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food

The History of the Green Bean Casserole

Green Bean Casserole
Green Bean Casserole

Every year at Thanksgiving, families across the country descend upon their local grocery store and clear the shelves of French’s Fried Onions, Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup, and cans of green beans – all in the name of recreating that traditional holiday side dish of GREEN BEAN CASSEROLE.

But did you know that this fabulous holiday treat isn’t necessarily as traditional as you might think?  It was created by the Campbell’s Soup Company as a way to sell more soup.

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Book food Gadgets How To shopping Websites

Zombie Fun: How to “Eat Your Face” for Halloween


Special Effects Cookbook
Special Effects Cookbook

Mike Samonek wants you to play with your food.

That’s part of the reason he came up with the SPECIAL EFFECTS COOKBOOK and Special Effects cooking website, as a way to encourage experimentation in the kitchen and having fun while you eat.

Some of the recipes that are featured include:

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food sports

Most tailgate party cooks prefer chicken or burgers; Some spend over $1000/year on tailgates

Weber's Way to Grill: The Step-by-Step Guide to Expert Grilling
Weber’s Way to Grill: The Step-by-Step Guide to Expert Grilling

Web Watch knows that there’s nothing that tastes better than some meat cooked fresh on the grill.

And when it’s football season, you have to have a grill to really do the tailgate up right.  Web Watch even won a Weber Grill a few years ago in a football tailgating cookoff contest with our grilled steak sandwich with carmelized onions.  One of the judges even came back to our setup and took an extra sandwich with them “for the road” when the competition was over. 

So we have that going for us.

Which brings us back to today’s point – that when it comes to tailgating and grilling, nobody knows their stuff better than the folks over at Weber.

Which is why every year Weber releases their own WEBER TAILGATING STUDY, a look at the tailgating habits that we should expect to see this upcoming football season.

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food Gadgets

Chocolate Oreo ice cream done in 40 seconds – The BlendTec Recipe


BlendTec Blender

Web Watch enjoys watching the WILL IT BLEND videos on YouTube.  Whether it be a blender full of marbles, a broom handle, or an iPhone — the BlendTec Total Blender makes fast work of turning those items into inedible shrapnel.

As they say – don’t try these experiments at home.

But there’s something about having a blender with over 1600 watts of ice crushing power that makes you say, “we gotta have that”.  In part because we’ve blown through other blenders when trying to go through different food prep over the years, and in part it’s because Web Watch wants to have the option to shred a jar full of marbles. 

We may never do it, but it’s nice to know that we could if we had to.

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10 Things food shopping

The most popular spice found in homes today? Dry Garlic Powder

Under Cabinet Spice Rack
Under Cabinet Spice Rack

Web Watch knows that making great food requires having great spices.

If you don’t have a PENZEY’S SPICES store near you, then maybe you have some other fresh spice retailer or farmer’s market that you could hit up for some glass jars of spice goodness.

And even if you end up buying your spices at the local supermarket, drug store’s food aisle, or giant-size Super Center Warehouse Emporium, the most important thing you can remember is to rotate your spices on a regular basis.  Dry spices especially will lose their flavors anywhere from 6 months to a year after your purchase.  You wouldn’t serve a beer after it’s “best by” date – you should apply the same philosophy to your spice cabinet and toss out anything that’s more than a year old.

Your taste buds will thank you.

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food How To

Award-Winning recipe for Cinco de Mayo Guacamole with Blue Cheese and Bacon (inspired by Food Network Best Thing I Ever Ate)

Friends of Web Watch have a large-scale annual Cinco de Mayo party featuring a salsa competition. We’ve been lucky enough to have walked away a prize every year with various takes on salsa, so when this year’s invitation indicated that there would be a guacamole competition instead (“to shake things up a bit”), we took that on as a challenge.

Because, let’s face it, guacamole really isn’t all that hard to make. It’s making prize-winning guacamole that people will declare as “the best thing I ever ate” that takes a little bit more effort.

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food How To

Just in time for the Kentucky Derby: The Ultimate Bourbon Ball Recipe

The Kentucky Derby Museum Cookbook
The Kentucky Derby Museum Cookbook

Next week is the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky.

And if you’re like Web Watch, you will be tuning in to watch the race with friends – holding a mint julep in one hand, and a racing form in the other… all while trying to see the race through the forest of giant Kentucky Derby hats worn by the ladies in the room.

But Kentucky isn’t know just for this long-running horse race.

No, Kentucky is also known for bourbon.

So if you’re going to host or attend a KENTUCKY DERBY PARTY on race day, you may want to make something bourbon-related.  You know, just because.

Categories
food shopping

FOOD ALERT! Girl Scout cookie Thin Mints are still smaller, so try this recipe

It really shouldn’t bother Web Watch as much as it does.

After all, eating too many cookies of any type isn’t good for you.  Heck, even Cookie Monster says that “Cookies are a Sometimes Food

But as the Chicago Sun-Times and others pointed out last year, Girl Scout cookies were getting a bit smaller, perhaps due to the recession.   There’s even a FACEBOOK page devoted to fans who want to get their 8 cookies back in the box.

But now an entire whole year has passed since, and Web Watch dutifully went to the local grocery store to buy our annual allottment of Thin Mints, Tagalongs, and Samoas from the Girl Scouts (and their parents) trying to sell off their excess inventory*.

And Web Watch can confirm that this year’s Thin Mints Economic Indicator shows that the economy is still in the gutter as the 2010 box looks to be the same as the 2009 box.  That is, in 2010 we’re still looking at a smaller box and fewer cookies.