Having a local cook you dinner when you're traveling sounds like a good idea.

EatWith

Here are all the breweries between San Francisco and where I'm going camping this weekend. Thanks, BreweryMap!

• What does 200 calories look like?
• The Cloud Player (build Soundcloud playlists, listen to playlists created by others, hot tracks, etc)
• RadioClouds (pick an artist and get an explosion of related artists - as watson puts it, "for rapid breadth first discovery")
• so percussionlab has all these x-mixes posted now

Recipe search by ingredient. Works exactly the way it should: you tell it what you have, then is starts asking "do you have this? do you have this?" (look over to the left.) Recipes sourced from all over the place.

May is a lean month it seems.

So this ranked list of foods by nutritional density is thought-provoking but flawed.

I just don't believe that salsa (what kind, anyway?) is better than me for beets, and the reason I don't is sodium. But that's apparently not factored in.

Different ways of preparing food will impact the nutritional value.

Also, and I'm basing this off a couple hours of fascinating discussion with Dylan when we'd already had a few, different people have different gut flora which affect their ability to digest different kinds of food.

But I like the idea.

• Do people know what they're talking about when they say agile development?
• Academic papers on Hadoop and MapReduce
• What happens when you get drunk?

My friend Ozge just started a blog on Turkish cuisine for American cooks.

In 2008, after five months of solo travel through Asia, I met up with Ozge on her home turf. (If you can travel with someone who is host, guide and friend together, I urge you to do so.) There followed a near month of highlights, as we ate and drank our way across Turkey, starting in Istanbul. It should always be nighttime, and we should always, all of us, be at rooftop restaurants near Istiklal, having meze with raki.

Aaand I can get the ingredients for the traditional eggplant dish locally. Yum.

Real Sichuan food at Chung King.

Now that I enjoy cooking, will pick this up when I eventually move back to the States. Also recommendation in the thread for an $11 sharpener.

cheaper and even better?

• A couple handfuls of small, fresh, spicy chili peppers (usually called bird's eye chilis)
• Three or four cloves of garlic
• Quarter cup of white vinegar
• Tablespoon of sugar
• Teaspoon of salt
• 4-6 bell peppers
• One or two sugarcube-sized pieces of fresh ginger
• A blender

Stem the chili peppers, coarse chop the garlic. Add everything except the bell peppers to the blender. Puree superfine. Slice a few bell peppers, add and blend. Keep adding bell peppers to taste; you'll probably want to add a bit more sugar too.

I'm a huge Sriracha fan but I actually like this better. It's the fresh peppers. Eat it on everything.

Where credit is due: I originally started with this recipe. Now that I think about it, even adding ginger was Teena's idea, not mine.

Some notes:

• Recipe above is approximate only. Your garlic cloves may be larger than what I get here in Kenya. Your chili peppers may not be as spicy.
• Don't go too nuts with the garlic, and especially not with the bell peppers. This is all about the flavor of the fresh chili peppers, and the spice.

• In Praise of Budweiser (contains extended footnotes)
• A Better Brew which contains the line: "I asked the brewmaster, Jean-Marie Rock, which American beer he likes best. He thought for a moment, squinting down his bladelike nose, and narrowed his lips to a point. Then he raised a finger in the air. 'Budweiser!' he said. 'Tell them that the brewer at Orval likes Budweiser!' He smiled. 'I know they detest it, but it is quite good.'"

Kristy makes it, shoots it, eats it. Hungry?

Somebody asked me for travel stories today and I had to throw up my hands. The most adventurous thing I've done so far is the Thai barbeque place I just visited. The buffet of raw meat and vegetables (some meant to be grilled, some not) were like a bunch of "NO!" illustrations for a travel health brochure. But it smelled so good ... the routine would have been familiar to any LA resident who's visited Koreatown. The main difference was that instead of the marinade, it was all about the delicious, chili-rich dipping sauces. Ok, a few random points:

Why it's better here
Find any popular food stall where you can watch your meal get cooked in front of you, and you get:

• Fresh-cooked food
• from fresh ingredients
• from a stall that does just one thing, and well enough to have a following
• in a country that cares about food.

Khao Soi
It's the new hamburger: tasty, addictive comfort food. Egg noodles, meat, etc, in a curry soup, topped with crunchy noodles. There must be somewhere in LA that has it. This is a perfect letter to Jonathan Gold at the LA Weekly actually: "ah yes, that delicious northern Thai specialty. There are several places in Los Angeles that claim to offer the real thing, but only one ..." etc etc

Also

• Fried rice doesn't suck.
• I had the best fried chicken of my life here.
• Met someone from Taiwan who claims chicken satay is a Malaysian dish.

I just had the spiciest meal I've ever had in this city, after five years of chasing Thai and Vietnamese delicacies. It was a pizza, at Mr. Pizza on Fairfax. They also have a silly good beer selection, with like six Samuel Smith varieties.

Some of the best chocolate I've ever had. Ignore the fact that it's sugar-free, that sort of creeps me out.

6th and Serrano, a couple blocks east of Western. Then go to Lollicup a few doors down for boba. Perfect. (via Jonathan Gold, of course)

Recipes from the New York Times.

Pulls from a bunch of different LA food blogs ... but no LA-specific feed?

Fr'instance, LA Beer Map.

Need to buy beer in Los Angeles? A lot of it?

• Shot of espresso: 77 mg (**)
• Grande Starbucks brewed coffee: 372 mg (***********)
• Starbucks Frappucino (bottled): 90 mg (***)
• Coke: 34 mg (*)

Good categories list for browsing. Oo and they link to chowhound threads!

• What's in your fridge?
• quick and healthy food pairings
• easiest, cheapest, healthiest meals