New: In this issue we are continuing to expand the scope of this section to include not only reviews of a neighborhood food business, but also news about food products or services that our reviewers find interesting. From time to time, we might also include a recipe or two. This section will continue to appear in each Berkeley Neighborhoods Council eNEWS edition along with comments written by an always anonymous reviewer. The post for this issue is really different because it’s about food news and recipes on the internet. Drum roll please…
Food.com states it offers 475,000 recipes, and there is no reason to believe that the half a million number isn’t true! When you go to the website you will see a row of tabs across the top. Click on “Holidays” (second from the left) and you will find the slogan “Every Day is a Food Holiday 365 days a year.” Click on the slogan. If you choose to, you may sign up here to receive daily e-mails, free of charge, which will provide information as to what holiday is involved with a particular date. You will see a holiday for the day you do this, along with at least 3 recipes for that day highlighting the “holiday” food. There are also tabs to see the information for the “Previous Day” and another for the “Next Day” so you can peek at what’s coming.
For example, if you go to the website, Food.com, and click on the Food Holiday tab you will be informed that April 18, 2014 is National Animal Crackers Day. You will find 6 recipes listed for that date, one for making “Homemade Animal Crackers” and among the others, one for “Zoo Food” which seems to be something that groups (like PTAs?) put together for bake sales. Zoo Food includes purchased animal crackers, raisins, peanuts and M & Ms — it strikes this reviewer as not a bad mix to slip into one of those big plastic Easter eggs.
Well, this reviewer signed up for the daily e-mails and guess what?
April 1 (April Fools Day) turns out to be The Birthday of Sliced Bread and BNC just couldn’t pass up commenting on this.
Who hasn’t ever said “It’s the greatest thing since sliced bread” but who said it first? Bartlett’s was no help with this. However, it seems that Otto Frederick Rohwedder of Davenport, Iowa invented the first bread slicing machine around 1923, but he didn’t get his first fully working sliced bread machine going until 1928. The first use was July 7, 1928 by the Chillicothe Baking Company in Chillicothe, Missouri under the name “Kleen Maid Sliced Bread.” Wonder Bread started around 1925, and the saying, the best thing since sliced bread, seems to have grown out of early advertising that said something along the lines that sliced bread was the greatest thing that has happened to the baking industry. Wonder Bread started marketing sliced bread nationwide in 1930 and after that, there was no looking back, or as Food.com put it, forever changing how we eat bread.
Along about January 18, 1943, the United States actually banned sliced bread as a “wartime conservation measure” presumably because of fact that waxed paper was needed to keep the bread from drying out. Apparently the ban wasn’t too well received and it didn’t last long — only until March 8, 1943 when it was said that since the ban didn’t produce the anticipated savings, it was lifted. (Your family and friends will be awed by what you’ve learned by reading the BNC eNEWS!)
Anyway, the 3 recipes given to celebrate this particular important Birthday, are just so-so. One of these recipes was for the “Potato Chip Sandwich” which most parents have experienced when they’ve served their kids a sandwich with chips. Here’s a sampling of the offerings for some other days in April
| April 4: | National Cordon Bleu Day | |
| April 6: | Fresh Tomato Day (here are recipes for Tomato Tart and Green Tomato Bread) | |
| April 7: | National Coffee Cake Day (the recipe for Cherry Streusel Coffee Cake sounds good) | |
| April 8: | National Empanada Day | |
| April: 11: | National Cheese Fondue Day (there’s a recipe for Aztec Taco Fondue and Cinco de Mayo is just around the corner) | |
| April 12: | Grilled Cheese Sandwich Day (check out the recipe for French Onion Soup Grilled Cheese) | |
| April 17: | National Cheese Ball Day (another historical fact. In 1801 the town of |
Chesire, Massachusetts sent a 1,000 pound cheese ball to the White House as a gift for the new President, Thomas Jefferson. None of the recipes given are as hefty as this, however.)
It seems that in the 3 recipes given for each day, one is pretty basic and another is much more adventuresome. Each day also provides a button to click on to increase the number of recipes for a particular “holiday” date, and all-in-all, it’s pretty interesting stuff which can liven up your cooking choices as well as provide subjects for dinner table or cocktail circuit small talk! Not bad for being free.