattoir, where my four ginger Tamworths, Henry, Fred, Winston and Hucknall, had departed for the happy grunting grounds. Not for nothing, I realised, had our medieval ancestors evolved the terms "pork", "beef" and "mutton", which lend respect both to the extinction of life and to what is left, in plastic bags, in the back of the car.

My thoughts on the way there had been less likely to stray into St Thomas Aquinas’s lucubrations on the souls of animals, or to those "Circle of Life" views espoused by the heirs to Walt Disney in "The Lion King". Instead, I was relieved at the comparative ease with which we had lured the feisty beasts from our rotavated garden into a trailer kindly driven by Richard Casemore, a prize-winning pig breeder from nearby Mells, jewel of the eastern Mendips. There had been much talk of pigs needing several hours to be persuaded to take up their one-way ticket to the big snore, of final looks back for reassurance before entering the trailer. In the event, they mercifully trotted on without that backward glance.  read more »

A good book is a great escape. The joy of keeping your sleep-deprived eyes open at 3am because you just have to know what happens next is like a tonic after an otherwise predictable day. The best kind of story can remain with you for days, weeks, even months after the final page is turned, the flaps re-read, the author photo scrutinised. Eventually you must face the fact that your book is done. The only thing left to do is hand it off to someone you love.

“The Naked Pint, An Unadulterated Guide To Craft Beer” is surprisingly such a book. A guide to beers may not sound like a page-turner, but this one is filled with the kind of humour, insight, pathos and historical nuggets that can hold its own against many a fictive tome. The authors–Christina Perozzi, a beer sommelier, and Hallie Beaune, beer writer–simply love beer. With disarmingly girlish charm, they present their subject in a way that is both accessible to the novice and interesting to the connoisseur.

Picture Tiny Fey and Lucy Liu in a bar arguing the merits of Allagash Curieux (a Belgian-style Tripel aged in Jim Beam bourbon barrels) and Russian River Consecration (a sour American Wild Ale aged for six months in Cabernet Sauvignon barrels) and you’ve got a pretty good idea of the tone.  read more »

Portland, Oregon, consistently ranks as one of America's greenest cities. Environmentally friendly lifestyle choices are everywhere, and especially in the way locals eat. Farmers markets pop up on city corners throughout the year. The best menus in town tout the virtues of “locavore” cuisine. And the idea of farm-to-table eating extends far beyond buying organic vegetables: for carnivores, sometimes it means coming face-to-face with your meat before it appears on your plate.

Portland's first annual Livestock Festival, which took place over two nights in November, paired live demonstrations of whole-hog and cow butchery with another Portland cultural favourite: literary readings about food politics.

"It's butchery in the context of art," said Lisa Donoughe, executive producer of Livestock. About 50 people came to see Cathy Whims, executive chef of Nostrana in Portland and a 2009 James Beard Award Finalist, and her restaurant's butcher, Nick Maxwell, as they artfully—and almost respectfully—sawed the head and trotters off a 70-pound gutted Yorkshire-Berkshire pig, while three west-coast writers offered wildly different perspectives on the idea of animal flesh. (One essay, titled "Fucking Vegetarian", came from an apologetic herbivore.)

An overhead camera projected images from the small kitchen on to two large screens in the back of the room, giving guests a close-up view of how one very cute pig becomes ham, pork belly and ribs, complete with use of hacksaw, mallet and an array of butcher's knives. The process is surprisingly loud but bloodless.  read more »

July 4th is an American celebration that foreigners have little trouble getting their heads around. Flags flying, hamburgers frying, bombs bursting in air–the Fourth fits right in to most easy stereotypes about the states.

Having lived in London for nearly a decade, I’ve found the other quintessential American holiday, Thanksgiving, is much more likely to generate confusion. Since most of my English friends seem to have studied far more American history than I ever have, I did not expect to have to explain Thanksgiving to them. No gifts. No cards. No elaborate decorations, save for a gourd centrepiece or two.

Thanksgiving is far less commercialised than other American public holidays, and as secular or religious as you like. It is also a nice speed-bump before the Christmas rush, a trait I never fully appreciated until I moved to a city where Christmas starts in early September.    read more »

I worry for food obsessives this time of year. How easy it is to spend all your time googling brining techniques and your money on that pedigree heritage bird. And please don’t walk into traffic while pondering how to make gingerbread not too crisp and not too chewy. 

Freaks, myself included, who already siphon off too much time preoccupied by bacon or burgers or quinoa are way over stimulated in the mudslide of time between Halloween and New Year's Eve. It is truly a food season—authentically and comfortingly seasonal before seasonal was trendy or understood to be important. The cookies are nice, gravy is a little bit of liquid sunshine and I'm always pleasantly surprised by the siren song of fall vegetables. If spring and summer are ripe for fruit fetishists, autumn is a time when humble roots and tough leaves reign supreme.   read more »

Lovers of the obscure and the unusual were given a treat this summer as “Hendrick’s Horseless Carriage of Curiosities” toured Britain in a carnival of the unconventional. Starting in Edinburgh in July, then on to Manchester in August and finishing in London in October, the carriage acted as a magnet for fans of the fantastical. Visitors were enticed to furnish this travelling museum with their most treasured eccentrica in exchange for cocktails on the lawn and a quick round of croquet.
 
Scotland and the North set the bar high with a hefty haul of oddities (though anecdotal evidence suggested that Edinburgh’s weird stuff was more wonderful than Manchester’s), but over 2,000 curious visitors visited in the capital, bringing with them some of the choicest pieces to complete a “comprehensive and utterly compelling collection of what Britain finds odd”.  read more »

If you think your office fridge is haunting, check out this gallery of pictures on Good magazine's website. Entitled "You are What You Eat", it's a photo series by Mark Menjivar that documents the contents of other people's refrigerators. "And if the aphorism holds true—if we really are what we eat—then refrigerators are like windows into our souls," Good suggests.

I wouldn't go that far, but the photos are immensely striking. Positioned in front of an open fridge, we find within a life in full. These views are often awkwardly intimate, with the grimy, yellowed-tooth colour of a fridge setting off its contents.

Whether we are looking at a hacked-up buck, glowing red in a freezer next to a bottle of tequila ("Carpenter/Photographer | San Antonio, TX | 3-Person Household | 12-Point Buck | 2008"), a lone jar of organic mayonnaise next to a black plastic bag on vacant shelves ("Street Advertiser | San Antonio, TX | 1-Person Household | Lives on $432 fixed monthly income | 2007"), or an impeccable medley of citrus, beer and yogurt ("Community Volunteer | San Angelo, TX | 1-Person Household | Completely blind and lives alone. | 2007"), the effect is compellingly voyeuristic, a mix of banality with bright spots of difference. (Keep your eye out for the frozen rattlesnake.) One wonders if shopping lists, medicine cabinets or glove compartments would be so revealing.  read more »

Jon Fasman just sent this link over in an e-mail, complete with a "double-dog-dare" to watch the video (about the making of a gyro cone) without:

a) puking

b) swearing off gyros for a good few centuries

Oddly, he made no mention of just how adorable the man in the shower-cap is.