I’ve been lazy so some of these are almost a week old…

• More Mark Bittman on NPR: Recipes From Mark Bittman’s Food Matters and audio interview.

• A field of wasabi. Did you know that it was a plant that grows? I didn’t. Had I thought about it I might have realized it.

• In the UK- Healthy packed lunch trend drives development.

• Cool stuff: Anti-Theft Lunch Bags Now on Sale.

• NPR on blood oranges.

• From Apartment Therapy: How to Cook Garlic Without Burning It. They say that garlic usually does best if it’s cooked quickly and over medium heat for about thirty seconds.

• Like cheesecake? Massive 2-tonne cheesecake sets world record.

• Pumpkin cheesecake with a ginger-pecan crust? Yes, please. It’s not something I’d likely make (I always feel that one needs a stand mixer to make cheesecakes although this recipe uses a blender) but if anyone wants to make one I’m more than happy to be a tester.

• Cupcakes and beer? I made cupcakes with Guinness in the summer – the ones with salted caramel frosting. Here’s another cupcake recipe that calls for Guinness. The frosting uses Baileys.

• Virgin Atlantic Asks Complaint Writer To Be Taste Tester.

• CBC‘s Spark asks, Does your laptop double as a recipe book? Mine has started to. I owned my laptop for over a year before it occurred to me to take it into the kitchen. Instead was I was doing was either running back and forth between my desktop computer in my bedroom/office and the kitchen, or scrawling down recipes in a notebook and taking that into the kitchen.

• Remember the Old Coke-New Coke debacle of the early 80s? I do. Since then, Coke has been called Coke Classic. No more. Advertising Age reports that Coke is dropping “Classic” from its name.

• Obamas Bring Their Chicago Chef to the White House. Story here.

• From Fooducate: Obama On Peanut Butter Fiasco: FDA Needs Revamping.

• A US study has found that perfluorinated chemicals (PFCs), which are used in areas such as food packaging, pesticides, clothing, carpets and personal care products, may be linked to infertility in women. Report.

• In Saturday’s Toronto Star Corey Mintz writes about catering his grandmother’s shiva in an article called “Say goodbye, and pass the smoked meat“. I was touched. My eyes misted a little. Do his articles usually generate that response? (Restaurant reviews don’t count.)  I bet a lot of the feedback he got to the story was from Jewish mothers and grandmothers asking him if he’s single, and “I have a daughter/granddaughter…” I wouldn’t be surprised if my mother thought it.

• In Saturday’s National Post Alison Broverman writes home about summer camp food. Oh, the memories. My memories of Camp Wahanowin don’t include traditional Shabbat dinner, but the memories are scarce and I have no doubt that we had them. I definitely don’t recall Smartiefried oatmeal.

• Men Smell Like Cheese, Women Smell Like Onions? This according to Slashfood and the Telegraph.  Aren’t little girls made of sugar and spice and everything nice while little boys are made of Snips and snails, and puppy-dogs’ tails? (Wikipedia on that nursery rhyme.)

• The L.A. Times asks, “Is crystalline fructose a better choice of sweetener?“

• Apartment Therapy is disappointed that Jamie Oliver’s magazine is only available on newsstands in the UK and that the price for US subscribers is around $64. Bonus news item: According to an advertisement on that page, Elisha Cuthbert is making an appearance on Project Runway Canada tonight, on Global Television.  Chris didn’t mention this in his Televisualist column this week.  I don’t watch Project Runway, nor do I have cable. However, I read all of Chris’ Televisualist columns and watch the Gilmore Girls clips that he posts on his blog every friday.

• This pleases me:  The UK’s Food Standards Agency (FSA) has published a list of food products that have been voluntarily reformulated to remove six food colours associated with hyperactivity in young children. Story here.

• FDA joins criminal investigation into Peanut Corporation salmonella. Story here.

• FDA provides recall information via Twitter. Story here. Here’s the Twitter link. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency might want to follow. They’ve got RSS feeds and email notification for food recalls and allergy alerts.

• From Dana McCauley’s blog: Topline Trends Tuesdays: Bacon in the sweet kitchen.

If I blogged more often I’d have fewer links. I should blog more often.