And we're back - NaBloPoMo Quirky Cookery

Yep, as planned, I focused on Quirky Cookery this last month to post every single day for the entire month. I've done Nablopomo on this site the last few years, but I had a lot of fun shifting the focus to showing you guys how much I play with my food. Well, and how much other people play with theirs, too, hehe. 

If you haven't been checking in over there, here's a taste of what you missed just from the pictures:

Be sure to hop on over there for hundreds of fun food posts and subscribe if you want some food-induced giggles on a regular basis. :)

 

 

 

Steampunk knows fashion and dolma machine rocks my leaves

I've only ever had a dolma once actually, and the person I was with said it wasn't great at all, but I enjoyed it. It's something I will surely have more of asap. Even if I hated them, though, I'm drooling over the machine at the bottom. Holy cow, it's so awesome. They're all so neat and perfect, and no major work to produce them. Yeah, I want it. I can't even buy leaves around here....


Steampunk & Clockwork Couture Inspired Fashion | BRASKY
July 26, 2010 at 9:42 PM

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6 reviews

http://features.cgsociety.org/newgallerycrits/g34/304034/304034_1254793908_medium.jpg July 26, 2010 at 6:54 PM

14 reviews

Floppy Disk Art by Nick Gentry :: koikoikoi.com - Visual Arts Magazine, graphic design, illustration, photography, interviews, inspiration, tutorials July 26, 2010 at 6:53 PM

9 reviews

Anal-Retentive Miniscule Pencil Tip Carvings « Wonderment Blog July 26, 2010 at 6:52 PM

29 reviews

Stuffed Vine Leaves & The Ultimate Dolma Machine : Cafe Fernando - Food Blog - food, chocolate, cooking, eating, photography, cookbook, food blog, photos, recipes, blog July 26, 2010 at 6:39 PM

8 reviews

Facebook Flashback Friday - Sushi cake, transformer owls, and the history of the world

One more in a series of link dump compilations including all the ridiculous things I've found and shared elsewhere. There are lots more shared on Quirky Jessi's Facebook, but here's some to catch you up:

• Where did it go? Watch closely to see evidence disappear before your eyes. I bet it's just smarties, right?
  
  
• Sushi birthday cake with full instructions and pictures of other people's versions:
  
• When beautiful actors play ordinary/real people
• Transformer owls. Don't worry, you don't need to understand what they're saying. Just watch the birds and if you want further explanation of when it gets bigger/smaller specifically, then check out the description.
  
  
  
  
• Enough Plumbers! This is a Mario-esque type game, but not. It's takes the concept of Mario (jumping around, collecting coins, funny sound effects) and turns it into a new puzzle game where as you collect each coin, you increase the number of plumbers you're playing at once. It can get really crazy, but fun. Try it out. :) 
• Ingenious label design that ensure the food you're getting is fresh. The hourglass stickers use a special ink that changes colors as ammonia is released inside, indicating when the meat gets older. Cool, huh?
  
• A brief history of pretty much everything. No really, it's all there. :D
  

It's all in the title - Play it safe or eat a bacon sandwich?

It's pretty obvious that I stumble across a lot of weird, funky, messed up....quirky?...stuff. Everything you see me post here, doesn't even add up to 1% of what I see. Along the way, there's a lot of stuff I surely miss, too, because it just doesn't grab my attention immediately, even if what's inside that next link, video, or site could be fabulous.

I'll admit, a lot of times I judge a book/site/picture/video intro/whatever by its cover or I require something attention-grabbing in order to waste even 20 seconds of my time. Other times, though, I find things when I'm least expecting them.

In this case, I followed a link to Flowing Data, and while there's plenty of interesting stuff on the site and it's worthy of being followed, it's also an insanely boring layout. Standard white theme with boxes of content and thumbnail images. I glanced over it, saw nothing that jumped out, and moved on. After all, it was just tons of text with most of the images being graphs of some sort (just the sort of thing I'd expect from Flowing Data really).



(Image Source - Cheesy bacon oatmeal from Live Well 360)

But at the last split second as the page shifted to another site, my eye caught a glimpse of "safe or bacon" among the "data visualization," heat maps, and engineers' guides.

Of course, the real title actually said "Understanding risk - play it safe or eat a bacon sandwich?" I went back to read the full title immediately and then clicked the link because, come on, why wouldn't I? Who makes a comparison like that??

David Spiegelhalter does, that's who. And in the video at the link, he explains "we have a risky side (the part of you that says it's okay to eat a pound of bacon every day) and a cautious side (the part that says to eat some oatmeal in place of bacon)." The video itself isn't anything insanely weird and is actually quite logical, but the examples he uses are great and his sense of humor shines through at some unexpected times.

Thanks Professor Risk!

Kroger's Gift Card Giveaway (And other grocery stores)

Giveaway time!

First, the reason for the promotion. Kroger is having a huge sale and in addition to giving me a $25 gift card (via MyBlogSpark), they're also giving one of you a $25 gift card. Woo!  Keep in mind that if you don't have a Kroger, there are other chains in the "family" that it can be used at.

Through March 14th, shop the Cart Buster Savings Event and find the hottest prices around on your favorite name-brand products in over 60 categories at the Kroger Family of Stores, which includes Kroger, Ralph´s, King Soopers, City Market, Dillons, Smith´s, Fry´s, QFC, Baker´s, Owen´s, Jay C Food Stores, Hilander, Gerbes, Food4Less, Pay Less Super Markets and Scott´s Food & Pharmacy.

Here are just a few of the great brands participating in the event: Honey Nut Cheerios, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Pillsbury, Betty Crocker, Hamburger Helper, Yoplait, Progresso, Totino´s, Green Giant, Cascadian Farm, Tide, Charmin, Bounty, Pampers, Pantene, Crest, Iams, Febreze, Old Spice and many more!

Now this particular sale ends in just a couple days, so you'll have to hit up your local store soon to take advantage of it. If you win the gift card, you'll be able to use it for some of their great sales in the future....and there are 'always' sales going on.

Anyway, here's how to get your chance to win one, too.

Contest Rules

Required entry: Comment below. Tell me about the best sale you've ever caught or your favorite thing to stock up on when big sales go on. (Comments are open and you can comment anonymously, but I need a valid email address or I won't be able to contact you if you're a winner.)

Ways to get more entries:

(For each entry, please leave a separate comment below letting me know what you did. If you're already a subscriber, just leave a comment saying so. If you follow me on Twitter or tweet about the contest, tell me your username in a new comment.)

-- Subscribe to Quirky Jessi (lots of ways....using RSS, through Blogger, or even by email)

-- Subscribe to Quirky Cookery

-- Comment on Quirky Cookery (any post is fine, just remember to come back and tell me you commented here for the contest; can be done up to 3 times total for 3 separate entries)

-- Follow me on Twitter (Quirky Jessi) and tweet about the contest (can be done twice a day for multiple entries)

-- Talk about this giveaway somewhere else -- up to 2 separate entries (put a post on your site? post on a forum? use Facebook? another site you love? just be sure to leave the link in the comments)

Remember to put each entry in a separate comment so they'll all be counted. :)

~Contest ends at midnight EST, March 22. All the information, gift card, and giveaway have all been provided by The Kroger Family of Stores and General Mills through MyBlogSpark. ~

Tea Closet/Hangers - Hang your tea like you hang your shirts

This is where squealy girls would say "Too cute!!" because uh, it's kinda cute, don't you think? Instead of pulling bags out of a box or canister, they're all hung neatly on your countertop in a cozy little closet for all to admire. This is just begging for a pun about Tea-shirts, huh?



Oh, and if creative tea stuff is your...erm...cup of tea....then follow the link for some awesome light tea. No, as in, really lights up and is fluorescent.

General Mills let me try free cereal! (And it's healthier now, too)

That's a pretty good disclosure, right? With all the changes to the blog world and making sure you tell everyone that you were given something free, it seems like everyone is stressing it beyond belief. I see it in bold all over sites. "They gave this to me, don't sue me!!"

Um, yeah, I'm pretty sure a simple line somewhere in your post, just like most morally-sane bloggers have been doing all along, is perfectly fine.

But anyway....that's not what this post is about.

This post is about how awesome General Mills was to send me coupons to try out their cereals. Around here, with 6 people total and 4 of them being kids who seem to be in constant growth spurts, a breakfast of cereal takes an entire box usually (or close, heh). Considering I make most things at home, cereal hasn't exactly gotten cheaper, and I pass on pre-sweetened things usually, I don't buy cereal all that often. The kids get to have it at school quite often anyway, so it's not like I'm depriving them of anything.

When I got the email from MyBlogSpark to receive coupons, though, and do a review, I was stoked. I was even more excited when I actually got them because "Ahhh!! There's four of them!! And they cover enough that I can get the big boxes!!" Yeah, so I might go a little crazy over getting freebies, oops, hehe.

I don't even go down the cereal aisle at Kroger's and tend to buy offbrand cereals at another store when I do actually buy cereal. Suddenly, I could taste all my old favorites and I was a bit giddy anyway from hearing that they'd decreased their sugar and increased their nutrients. Well, before I get too far ahead of myself, look at these stats and such:

General Mills announced a commitment to further reduce sugar in cereals advertised to kids under 12 to single digit grams of sugar per serving. The company has already been reducing sugar in cereals while increasing key nutrients, such as calcium and vitamin D, and providing whole grain.

Other cereal benefits:

* Ready-to-eat cereals, including presweetened cereals, account for only 5% of sugar in children´s diets.
* Ready-to-eat cereal is the No. 1 source of whole grains in a child´s diet today.
* More frequent cereal eaters tend to have healthier body weights and lower Body Mass Index measures.

I wanted to get some cereals that I wouldn't normally buy and that generally make me think "really sugary" (like Lucky Charms). After all, if they were decreasing the amounts of sugar, I wanted to see if they made them disgusting, right? Well, and I had to get some Kix because I hadn't had those since I was a kid and they were favorite. Kid-tested, mother-approved! Yummy. <3

Turns out, everything we tried tasted as good as ever, and the stats really aren't that bad. Lucky Charms at this point still had 11g of sugar per serving, which isn't quite a single digit yet, but it's close, and as an occasional cereal to eat, I don't see that as bad at all. It's especially great for weekend mornings when they're starving and I'm tired. And really...how bad is a few extra grams of sugar when a lot of people would be chowing down breakfast sandwiches, sausage/bacon, pancakes covered in syrup, etc?



If it's been a while since you've looked at presweetened cereals, it might not be a horrible idea to check them out again. General Mills seems to be doing their part with increasing the "good stuff" and decreasing some of the "bad stuff," so why not give them a shot? (Yes, they gave me free stuff, but since when do I lie to you guys or encourage you to do something I wouldn't? Exactly....I don't. I was kinda hoping I'd be able to give a less-than-positive review, but their Kix got to me. :( Oh well).

Tea bag origami birds

I absolutely love this concept, as do a lot of other people, but it seems these can't be bought until someone pitches the creator a production deal of some sort. The creator forms the tea bags into birds by hand and obviously can't mass produce them, so for now we're stuck just looking at them in awe.

Turkey sings adorable "I Will Survive" rewrite

By far one of the most adorable Thanksgiving-related videos I've seen. You'll love it, too. I found it over on this silly lady's blog and thought it was worthy of an extra post today. ;)

*Sings*

And now you're back, think you're the boss
Wanna put me on a plate
Next to your wife's cranberry sauce

I should have known this day would come
I should have known not to relax
If I thought for just one second
You'd come in here with that ax

Go on now go
Walk out the door
Just turn around now
Ain't choppin' my head to the floor

Weren't you the one
who prized the dark meat on my thighs?
Did ya think I'd gobble?
Did you think I'd lay down and die?

*Hums while cooking*

Happy Thanksgiving guys!

Turkey bowling for Thanksgiving

So it's Thanksgiving here in the US, but I wanted to stick to the gaming theme for the month. Why not combine both of them into a game of turkey bowling then! Now before the animals rights activists and vegetarians crawl out of the woodwork on this one, there's absolutely nothing wrong with using a plastic bird instead.

For those of you who like lame humor, check out this part of Wikipedia's entry for turkey bowling:

Derrick became a self-appointed commissioner of the "Poultry Bowlers Association" and codified the rules and terminology, such as "the fowl line" (cf. "foul line"), "the gobbler (three strikes in a row; cf. turkey (bowling)), and "the wishbone" (a 7-10 split).

The Ultimate Gamer Wedding Cake (and a few more edible games)

I was trying not to have too much overlap this month and I know I've already featured a couple board game cakes, but this one is what a modern day "true gamer" cake would consist of. Instead of labeling each piece myself, here's a snippet from the bride herself:

As you can see, the bottom layer is my fabulous Xbox 360. On top of that is my PS2 and the next layer is my Xbox. If you look closely enough, you can see the DVD remote sensor in a controller port. Such attention to detail! Topping the entire masterpiece (as it should) is the limited edition ‘Legend of Zelda’ gold GameCube.

Doesn't she look so happy? Not only does she have the wedding glow going on, you can tell having her gaming systems with her just makes her day. :D

Here's a couple more gaming cakes to satisfy your sweet gaming tooth:


Awww!!


This great Tetris masterpiece was given to the Tetris-addict groom by his sister who actually left empty places in the game so he could solve it before cutting!



Shush it, Emily. I know, ok? Lol. :P


Legend of Zelda

If you're still craving more, I found this great Flickr group which is devoted to nothing but gamer cakes. Look around. Maybe you'll find your favorite game there, too.

Tic Tac Toast - Play right on your bread!

One of the simplest games of all time is Tic Tac Toe, so of course I'd include a quirky version of the old game. We've established that I love playing with my food, so Tic Tac Toast is perfect, hehe. Really, it's just a little plastic stamper that you press into the bread and once toasted, it "brands" a grid onto it. I'm sure you could handle doing this yourself with a knife, but that takes the fun out of giving this as a gift.

It's giveaway time! (Better Homes and Gardens)

Hey guys, it's time for another giveaway. Actually, over the upcoming months, I have several different giveaways, including an Asian dining set, some cookbooks, flash drives, and a few other various goodies.

For now, though, we'll kick-off my giveaway spree with a subscription (12 issues, once a month) to Better Homes and Gardens. It seems like BHG has been around for forever and a day, and even though many magazines are going under as the internet takes over, they seem to be holding up pretty good. Actually, I just checked, and it seems they've been going at it since 1922. Holy cow, they'll be coming up on their 100 year anniversary before they know it.

Part of the reason I'm doing all these upcoming giveaways is to go along with the release of my newest silly site, Quirky Cookery (hence the cooking-related products later). I've been working on it for a while and I think most of you will love it. It's so much fun and basically, all about me playing with my food. You'll find my quirky creations there, along with interesting recipes I'm trying out, wacky products, tons of pictures, stories and more.

Exciting, huh? But let's get you guys to the giveaway for now, considering that's why most people will see this. ;)

Contest Rules

Required entry: Comment below. (Comments are open and you can comment anonymously, but I need a valid email address or I won't be able to contact you if you're a winner.)

Ways to get more entries:
(For each entry, please leave a separate comment below letting me know what you did. If you're already a subscriber, just leave a comment saying so. If you follow me on Twitter or tweet about the contest, tell me your username in a new comment.)

-- Subscribe to Quirky Jessi (lots of ways....using RSS, through Blogger, or even by email)

-- Subscribe to Quirky Cookery

-- Comment on Quirky Cookery (any post is fine, just remember to come back and tell me you commented here for the contest; can be done up to 3 times total for 3 separate entries)

-- Follow me on Twitter (Quirky Jessi) and tweet about the contest (can be done twice a day for multiple entries)

-- Blog about the contest (link back to this post and leave the URL in comments below)

-- Talk about this giveaway somewhere else -- up to 2 separate entries (post on a forum? use Facebook? another site you love? just be sure to leave the link in the comments)

Remember to put each entry in a separate comment so they'll all be counted. :)

~Contest ends at midnight EST, August 22. I need to have your address sent to me by the 23rd. Sorry, contest only open to US residents....unless you want to pay an additional $12 plus 6% GST or 14% HST in Canada~

Heart-shaped Watermelon

You can say "awww" first. Then you can look at the price tag of 15,760 yen (about $160) for one. Holy cow. It took the Japanese couple 3 years to perfect, but they finally produced perfect heart-shaped watermelons and will surely be producing more in the future for such high prices.

More synthetic sweets -- Floss with your cupcakes

If sniffing your chocolate isn't your style, how about flossing with your cupcakes would work out better for you. The price is still kind of high ($5 for 27 yards), just for floss, but for a novelty gift, it could be fun.

Turn your "cereal with marshmallows" into "marshmallows with cereal"

Were you one of those kids who loved eating Lucky Charms (and/or any of those other cereals with fun little marshmallows in them)? Did you ever think it never seemed like there were enough of the marshmallows? Half of you who answer yes to that probably 'still' wish there were more of those marshmallows, huh? Hehe.

Well you're in luck. Cerealmarshmallows.com sells your favorite dehydrated (just add milk for fluffiness!) marshmallow puffs. Each 8 oz bag supposedly "spices up" 18-25 bowls of cereal, and right now, they're selling them at a huge discount.

Don't like them in your cereal? Keep in mind that these would make good marshmallows for hot chocolate or adding to baked desserts. And they'll stay good for about two years, if for some odd reason, you don't end up eating them all much sooner than that.

Have fun with your food -- Noodle waterslide

I'm not sure if this is so people can have fun with their food....or so food can have fun, hehe.

Obama Sushi Rolls

Is it just me or does Obama's ears look huge in that sushi display? ;-)

Add chocolate wiimotes to the list

Between the PlayStation controller shaped soaps and the chocolate Nintendo utensils, maybe I should just turn QJ into a "quirky gaming products" site instead, geesh.

Now don't get me wrong, I love what Etsy stands for and I'm happy that so many smaller crafters can get their products out there on the web. There are tons of products I never would've seen otherwise, and it's wonderful. I certainly can't complain about all the silly gaming crafts I've seen there either. Add some chocolate? Oh yeah, I'm sold.

But yeah, it seems like everything is being shaped into video game controllers now! I guess it might as well be chocolate, huh? There are also blue, green, and brown PlayStation 2 controllers.

(And no, for those who are wondering, there isn't a trigger shaped into the chocolate on the bottom.)

Le whif -- The chocolate you inhale

Yep, this is the "revolutionary new way of eating chocolate".....by not eating it at all. Now I like chocolate more than most people.

Remember, the only wedding dress I could ever see myself actually considering is one made of chocolate? And I own a bottle of cocoa butter lotion for the sheer sake of it smelling like chocolate.

But this? Oh my. I know people could use it to smell chocolate when they're craving it instead of actually indulging in it. Or sure, a quick pick-me-up. But for me? It'd make me want the real thing even more!