Now Serving Hot Links ...

An Oyster with an Eye from Blogging in Paris. And she's right ... it does look as if an eye is peeking out at us!

The Right Beer for PB&J
And they all rejoiced ... yes it does exist!

Chocolate Mint Panna Cotta
From A Foodie Froggy in Paris comes one of my favorite flavor combinations ... and the photos just make me want one even more.

10 Foods Named After People

2. Salisbury steak was invented by Dr. James H. Salisbury. He thought that fruits and veggies were bad for humans and caused heart disease, tumors, mental illness, tuberculosis and all kinds of horrible ailments. He invented the Salisbury steak (which is really just hamburger steak) to convince people to change their diet to mostly meat.

From Mental Floss blog ... an interesting list.

There's Something to Those Big Irish Breakfasts

The only time I ever lost weight on vacation was on a trip to Ireland, where we stayed at different B&B’s almost every night. The “big Irish breakfast” was wonderful, every day, and we ate it all - cereal or porridge, black bread with butter, yogurt with berries, eggs, sausage, bacon, potatoes and fried tomatoes and lots of coffee with cream. It would keep us quite filled and energetic until supper (I don’t believe we ever ate lunch, although we took a break each day for a Guinness and some days for gelato), and supper was fairly light - a bit of fresh fish and veggies or the like.

The Anchoress's experience backs up a new study talking about the best way to eat ... read it at her place.

With Beans Comes Rice
I usually pass up the rice at Mexican restaurants. Let's face it, they use it as an inexpensive filler and rarely lavish the time or care needed to make it delicious. In fact, along with the tortilla chips and salsa, that is one of my tests to see just how much a restaurant cares. Confusingly, my favorite Tex-Mex place, Mariano's, falls very far short of the mark in this category ... on the salsa front as well as the rice ... while still turning out some very good dishes otherwise. Homesick Texan gives us the low-down on how to produce the real thing ourselves.

Fried Catfish Japanese Style
Tigers & Strawberries has a new favorite way with catfish. You guessed it. She uses Panko instead of breadcrumbs. Which leaves me asking ... am I the only person on the planet who has repeatedly tried Panko for breading and not fallen in love with them? In fact, found that they soaked up oil, didn't brown, and just didn't make that big a difference? Must be ... I'm probably doing something wrong but I've never had any problems with plain old breadcrumbs.