Quoted: (...) Some, if not most, organic food outlets--including Wild Oats, which Whole Foods acquired last year--suggest that the shopper's goal should be to do more with less. But the genius of the Whole Foods approach, under hard-driving Chief Executive John Mackey, has been to realize that many American consumers have a vague desire to buy organic and live healthier but have no interest in dispensing with selection or comfort.
(...) But the first rule of sustainable architecture is to keep new buildings as small and efficient as possible. With its soaring 30-foot ceilings and endless aisles, 280 subterranean parking spots and all those TVs flickering day and night, this place is neither. It's more like the grocery store version of a hybrid SUV made by Lexus or a 12,000-square-foot "green" house with a swimming pool and six-car garage accompanying its solar panels and sustainably harvested decking.

What in the world? I'm more-or-less slack-jawed at the whatever-it-is that SXSW has become. 24,000 paid attendees but what Austinite would ever pay these days, with such a spectacle on the hoof? Maybe next year we jump the shark - I can't wait to see what SXSW in decline would devolve into!

The city is today breathing a collective sigh of relief now that the band is (O.K., 1200 bands are) gone, along with the hangers-on. Heavy, cleansing rains expected for the next 24 hours. See you all next year.

Quoted: AUSTIN, Texas – So “food robot” Rachael Ray wanted to throw a South By Southwest party. Bloggers and other Web luminaries balked, to say the least.

Quoted: ...The franchise I visited, on Hollywood Boulevard near my old apartment, looked like it had withstood assault by bullets, flamethrowers, Baseball Furies, and a hundred hook-handed whores. Everything inside the store—including the employees and customers—looked like it had been rubbed with sad ham...

Great NYT article on food in the Hill Country southwest of Austin.

Quoted: On the foodie trail in the Hill Country it still is not unusual to speak of slabs instead of slices.

Page after page of great lunchbox food art, daily entries for several years. Hundreds of great ideas, most using completely recognizable bento foodstuffs.

Amazing new cooking process, originally developed for clarifying meat broths, now used for all kinds of foods!

Quoted: Mr. Iuzzini also uses the technique to make an even more surprising dish for his chocolate course. He makes separate “stocks” of dark and white chocolate by cooking them in water, then clarifies them into fat-free liquids, one brown and one colorless. He then adds sugars and xanthan gum, a thickener, to give the two liquids different densities and a slight cohesiveness. This allows him to build a two-story drink, a layer of cold white chocolate consommé riding on a base of hot dark chocolate consommé.

It's hardly been warm enough here for car-baked cookies. Finally, a reason to root for global warming!
I am SOOOO going to do this next summer.

Perhaps the most important blog entry evar. Bacon making at home. The presentation is fun to read, too. From "The Champagne of Blogs."

Kids: McDonald's hamburgers, better with the wrapper.
Adults: Two-buck Chuck, better without the label!