Contests


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Cookie Dough-lympics: The Winner

 After some amazing recipes and ideas, the Cookie Dough-lympics have come to a close! With much deliberation (I mean, it’s hard to say one cookie dough is better than another!) the cookie dough diva herself chose the recipe worthy of the gold medal:
The Winner: The Baker Chick with Salted Caramel Cookie Dough Truffles

Check out the other amazing entries, and comment for a chance to win one of three Cookie Dough Lover’s Cookbooks!!!

Awake at the Whisk: Cherry Ice with Cocoa Nibs
Confessions of a Recipe Junkie: Cookie Dough Creme Brulee
in Contests / Desserts 2 comments
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Opening Ceremonies: The Cookie Dough-lympics!

Yes, it’s that time again! OK, fine — it’s that time for the first time ever. We’re happy to announce, along with our friends at Quirk Books, the first ever Cookie Dough-lympics! The month-long competition is where the Michael Phelps’ of food bloggers will create the craziest and best recipes — all using Lindsay Landis’s egg-free cookie dough from her up-and-coming The Cookie Dough Lover’s Cookbook.

Although there won’t be choreographed dancing or a parade of nations, tomorrow through June 22nd the doughy flame will burn bright, with one blogger showcasing their cookie dough recipe per day. Cookie dough pizza? Cooking dough pie? Cookie dough cocktails? What do you think, ES-ers?

Stay tuned to Quirk Books, @EndlessSimmer, and @QuirkBooks to view the recipes each day.

We’ll be announcing the winner right here on June 25th. Let the games begin!

in Contests / Desserts 4 comments
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Award-Winning Lamb Nachos

If ES can do anything, we can make bar food appetizing, and we can make it win competitions. Yes, really.

After you all voted for Russell’s Welsh Rarebit Lamb Nachos, he was paired with Chef John Critchley of Urbana to help perfect the dish for the big event, and perfect it he did. Russell and John took the nachos and turned them into, well…really fucking fancy nachos.

We headed to the Lamb Pro-Am after a hearty breakfast at Urbana (read: bottomless champagne). I stocked up on Lamb swag, then sampled beer while Russell and John served the masses their delicious, cheesy, fancy-looking nachos.

Here is Russell and John’s award-winning recipe!

Slow Roasted Lamb Nachos with Welsh Rarebit and Scallions

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in Cheese / Contests / Recipe / Red Meat 3 comments
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Are You a Supertaster?

For serious foodies, there’s nothing more embarrassing than being exposed as having a poor palate. Recently, I had a quite horrifying experience at Ample Hills Creamery in Brooklyn. Everyone in the borough has raved about their “salted crack caramel,” a deep, savory ice cream rich with the intense notes of burnt sugar. But when I finally tried Ample Hill’s caramel, I absolutely, 100% hated it. At first I thought there was something wrong with my spoon; that’s how much I disliked the strong, bitter taste of it. Even as three friends next to me all practically had a collective oral orgasm while shoving the ice cream into their faces, I couldn’t get the taste out of my mouth quickly enough. I went home and literally washed my mouth out. Not kidding.

What had happened? Is my palate too weak to support the taste of this cracked-out ice cream? Or…am I just a SUPERTASTER? Many of you have likely already heard about this concept. If not, here’s a brief intro from SupertasterTest.com:

Supertasters experience taste with far greater intensity than the average person. About 25 percent of Americans are supertasters, a group with an unusually high number of taste buds. If you love food more than most, you may have inherited supertaster genes.

Evidence suggests that supertasters are more sensitive to bitter tastes and fattiness in food, and often show lower acceptance of foods that are high in these taste qualities. Supertasters tend to dislike strong, bitter foods like raw broccoli, grapefruit juice, coffee and dark chocolate.

A-ha! So maybe it wasn’t a palate failure, but just an instance of my true taste bud elitism coming out. Clearly, the ES team needed to investigate this further. Armed with a packet of tests from Supertastertest.com, we got to work.

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in Contests / Featured / Personal / Trends 4 comments
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Epic Meal Time Is Your Eater of the Year

Technically, there are 12 hours left in the year and anything can still happen. But with the majority of the votes in, it looks like Epic Meal Time is moving towards a strong victory in our fifth annual Eater of the Year poll.

To celebrate, let’s watch the EMT crew make waffle fries…but of course, these are not your average waffle fries.

Congratulations to Epic Meal Time and to all of our very distinguished Eater of the Year nominees.

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Who is the Eater of the Year?

Each year, Endless Simmer asks our loyal readers to vote on which person deserves the coveted title Eater of the Year. Past winners include Anthony Bourdain, Hezbollah Tofu, This is Why You’re Fat and Ruth Bourdain. So who made the biggest splash in the food world in 2011? The nominees are…

Herman Cain

Maybe it didn’t work out in the end, but you have to admit, there’s something admirable about a man who isn’t afraid to say that running the nation’s 36th best pizza chain qualifies you to run for president. In fact, there isn’t much at all Herman Cain is afraid to say. In a world where presidential politicians deep-throat corn dogs in public and then retreat to their campaign bus for lobster thermidor, it was refreshing to have an honest eater in the race, at least for awhile. Herman Cain wasn’t afraid to sing about his love for crappy fast food, or to declare that only sissy men put vegetables on their pizza. He wasn’t afraid to eat chicken wings win Michele Bachmann, or to propse that poor people don’t need food stamps because they can just buy used food. How is this man not already eater-in-chief? Just hope he never asks you to dinner. (Photo: Broward Palm Beach New Times)

Epic Meal Time

We can all acknowledge that the Food Network is pure shite nowadays, and there hasn’t been a food show worth watching since Cookin’ with Coolio. What the teevee execs don’t seem to get is that Americans don’t want 30 minute meals or cutesy casserole recipes. We want WORLD RECORD BREAKING FOOD.

Enter Epic Meal Time, the web TV show that ate all of the other web TV shows and then burped them up. Fancy an 84-egg sandwich? Meatloaf made out of McDonald’s? A Christmas tree crafted from bacon? EMT’s outrageous creations make state fair food look like a tea party hosted by Gwyneth Paltrow, and we just can’t look away. The ultra-American eaters dirty little secret? They’re Canadian.

The Lawrence/Julie & Julia Project

When Julia Child said she was going to use television to teach Americans how to cook French cuisine properly, people laughed at her, but she became a foodie legend. When Julie Powell said she was going to cook every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and record it all on something called a weblog, people just thought she was weird, but she became a blog-to-book-to-big-screen phenomenon. When college student Lawrence Dai decided he was going to watch Julie & Julia every day for a year, people immediately realized he was a genius. Yes, the Lawrence/Julie & Julia Project had all the hallmarks of a jokey web project that wouldn’t last more than 15 minutes, but Lawrence actually did it, watching J&J a full 365 times, and firmly proving that online journalism does indeed have a purpose.

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in Celebs / Contests / Politics 0 comments
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Talk Like a Pirate Day

product-pirate-booty

I’ve definitely ranted about all of those “Day of Days,” as I so eloquently called the phenomenon. A day for soft serve ice cream, a day for mustard, a day for bulk foods…

Anyway, I think I may have found the best “day of” yet: Talk Like a Pirate Day. Which of course, is today, September 19th.

I don’t know what may pop into your head when you hear “pirate” – is it Peter Pan, Pittsburgh baseball, puffed rice? Well for me, it’s a quote from the best movie of all time: PCU.

Rand: I scheme and plan for MONTHS and it gets screwed up because YOU can’t control the students! NEVER send a woman to do a man’s job!
President Garcia-Thompson: You cocky, pointy-nosed little Reaganite! If you hadn’t provoked them, we wouldn’t BE in this mess!
Rand: Whoa! Reality check here! Earth to TALL BITCH! What is your fault? THIS IS!
[turns on Droz]
Rand: Hey, poor boy! Go and have all your parties with all your new friends! I can see it now, Andrews. You and all the knee-jerk, bleeding-heart liberals, sipping tea and playing patty-cake. And those useless hippie pot-heads, those commie-pinko leftists. The bunny huggers, the pillow biters…
Droz: Whoa! Whoa! Which ones are the pillow biters again?
Rand: The BUTT-PIRATES! And those beastly man-haters, tell those chicks to shave their pits then call me! And those goddamn whiny crybaby minorities, you can keep them all!
[Rand realizes that Droz had a microphone close by and that the sign lady has been signing everything he said]
Droz: [to the students] Rand McPherson, everybody. And don’t forget the 9:30 show is completely different than the 7:30 show. Enjoy the veal!
[the students then go after Rand]

Rand: I scheme and plan for MONTHS and it gets screwed up because YOU can’t control the students! NEVER send a woman to do a man’s job!

President Garcia-Thompson: You cocky, pointy-nosed little Reaganite! If you hadn’t provoked them, we wouldn’t BE in this mess!

Rand: Whoa! Reality check here! Earth to TALL BITCH! What is your fault? THIS IS!

[turns on Droz]

Rand: Hey, poor boy! Go and have all your parties with all your new friends! I can see it now, Andrews. You and all the knee-jerk, bleeding-heart liberals, sipping tea and playing patty-cake. And those useless hippie pot-heads, those commie-pinko leftists. The bunny huggers, the pillow biters…

Droz: Whoa! Whoa! Which ones are the pillow biters again?

Rand: The BUTT-PIRATES! And those beastly man-haters, tell those chicks to shave their pits then call me! And those goddamn whiny crybaby minorities, you can keep them all!

[Rand realizes that Droz had a microphone close by and that the sign lady has been signing everything he said]

Droz: [to the students] Rand McPherson, everybody. And don’t forget the 9:30 show is completely different than the 7:30 show. Enjoy the veal!

[the students then go after Rand]

To celebrate this pirate madness, Pirate’s Booty is giving away a chest of goodies to one of our readers.

We’ll pick a commenter by random, but just leave a comment in this post about anything, hopefully about pirates, but Eagles football will work too. Oh, or about food.

Here are some pirate-speak definitions to inspire your comments.

Comments are due midnight EST, Monday, September 20th.

Scallywag – Mild insult similar to rapscallion or rouge.

Scurvy Dog – The pirate talking directly to you with mild insult.

Shiver me timbers! – Comparable to “Holy crap!”

Son of a biscuit eater – Insult directed towards someone you don’t like.

Three sheets to the wind – Someone who is very drunk.

And of course

Pirate’s Booty! –  Pirate’s treasure and also a favorite snack that’s’ good anytime!  Pirate’s Booty is a deliciously baked rice and corn puff that’s baked, all-natural trans-fat and gluten-free.

in Contests 3 comments
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