1. Cookin’ Wit’ Tittle, a Chicago public access cooking show which is surely the most informative program about burnt toast you will ever see. From the way-personable hostess to the deck-of-an-aircraft-carrier cinematography to the ease with which she roots around up the business end of a turkey, this is simply perfection.

Cookin’ wit’ Tittle – Grilled Turkey from La Donna Tittle on Vimeo.

2. Australian political blogger Tim Blair demonstrates how to make one of Australia’s greatest achievements this side of Stobie Poles and Crocodile Dundee 2: the carpet bag sandwich, “so bewitchingly complex in flavour that you would surrender a limb just to watch someone feed it to a common cat.”
3. The 20 most terrifying pictures of Ronald McDonald ever, although…
4. …not as terrifying as the idea of Chicago Gluttons taking on the new Angus Deluxe (“Suggested pairing: I recommend enjoying this abomination with a fine single malt scotch. The oak flavor accentuates the 39 grams of fat and really helps you taste the 1700mg of sodium.”)
5. Seattle’s Rebekah Denn tries the Alinea cookbook on some learned friends. An art critic: “I call it meticulous high style for the moneyed classes, for the moneyed classes who want to feel bad, because they do not have what it takes to do justice to this oyster. They don’t. They’d probably find all that foam faintly repellent, reminding them of spit, and then they’re self-conscious, right?”
6. A touching remembrance of the grandmother who gave the very artistic Chicago food blog Lottie + Doof its name, complete with homemade graham cracker recipe.
7. Nudist farm workers in Wisconsin, at Minneapolis’ Heavy Table blog.

1. Found some way cool links looking for charcuterie blogs; the first (who kindly linked my La Quercia podcast) is called Meatchip, check out these photos of cured pork collar.
2. And the second, from a guy who has a charcuterie bar in Toronto, is called Charcuterie Sundays; you have to see the pictures of brain carpaccio and kurobota jowls.  And the pics of his curing room, and— oh just go look at everything.
3. This is an archly funny true account of an unexpected four-footed visitor to a Whole Foods, at Hungry Mag. (No, not the four-footed visitors who got my Whole Foods closed last year.)
4. Monica Eng had some freaky black bread from China. Be sure to click on the image and see the bread close up, it’s kind of beautiful… in a not-for-eating way.
5. Okay, no Good Food this time, let’s do our original food podcast fave (going back to before podcasts—I used to burn these to CD to listen to on plane trips, you kids today with your iPods), The Splendid Table. The best thing in this one is the chat about spices in history, which starts at around 14:30. No, spices were not used to cover up the flavor of meat gone bad— as historian Paul Freedman points out, it made no sense to use something so expensive to salvage something less expensive. Sally Schneider also talks about what to do with the vegetable close to my heart and soon to be available, beets.  I can’t seem to get their embed code to work, so go here.
6. Gastro-retro: cool foodie finds in antique stores from a Minneapolis blog, The Heavy Table. The best: a Knox Gelatin cookbook for making gelatinized food to use on camera, which like most corporate-sponsored cookbooks, thinks you can use its product in anything. Like tuna.
7. I found this guy because he clicked the “Like” button on my LaQuercia video at its Vimeo page. Here’s a short but mouthwatering movie he made about the legendary Katz’s Deli:

A Pastrami Pilgrimage from Gary Ingram on Vimeo.

1. Best read of the Chicago food media week is Chuck Sudo’s 5-part trip to New Holland brewery with Paul Kahan, and talking to much-lauded (but evidently business-impaired) former Journeyman chefs Matt Millar and Amy Cook. It’d be best even if I didn’t get mentioned in part 5. Here are the pieces: 1 2 3 4 5
2. Best view of the week is this filthy, hilariously dead-on sendup of the celebrity chef culture made by celebrity chef Kevin Boehm (with some others participating). It beat out Graham Bowles’ bare butt to win the Gold Coast Film Festival:

3. I’m setting a higher bar for linking to Good Food podcasts, since I always seem to, but I was fascinated by four things back to back in this one: Russ Parsons on what to do with all that stuff from a farmer’s market, a woman revealing all the fakery behind “100% fresh-squeezed” orange juice, a not too woolly talk about biodynamic winemaking, and a very interesting piece on mobile slaughterhouses as an answer to the fact that NIMBY regulatory issues make it basically impossible to build a slaughterhouse anywhere any more:

4. Fraises des bois have become a hot item at the Green City Market this year, partly because people like me keep mentioning them on food blogs and Twitter. The worst offender clearly is Fruitslinger, who hunts for the wild ones here.
5. Speaking of what to do with strawberries and the other fruits of the moment, I’m always a fan of making cherry clafouti, the traditional French sort of custard-baked-pancakey thing, although I make it according to Joel Robuchon’s not very traditional recipe usually, including in a pastry crust. Anyway, here’s a cool idea for a strawberry-rhubarb one, since anyone shopping the markets right now is pretty much guaranteed to wind up with strawberry, and rhubarb.
6. This is where Helen of MenuPages would say OMFG: caramel fried green tomatoes and ice cream. Also pretty incredible is the recipe and photos for honeysuckle sorbet. I’m really going to have to make that. Biscuits and Such is my instant new favorite Southern food blog, I think.
7. Louisa Chu found this, a very good argument for always having your camera in your pocket at lunch, because you never know what will suddenly appear waiting to be photographed.

A lot of activity from folks I know, and a new video series which is doing something a lot like Sky Full of Bacon… but about dairy in the New York region. So this is mostly a local logrolling edition, but plenty of good stuff to check out:

1. The Local Beet wants people to spread the word about its new Farmers Market Finder, and they should, it’s a very cool tool. Just enter your zipcode in the search box at the top right of the main page, and you’ll get a Google map that shows you by color code when the next markets are near you. Click on any of them to get more info. CORRECTION: It covers a pretty good swath of the region already, “the whole state of IL, plus some of NW Indiana, SW Michigan and southern Wisc.,” says local cheese Michael Morowitz, with new markets being added daily.
2. The Dairy Show is a video series by a doctor named Michael Crupain about people doing artisanal, sustainable stuff with dairy in the New York state area. Episode one includes a cheesemaker whose story is strikingly similar to that of the La Quercia folks in my most recent podcast:

TheDairyShow.com Episode 1 from TheDairyShow.Com on Vimeo.

3. Michael Nagrant’s back in the audio podcast biz after a hiatus, talking to Curtis Duffy of Avenues and Jason Hammel (seen in my “There Will Be Pork” podcasts) of Lula and the new and oh-so-hot Nightwood. I’ve only listened to the latter so far, but Jason is one of the most thoughtful chefs I’ve met (perhaps not surprising when you consider that he was in a writing program under David Foster Wallace before becoming, somewhat casually at first, a cafe owner and chef), and he has a lot of interesting (if not entirely cheerful) things to say about writing and cooking as both art and craft, how personal creative aspirations intersect with the reality of running a business and managing a staff, being a parent in the food biz, and so on.  (Fun fact: Jason’s first food jobs were California Pizza Kitchen and TGI Friday’s.)
4. Honestly, I don’t link to every episode of KCRW’s Good Food, but this New York-based one is another really strong one, including the owner of NYC’s appetizing store Russ and Daughters explaining how controversial “and Daughters” was back then, and a middle eastern store owner in Brooklyn talking about business pre and post-9/11. Hey Evan, we’ve got good food too, come to Chicago and I’ll show you around.

5. David Hammond talks to a couple of wine mavens about what you’re tasting when you’re tasting barolo.
6. Chuck Sudo has started making guanciale (something I also did here). We will cover this story as it develops.
7. And finally, another thing New York has that we don’t, thanks to Daley’s anti-street vending stance: hipster ice cream trucks.  From the Plate of the Day blog. UPDATE: See comments for a lead on a hipster ice cream truck in Chicago after all!

For this edition, I’m sticking to my local homies (or at least out of towners I kinda know), plenty of good readin’ there:

1. Ronnie Suburban ate cured meat at Vie, The Publican and Mado, and took mouthwatering photos.  I ate about that much meat going to Wisconsin for a day and a half, or at least it felt like it on the drive home, with little of the aesthetic delight.
2. Christopher Borrelli writes a paean to hippie restaurants in the Chi-Trib.  Comes out more like an exercise in masochism to me, but it’s pretty funny.
3. The totally insane Chicago Gluttons does an even funnier paean to The Bristol, complete with cheesy music video and obscene Cathy parody (that’s the comic strip, not Cathy2).
4. This Serious Eats piece would be frightening if it were merely an insanely detailed history of food on Star Trek. That it’s merely scratching the surface of a subject which has already generated two cookbooks…
5. Why Dominic Armato did not get to go to Commander’s Palace, and what he ate instead.
6. Hugh Amano makes stuff himself, prompting the comment, “You can’t make pickles, you can only buy them.”
7. Fig Catering recounts everything that went into their particpation at the Mole de Mayo. Best entry: “1 week prior…Since our health inspector has ignored us for the last year, but we need a health inspection within 6 months in order to participate in the event, they have to be called in. Molly handles this one solo and learns exactly how weird health inspectors are (make sure you ask about his Nutri-System diet).”

Michael and Jill Morowitz, of Local Beet fame, sent me so many things that they might as well be the guest ghost-hosts of this 7 Links of Terror, the first three are theirs:

1. An NPR piece on The Settlement Cook Book, “The Matzo Ball Matriarch of American Jewish Food.”
2. A whole series of short documentaries about a Berkeley woman who has a shop devoted to pickling just about anything. It will inspire you… to pickle!
3. Two posts from a blog about weird old books and magazines: a wartime ad headlined The New Pioneer Woman in Meat and Art Made of Fat, a really strange and fascinating post about a guidebook for butcher shops making window displays out of fat scraps. Yesterday’s sales display becomes today’s serial killer obsession….
4. Another excellent edition of the Santa Monica public radio show Good Food; be sure to listen to the segment on the plummeting fish population (around 9 minutes in), and the one with a woman who makes a straightfaced case for a diet high in animal fats (about 31 minutes in), though there’s plenty good (including Michael Ruhlman) in it so you might as well listen to the whole thing:

5. Have you gotten emails about that bill that’s going to outlaw organic farming, even home vegetable plots? There’s a lot of talk about that, and a lot of people have hastened to say the concerns are overblown. Reason magazine looks at it and is not entirely reassured.
6. Newly laid off Tribune folks should make haste to ex-colleague Emily Nunn’s blog Cook the Wolf, as it’s full of saving-money-by-cooking-interestingly posts. Start with this slightly barbed childhood remembrance about eating cabbage. You might also notice, instructively, that Emily without editors is more interesting to read….
7. Finally, you read my review of the new book about North Carolina barbecue, Holy Smoke, right? Well, here’s a post by LTHForum poster and regional food obsessive Pigmon, with reports on many of those places and, better yet, mouthwatering photos of many of those places.

1. Malort, a bitter, generally unrewarding liqueur with a local cult (and no presence anywhere else), is discussed in loving detail in a Mike Sula Reader piece complete with Malort cocktail recipes and a blog sidebar. It’s a fun story, if the drink is ultimately less interesting (yes, I’ve tried it) than the story around it.
2. This seems the natural followup to the above:

3. Extremely evocative report on Negril, Jamaica, full of mouthwatering images, posted at LTHForum (and a few other places).
4. Malaysian food is one of those things we just don’t get here. This is a nice blog of recipes and pretty pictures of it (I linked directly to the Malaysian page, but there are other pages for other Asian cuisines).
5. Proof there’s a blog about everything: a blog about trying to cultivate truffles in New Zealand.
6. Screw Ace of Cakes and all those shows about artfully constructed mountains of fondant, here’s a cool video about the making of a traditional Sicilian cassata, which looks both impressive and tasty.
7. Gotta include one April Fool’s joke, no?

1. Especially good episode of KCRW’s radio show Good Food, with writer Rob Long’s account of life in the socially stratified world of a container ship, and Temple Grandin talking about how animals behave in slaughterhouses (which explained a lot about what I observed while shooting in one), among other things.

2. Stunning high-definition photos of traditional foodmaking in Europe— check out this one on the old way of making Speck (a prosciutto-like pork product), or this one on making cheese 8000 feet up in the Swiss Alps. You could spend hours here, gazing deeply into each photo.
3. Speaking of cheesemaking, here’s a whole blog about Wisconsin artisanal cheesemaking, and a very good one too.
4. Go ahead, say it. There’s an optimism to these 50s and 60s packages that’s missing from today’s soulless packaged goods designs. It’s the obvious comment, and it’s so true. (h/t Dinosaurs and Robots)
5. More Flickr: crashing a wedding in China. Food is involved.
6. Hugh Amano doesn’t post recipes. Believe me, looking at a lot of blogs for something to put here, I’m all for fewer recipes (especially of sweet breads/cakes) and more conceptual writing about cooking… like this piece.
7. There’s going to be an exhibit about one of Chicago’s most fascinating old time restaurants, the Dill Pickle Club, a hangout for bohemians (small b), anarchists, artistes, slumming aristos, and other interesting folks of the 20s.  What Wicker Park dreams of being, it really was.  Here’s a website about the exhibit, though there’s not much there yet.

1. At Michael Nagrant’s Hungry Mag, Barry Strum recounts the time he tried his first banh mi… at a military prison in Vietnam in 1969. Which sorta puts worrying about how politically correct your coffee is into perspective, if you ask me.
2. A hell of a good sounding burger in Sikeston, MO.
3. The Periodic Table of Awesoments. Beer is #6. Guess what #1 is.
4. Nosfertater and other cool food art.
5. Two Chicago-based homebrewing blogs: The Daily Ikura (some nice pics of British charcuterie there, too) and Chibebrau, who just had a baby.
6. Great pictures and evocative text from a woman cooking and living rustically in SwitzerlandFrance. Read the one about goat farming.
7. A too-short but interesting segment from a Jamie Oliver TV show showing Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (The River Cottage Cookbook, etc.) talking about why you should have free range pigs:

Makes you want to see a whole video on that subject! Or two!

I suck at sucking up to networking with other bloggers, mainly because hell, who has time to do all that when you’re, uh, when you should be editing your next podcast. So I’m going to institute a new feature which will be the only way I know of to force me to go out and link to stuff. It’s called 7 Links of Terror, just because, well, something called Sky Full of Bacon has already left town on the Goofy Name Bus. Despite the name, it’s mainly really a food linkage feature, but other things may sneak in from time to time; some of it will be showering favor on people I know, but still with enough discrimination that I hope you’ll find it interesting. And yes, you can email me suggestions, or just post them in comments, though I reserve the right to zap them (as I do so much spam, don’t know why they keep trying).

Let’s begin:

1. Dinosaurs and Robots discovers a lost civilization’s chocolate shop in LA.
2. My occasional editor Heather Shouse (Time Out Chicago) has an extremely helpful (for Chicagoans, anyway) guide to Polish sausages. I really like the way they made the photo look like color printing of the 1950s, like in a lot of cookbooks I have.
3. Lakeside Smokers, who linked my head cheese mulefoot pig podcasts, do homemade sous vide.
4. The U.S. Senate has a hot dog dispensing machine. (Best comment: “One thing you don’t want to see made inside another thing you don’t want to see made.”)
5. All hail the Stuckey’s Pecan Log Roll… even all the way from Switzerland.
6. Art, the chef in my foraging video, has further thoughts on gleaning.
7. What does Thai food look like when it’s being made by the side of the road in Thailand? Check out this blog by a photographer living there.