Guilty Pleasures

We've long been fans of Jen Yates' fantastically funny food blog, Cake Wrecks, so we were mighty pleased to find the she's finally assembled enough disastrous misspellings, ill-conceived concept cakes and just downright nasty icing snafus to fill a whole book, "Cake Wrecks: When Professional Cakes Go Hilariously Wrong."

Also on bookshelves this month, Jessica Amason and Richard Blakeley's "This Is Why You're Fat: Where Dreams Become Heart Attacks."

See our favorites from both tomes after the jump.

Cow head in banana leaves at Hill Country. Photo: Kat Kinsman

There comes a time in every girl's life -- when she's ripping open the long-braised skull of a short-lived calf in order to better wobble out its beer-marinated brain -- that she smiles contentedly and realizes she loves her life an awful lot. Then she goes for the eyes.

Well OK, not every girl's life -- but at least those of a troika of squeam-free dames including Hill Country's executive chef and cookbook author Elizabeth Karmel, Homesick Texan writer Lisa Fain and lucky, lucky me. And it all happened because of Twitter.

See a step-by-step barbacoa making slideshow and read a description after the jump. Warning -- it's not for vegetarians or the faint of stomach.

Pickles. Photo: Kat Kinsman

There's a canning revolution going on and Kim O'Donnel -- former food writer for the James Beard Award-winning Washington Post -- has brought it to a boil.

Upon tremendous response to her re-Tweet of an Ethicurean post about a canning party in San Francisco and subsequent suggestion that Seattle and other cities follow suit, O'Donnel asked interested home canners to contact her. Thus Cans Across America was born. On the weekend of August 29-30, cities across the nation will host classes, can-a-thons, canning meet-ups and raise awareness of this retro-haute preservation method.

More about the nation's can-do attitude after the jump.

I'm stingy with my smoke.

Not in a "don't bogart that can, man" way. Just that if I'm going to go to all the trouble of stoking a hardwood lump charcoal fire, obsessively monitoring its low-'n-slow-ness for a goodly chunk of the day, feeding its greedy gut with beer-soaked mesquite and hickory chunks at half-hour intervals all for the sake of an albeit fabulous brisket or pork shoulder, I'm gonna want a bit more return on the investment.

Here's where foil pans of salt, cherries and lemons come in.

No apples were harmed in the baking of this pie.

Perhaps at some point in the distant past, it was possible for a person under the age of 50 to whip up a mock apple pie, hold the irony. Now in an age wherein slowstainable locaheirganic produce is de rigueur in many circles (not mine, but then again, I pour cherry soda all over unsuspecting hams and eat brains from a can) it seems almost viciously retrograde to dump lemony simple syrup on top of a pile of mushed-up crackers and pass it off as fruit.

So don't do that. Just enjoy it for its bizarrely satisfying damp cracker heft. Use, I dunno, heirloom leaf lard in the crust or send a tithe to Michael Pollan if you feel you need to, but really, this pie is in no need of apology.

Get the Ritz Mock Apple Pie recipe after the jump.