Navigeaters

A hearty welcome back to Stupidly Simple Snacks with Amy Cao. If...

adamwiner — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 18:10:37 -0400

A hearty welcome back to Stupidly Simple Snacks with Amy Cao. If you’ve never watched one of Amy’s videos, check out the new one. To enjoy the revived series you need be neither stupid nor simple, but you should probably like snacks…

amyblogschow:

Stupidly Simple Snacks is back.

After eight months, Stupidly Simple Snacks is back in action with new episodes airing weekly. (Watch the new episode here.)

Huge thanks to my friends Hannah and Oleg of Schnitzel & Things for showing me how to make matzo brei. Matzo brei is a traditional Jewish breakfast and snack dish that’s especially popular during Passover. Learn more about Schnitzel & Things on their website and say hi on Twitter!

As many of you know, I began working with Foodspotting earlier this year, so I decided to devote my time learning the ropes and put SSS on hold for bit. I wouldn’t trade my team or job for the world, but I’m also mighty pleased to bring back snack-making! Please enjoy, and subscribe on YouTube so you don’t miss a thing ♥

Here’s Laura’s update from...

adamwiner — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 19:20:19 -0400

Here’s Laura’s update from Nathan’s!

lauraleu:

Today I competed in the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Competition, and this was my view from the stage. I ate 8.5 dogs and finished 3rd…to last.

Backstory.

On Monday, I’ll be competing in the Nathan’s Famous...

lauraleu — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 13:46:27 -0400

On Monday, I’ll be competing in the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Competition. As you can see, becoming a competitive eater has not been pretty. Check out the essay I wrote for Salon on my journey from eating enthusiast to Bunnette to professional gorger.

And you can see more of my ugly eating faces tomorrow at 11:25 AM (EST) on ESPN3.com, which is streaming live video of the first-ever women’s division. They’ll also be showing highlights from the ladies’ contest during the noon hour on ESPN. I’ll do my best to suppress my gag reflex.

We’re giving away Candwiches! More info at the end of this...

adamwiner — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 08:24:00 -0400

We’re giving away Candwiches! More info at the end of this post.

ADAM: Usually this blog charts our mission to eat a meal from every nation in the world without leaving New York City. But for this post we’re taking a slight detour to eat a meal that we’re pretty sure comes from the future. Or, if you’d prefer to believe the shipping label: West Jordan, Utah. We’re talking, of course, about Candwich, the famed Sandwich in a Can, which got the interwebs all abuzz when it was announced last year. Well, that meal tube is finally on sale. And always eager to try a product whose packaging can simultaneously boast both “Extended Shelf Life!” and also “Great for School Lunch!” we had a four-pack delivered to our door.

LAURA: The pull-tab opened with a “pop,” as if you were opening a can of tennis balls and not, say, lunch. We were disappointed to see that the sandwich was not pre-made. You get the bread, a knife and squeeze packs of PB and J. For a “convenient” lunch option, this sandwich is exhausting! On the plus side, it also came with a ready-to-eat Laffy Taffy and a packet of FreshPax which helps it stay shelf-stable for over a year. Mmmm, chemical drying agents…

ADAM: And instead of getting normal slices of bread, you get what is essentially a hot dog bun. The bun is heavy and moist in a slightly disturbing way, but its most noticeable characteristic is its odor. Think of the smell of a WonderBread bun, then times it by roughly a bajallion. That’s what Candwich bread smells like.

LAURA: Once inside our mouths, the peanut butter and jelly tasted fine, but the bread was unnaturally moist and frankly gave me the heebies-jeebies chewing it. Maybe my palate was just too refined, though, because the packaging claims that “Kids love them!” Then again, kids also love eating paste and boogers.
ADAM: There’s way too much bread for the amount of peanut butter and jelly, and the whole thing quickly condenses into an unpleasant wad in your mouth. Basically, this is a canned good, except without the “good” part. That being said, if I was stranded in a bomb shelter and all the other food in the world was tainted with radioactive fallout? Sure, I’d eat it. Is that a quote they might want to put on their packaging?

BONUS: We’re giving away our excess Candwiches! To win one, just reblog this post on Tumblr and/or go to our Facebook page and “like” the link to this article. We’ll randomly choose two winners and mail them their shelf-stable prize/punishment.

And for more food hilarity, kindly check out our other website I Want You Inside Me.

Hey everybody! We’re working on some more Navigeating, but...

adamwiner — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 14:17:09 -0400

Hey everybody! We’re working on some more Navigeating, but in the meantime, we wanted to share another food blog we started called I Want You Inside Me. The site is pretty simple: We take a shot of delicious food and then scrawl words on it. (As lovingly illustrated above.) It’s kind of like a culinary Perez Hilton. Except we won’t be drawing penises on pictures of ham sandwiches.

Yet.

Check it out at IWYIM.com.

Turkey via Ft. Greene, Brooklyn: The Country Makes A House Call

lauraleu — Thu, 19 May 2011 13:57:00 -0400

LAURA: Let’s talk Turkey. You know a country that shares its name with a delicious game bird is...

Happy Valentine’s Day! Instead of chocolates, we got you...

lauraleu — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 11:30:37 -0500

Happy Valentine’s Day! Instead of chocolates, we got you these fungus-encrusted worm corpses. And they say romance is dead.

Adding to our list of Chinese Aphrodisiacs, the Cordyceps Sinesis, or Caterpillar Fungus, is a parasitic mushroom that kills moth larvae and uses their carcasses to grow its spindly fungus body. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, Cordyceps are used to treat impotence and waning libido. In fact, in a clinical trial of 243 men and woman who suffered from low sexual desire, 64% of those who ate the mummified bug mushroom experienced a boost in horniness. Apparently, the sac fungus stimulates the secretion of testosterone and relaxes the corpus cavernosum of the penis (the smooth muscle), allowing blood to enter and produce what is clinically known as a RAGING BONER.

The crusty little buggers can be brewed in tea, stirred into soup or ground up and sprinkled on cereal. Kamwo Herbal Pharmacy (where we bought our deer antler) sells it for $800 per 38 grams. So it may be more expensive than a bouquet of roses, but when you care enough to say “I wanna bang you all night long, baby,” caterpillar fungus is the Valentine’s gift that truly keeps on giving (in bed).

Previously: Watch us test out other Chinese aphrodisiacs.

For Valentine’s Day, we tested out some Chinese...

lauraleu — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 11:22:06 -0500

For Valentine’s Day, we tested out some Chinese aphrodisiacs: Deer Antler, Shark Fin Soup and Bird’s Nest Soup. You figure they’ve got to at least kinda work—how else did China end up with so many people?

That’s a pic of me and Laura with a giant McRib!...

adamwiner — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 14:50:00 -0400

That’s a pic of me and Laura with a giant McRib! Backstory: A couple years ago, I wrote an article for Maxim that involved me seeking out McDonald’s restaurants that served the legendary, yet rarely-seen McRib. (It’s kind of like the Sasquatch of sandwiches.) Because of that road trip, Micky D’s invited me to Tuesday’s nationwide McRib relaunch event, where they were honoring a few dedicated McRib super fans. Yes, the event was great, but at the same time it was a little bit sad because it meant my life had just peaked.

So in honor of the honors, here are some little-known McRib facts that I learned while doing my McResearch:

1. The McRib was created by McDonald’s first head chef, Rene Arend. Admittedly, Arend’s largest contribution to McHistory would have to be the invention of the Chicken McNugget. When the McNugget debuted in 1979, demand was so high that McDonald’s couldn’t get enough chicken to supply all its franchises. So Arend had to create another menu item for restaurants who couldn’t get poultry. His creation? The McRib.

2. Despite being called the McRib, the sandwich actually contains little rib meat and is made primarily from pork shoulder.

3. When coming up with the sauce, the team began by tasting tons of store-bought barbecue sauces. They ended up patterning the McRib sauce off of KC Masterpiece.

4. When first creating the sandwich, Arend faced internal pressure to mold the meat into a standard round patty. It is only through his genius and his perseverance that the McRib looks like it has rib bones. Even though it obviously has no rib bones. God bless him.

OK, that’s all I got on McRib. If you still want to hear more about eating meat, may I suggest you try the video where Laura and I went zombie and ate a bunch of animal brains?

A Zombie’s Food Guide: Where to Eat Brains in NYC Want to...

adamwiner — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 14:42:00 -0400

A Zombie’s Food Guide: Where to Eat Brains in NYC

Want to fine dine like a zombie? As we were researching our brain-munching Halloween video, we discovered these New York restaurants that serve up cerebrums:

Sautéed Calf’s Brains (Pictured above) At Chez Napoleon in midtown, we really enjoyed the classic French dish cervelle de veau—which is just a fancy way of saying cow brains sautéed in a ton of butter. If Julia Child rose from the dead, this is how she’d cook your brain.

Barbecued Pig Brains On Sundays, they barbecue up a whole hog at Fatty ‘Cue in Williamsburg. Call ahead and they’ll save you the head. Added bonus: In addition to brains, you get eyeballs and face meat!

Roasted Lamb Brain They don’t list it on the menu, but the Greek restaurant Uncle George’s in Astoria roasts whole lambs heads. The Greeks consider it a delicacy. We considered a stomach pump.

Cow Brain Sandwich Put your brains on bread at Karam in Bay Ridge. Expert tip: Squirt on ketchup to make it look bloody!

Fried Cow Brains St. Anselm in Williamsburg fries up cow noggins like they’re McNuggets, complete with a tasty dipping sauce. This is how Ronald McDonald will eat your brain.

Enough talking about eating brains, time to watch it happen! Check out our video of us munching grey matter. We promise it’s just as funny as it is repulsive…

It’s almost Halloween, so you know what that means: Time to eat...

lauraleu — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 12:17:00 -0400

It’s almost Halloween, so you know what that means: Time to eat brains!

What? You prefer candy?

Pansies. Instead of trick-or-treating, we got our zombie on, tasting how different cultures dine on grey matter. First stop on the tasting trek: St Anselm’s chef Al Bacchiochi deep-fried some fresh cow lobes for us. Then we looked back at the lamb’s head we demolished at Astoria’s Greek restaurant Uncle George’s and the guinea pig brain we ate in one bite at El Pequeno, an Ecuadorian joint in Queens that spit-roasts the whole rodent. For dessert, we stopped at Manhattan’s Chez Napoleon to sample the traditional French dish cervelle de veau—aka calf brains cooked with butter and capers. If zombies had a passport, this is how they’d gastro-tour.

And finally, just a quick note about the video above: Like all skull contents seen in this episode, the cerebrums we’re holding in the opening zombie shot are actual cow brains. Let us be clear: No stunt brains were used in the filming of this video!

ADAM: This year marked the 200th anniversary of Oktoberfest, and...

adamwiner — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 11:19:50 -0400

ADAM: This year marked the 200th anniversary of Oktoberfest, and today (October 4th) is officially the last day of the festivities. So you should probably suck down a beer or double-team a sausage.

LAURA: The oxymoronic thing about Oktoberfest is that most of it doesn’t actually occur in October. But the first one did: It was held on October 12, 1810 in Munich to celebrate the marriage of Bavarian Crown Prince Ludwig. The matrimonial event lasted for five days and included a giant horse race, which means Prince Ludwig was possibly the world’s first bridezilla.

ADAM: The racing nonsense persisted until 1960, but long before that, the main activity had switched from watching sprints to getting blitzed. Plus soon after Oktoberfest’s inception, the celebration was lengthened to multiple weeks and moved into September, where the days were longer and the weather warmer.

LAURA: The best Oktoberfest food is easily weisswurst, a girthy veal sausage that you wrap your lips around and then suck on till the meat squirts out, a method known as “zuzeln.” To watch us get our zuzeln on, check out our video on Oktoberfest foods. We might make a penis joke or five.

Bavaria, Germany via East Village: An Oktoberfest Sausage...

lauraleu — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 17:54:05 -0400

Bavaria, Germany via East Village: An Oktoberfest Sausage Party

Today marks the fifth day of Oktoberfest and the fourth day of consecutive hangovers for every person in Munich. To celebrate Germany’s most raucous party 4,000 miles west of Bavaria, we went to East Village bierhaus Zum Schneider and sampled some classic Oktoberfest sustenance. Besides the beer, we also ate food.

Watch as we stuff our drunk faces with sliced radi, obatzda cheese spread, Nuremburg wursts, and then attempt to ungracefully zuzeln a weisswurst. For those aren’t familiar with Bavarian slang, “zuzeln” means sucking and is a traditional technique used to get the meat out of the sausage casing. It’s also a traditional technique for making your dinner date feel extremely uncomfortable.

Eats Deets:
Zum Schneider
107 Avenue C (East Village, Manhattan)
212-598-1098

This is a cup of Falooda, which we had at a Burmese church...

lauraleu — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 09:31:23 -0400

This is a cup of Falooda, which we had at a Burmese church picnic. It’s a complex dessert that traces its origins back to ancient Persia and pretty much kicks simple American milkshakes onto the short bus. They begin by shoving a ladle into a pink pot of ice cream and milk, pouring in some rose syrup, and then mixing it with tapioca, flan, and a few different gelatins. And those little black caviar-looking things on top? Those are basil seeds. As in, the embryonic herb that will grow up to become the garnish in a Caprese salad. In many Asian cuisines, basil seeds are soaked, which makes them gelatinous, and then thrown into drinks and desserts, such as Falooda. It’s like eating a basil abortion. Bon appetit!

To watch our video of us slurping down Falooda, click here.

Burma via Queens: Eating Fish Soup for Breakfast As we learned...

lauraleu — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 17:24:47 -0400

Burma via Queens: Eating Fish Soup for Breakfast

As we learned from our gasto-journey to Finland, churches are an excellent source for ethnic food, which is convenient for those who want to repent immediately after committing gluttony. So for our foray into Burmese cuisine, we went to the Myanmar Baptist Church’s 15th Annual Fun Fair in Briarwood, Queens, where we chowed down on home-made mohinga (fish stew), wet thar dote htoe (pig organ salad), lahpet thohk (fermented tea leaves), and falooda (squishy milkshake). Then instead of asking for forgiveness, we asked for seconds. Because we’re heathens!

Eats Deets:
Myanmar Baptist Annual Church Fun Fair
Second Saturday in August
143-55 84th Drive (Briarwood, Queens)

That circled blur is a live shrimp jumping out of a bowl, trying...

lauraleu — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 17:13:00 -0400

That circled blur is a live shrimp jumping out of a bowl, trying to escape being our dinner.

Last week we posted video of us eating drunken shrimp, the notorious Chinese dish where live shrimp are soaked in alcohol, then eaten while still twitching. Frankly, the dish is sort of like gastro-date rape: You get the shrimp hammered enough to impair their mobility and then take advantage by forcing them down your throat. Which is probably how drunken shrimp ended up on the list of the “Cruelest Dishes in China.”

To find out how guilty we should feel about eating still-living shrimp, we asked Emma Creaser, an associate professor of marine physiology at Unity College and our go-to expert for all matters involving the mastication of live sea creatures, to tell us how much pain the creatures would have been feeling. Here’s what she said:

“Alcohol is often used as an anesthetic for invertebrates, including shrimp, in biology. We judge them to be anesthetized when they stop wiggling or ‘trying to escape.’ For your meal it would thus depend on how long you let the shrimp sit in the alcohol, and thus how wiggly it still was before you ate it. Shrimp have some concentration of nerves into centralized knots, but whether they ‘feel’ pain, even sober, with the same angst as we do is unknown. However, you might console yourself by remembering that shrimp are eaten alive by almost all of their other predators.”

Since our shrimp bathed in booze for a good 20 minutes, and they seemed pretty mellow-yellow when we ate them, we’re categorizing them as “highly anesthetized.” Plus we take comfort in the reminder that shrimp are routinely eaten alive by other predators.

At least we were thoughtful enough to buy them a drink first.

To watch our video of the shrimp hopping out of their bowl and into our mouths, click here.

Canton, China via Brooklyn: Eating Live Shrimp Besides their...

adamwiner — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 10:30:00 -0400

Canton, China via Brooklyn: Eating Live Shrimp

Besides their tendency to suppress free speech, befoul the environment and abuse human rights, China is a pretty awesome place. And more gastronomically varied then we could ever hope to cover in a single meal. So we will be doing multiple Chinese navigeatioins, of which this is the first.

Recently we tagged along with New York’s awesome weird eats club The Gastronauts for a meal they organized in Brooklyn’s Chinatown at the restaurant Pacificana. On the menu: Duck tongues, goose web and drunken shrimp—aka live shrimp doused in alcohol then eaten while still squirming. We’re classifying this meal as our taste of China’s Canton region. If you happen to be an inebriated crustacean, we advise you never visit.

Eats Deets:
Pacificana
813 55th Street (Sunset Park, Brooklyn)
(718) 871-2880

A woo-hoo news alert: Navigeaters has joined Next New Networks —...

lauraleu — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 10:30:00 -0400

A woo-hoo news alert: Navigeaters has joined Next New Networks — of Auto-Tune the News and Key of Awesome fame — and will have episodes airing on their ~~Hungry Nation channel~~ not-yet-launched travel channel every other Thursday! Check out our intro video above if you’d like to hear the story of our blog’s inception or just want to see us wearing matching pajamas with built-in butt flaps.

We’ll still be posting all of our videos on this here blog (along with any text and photos posts we do), as well as on our shiny new YouTube page, but with the NNN partnership, you might also be able to catch us on one of their many other distribution channels, like iTunes, Hulu, TiVo, Amazon, and a bunch more. So basically, we’re gonna be all up in your piece.

Apologies in advance to your piece.

South Africa via Ft Greene, Brooklyn: The World Cup of Chowing

adamwiner — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 09:49:00 -0400

ADAM: The World Cup has put South Africa in the spotlight for everyone who cares about soccer....

Postcard from South Africa To get our World Cupped, we hit up...

adamwiner — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 15:51:00 -0400

Postcard from South Africa

To get our World Cupped, we hit up Brooklyn’s outpost of South Africa, the restaurant Madiba. While there, owner Mark Henegan showed us a potjie (above), the three-legged cast iron pot traditionally used to cook stew. Then he filled us in on the most awesomely alarming South African item on the menu: Monkey Gland Sauce.

“We tell people that we rip out a monkey’s glands then cook them, but that’s not true,” he explained. “No one’s sure where the name monkey gland sauce came from, but one story is that it originated when a big French chef came to Johannesburg. While he wasn’t paying attention, someone put fruit into his red wine reduction. He sipped it and shouted, “What is this?!? Monkey gland sauce?!?” But then he realized he loved it. So they put monkey gland sauce on the menu that night and it got written up in all the newspapers. That’s how monkey gland sauce became famous—it was the mixture of a well-known chef from France and the local people in the kitchen.”

At Madiba, they serve monkey gland sauce on ribs. Had it been made of real monkeys, we totally would have gunned it. Instead we opted for an even better main course. One made of bunnies! (Kinda.) Full post on the South African foods we actually ate coming later this week…

Yours in Mastication,
Laura & Adam