Gigabiting

image via the Urban Craft Center

The blogosphere seems downright sedate when you see what’s going on with zines.

For the uninitiated, a zine is a small circulation, independently produced publication. It can be a hand-drawn masterpiece or a crudely photocopied manifesto. The time and materials needed are seldom matched by sales revenue, but profit is rarely the goal of these labors of love. 1,000 copies at $3.00 apiece would be a pretty big deal to most zine publishers.

Zine publishers relish their outsider status. They opt to explore stories and employ narrative motifs that are ignored by the traditional food media. The content might be controversial or sexual, or its theme might be obsessively focused on a single, arcane subject. Publications like Veganarchy (a zine for anarchists who happen to be vegans, and vice versa), Big Hands (the goings-on in a 24-hour doughnut shop in Bloomington, Indiana), and Burritos are Tasty (you get it) probably will never reach broad, mainstream audiences, but hey, that’s not what they’re aiming for anyway, although there are a few (Boing Boing, Bust, Bitch) that have crossed over.

A zine is a DIY publishing event.

These days, when every ninny with an internet connection and a Blogger account is a publisher, zines remain scrappy and lo-fi; resolutely imperfect, unpolished little gems. The writing is  feisty and original, and the lack of spell-checking is made up in passion and exuberance.

Herding Cats.

Zines tend to come and go, volumes can appear at irregular intervals, and print runs are small. There are no traditional review sources or conventional distributors. Retail efforts are pretty much limited to the flier racks at independent booksellers and indie record outlets, ads in the back of other zines, and swap meet-like ‘zine fests’.

The best plan of attack is to find a food zine you like and network it from there through the ads it carries for other zines, and through the creator or publisher’s website. There are also meta-zines that exist to review other zines, but of course you still have to locate one of those.

Here are some links to get you started:

Metazines Broken Pencil, Alternative Press Review, and Fact Sheet 5 all publish zine reviews and other windows on the world of independent media.

Recommended zines (I’ll keep my fingers crossed for availability):

Snack Bar Confidential is a fun and kitschy visit to the golden age of snack food from a writer with a fascination for the advertising and packaging of the ’60s and ’70s.

Gastrolater digs deeply into food and pop culture with intelligent, personal meditations.

Coffee Shop Crushes explores the private interactions and unrequited loves of baristas and their customers.

Each issue of Last Supper tackles a specific theme– an ingredient, a holiday, a technique, or a broader social issue. Writers and visual artists are paired to create a submission combining a dish, a drawing, a recipe, and a personal reflection.

Also helpful: Writer Action Girl (zinesters love nicknames) has tips on ordering etiquette on the House of Fun website like the helpful hint to always send cash– bank accounts are rare in zine circles– but not a lot of change because it jams up the post office machines.

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Recipe tweets, or twecipes, are incredible feats of verbal compression.

To make the 140 character cut, the recipe has to be reduced to its essence, trimmed and edited, and then trimmed again. Every keystroke has to pull its weight; each word should vibrate with economy.

The best twecipes are models of clarity and usefulness. Take this one for mussels in a creamy fennel sauce:

brwn fennel/garlc/T buttr. Boil+c wtwine; +2lb mussel. Cvr,shake5m; rmv open to bowl(discard shut). Boil sauce+⅓c srcrm/s+p.

It relies heavily on the reader’s familiarity with ingredients and techniques (no stated prep steps for the fennel bulb or garlic, no warning about the curdling tendency of over-boiled sour cream), but directions are thorough, unfussy, and I’m betting it’s delicious.

Less successful are those that rely heavily on often cryptic abbreviations. Take the following recipe for pureed eggplant:

Brush aub w/evoo, roast 20m, 200c. Peel, msh, + halfonion/1TS ginger/chilli/halfTS cumin/lime/coriander. Season.

In this instance, it’s unclear what you even end up with— eggplant skin on and uncooked onion for a chunky side dish, or no skin and sauteed onion for a silky-smooth dip.

Some cooks, presumably those who do the NYT Sunday crossword in ink, claim to enjoy puzzling through twecipes. For the rest of us, help can be found in an online glossary of culinary twitterese, although even that didn’t help with parsing the eggplant recipe’s use of ‘evoo’ for extra virgin olive oil.

The first cookbook collection of twecipes will arrive in stores next week.

Eat Tweet comes from Maureen Evans, the cook behind the twitter recipe feed @cookbook. The hands-down queen of the genre, the surprising poetry and miniaturized elegance of Ms. Evans’ twecipes has been likened to Fabergé eggs and bonsai trees. Appropriately, she has a sideline as a poetess of haiku, also available through twitter.

Mk smthng gr8 4 dnr 2nit.

For more twecipes check out the recipe directory at twitter aggregator We Follow. It provides links to over a thousand twitterers, ranging from champion tweeter Jamie Oliver, with more than a half a million followers, to  GrandmaVera whose tagline reads: OK I think I may have this twitter stuff figured out now…

Creative Commons image via San Jose Public Library
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How do you teach Home Economics to a generation raised on Top Chef and Project Runway?

For starters, it’s not Home Ec, but Family and Consumer Sciences. Cooking is now culinary arts, and sewing has given way to fashion design. And many believe that’s the problem.

Home Economics for girls and Shop for boys had long been required for high school graduation. In the 1970′s, classrooms went coed, but by then, the traditional Home Ec curriculum of hand-stitched hems and tuna casseroles was deemed fusty and outmoded. Instead of retooling, most school districts simply dropped the graduation requirement; the Reagan era tax cuts made the decision for them.

If it breaks, get a new one. If you’re hungry, try the drive-through.

Basic life skills like household repairs, balancing checkbooks, and preparing simple meals are no longer routinely taught in school– and what busy, working parents of teenagers have the time or the inclination to give home lessons? Instead, non-mandatory Home Economics has led to boutique electives in fashion merchandising and sushi-rolling. And this in the midst of a childhood obesity epidemic and our collectively declining financial health.

Nobody wants to see a return to the gender-stereotyped classrooms and curriculum, or the tuna casseroles, but how about some basic principles and pragmatic instruction that would transform daunting chores into manageable and rewarding pursuits? Home Economics is not like you remember. Here’s a thought for this back-to-school season: maybe it should be.

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My This for Your That

You used to do it as a kid. You had an innate sense of the relative value of Twinkies and would broker a lunchroom exchange.

In recent years, barter has been making a comeback. This ancient form of trade is alive and well in e-commerce. Combining the DIY ethic with social networks, online barter exchanges are flourishing in the current, shaky economy.

You don’t have to be a bread baker or backyard gardener to get in on the new barter phenomenon. There are restaurants looking to swap meals for the services of writers who can produce their newsletters, and backyard chicken owners who will keep you in fresh eggs if you tutor their kid in math. Here’s how you can get started:

Veggie Trader is a national clearinghouse for backyard gardeners. Swap your bumper crop of tomatoes for some excess basil or homemade pickles. If the plum trees didn’t produce, or you’re just not a gardener, many of of the traders will accept cash. Another barter exchange for gardeners is Neighborhood Fruit (also available as a phone app). It posts backyard bounty from members as well as fruit that is up-for-grab from trees on public land. Hyperlocavore is an update of sharecropping— you swap the use of your yard for a share of the produce grown on it.

Industry journals Barter News and Barter News Weekly both publish lists of industry sources and contacts, classified ads, and plenty of how-to articles.

Craigslist has a bartering section for each city it covers. There’s quite a bit of food swapping going down, especially at this time of year as garden surpluses hit the listings. Closer to the holidays you might find homemade candies and baked goods. Like Craigslist, Food Barter is a free classified ad service, but one that is focused exclusively on food swaps.

Soup Swap is just what it sounds like. The site will help you find an existing swap in your area, and provide guidelines, support, and publicity if you want to host your own.

Barter for beer at London’s Marksman Pub. Currently they are seeking window cleaning for the pub windows, tuning services for the pub piano, a Scrabble game, a bicycle baby seat,  black Sharpie pens, and a set of drill bits. If you have any of those, you’ll drink for free.

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image via Show and Tell

Forget about ordering one dessert with four forks.

What’s big in desserts right now is small. We’re scooping itty bitty spoons into tiny tureens of tiramisu and downing shot glass shooters of passion fruit soufflé. Already precious cupcakes have morphed into the cake ball trend, and little pies are appearing atop lollipop sticks.

Restaurants are happy to accommodate the baby sweet tooth. They find that average checks are higher when small desserts are on the menu; customers that wouldn’t typically indulge are lured by the novelty and smaller commitment of the miniatures, and while they’re at it, they’ll order a coffee, a tea, maybe an after-dinner drink.

We are more adventurous with tiny desserts. We want a big taste in the small package and are willing to experiment with unfamiliar ingredients and preparations. The stakes are low– we’re committing to just a few bites at a lower price point than for standard desserts. Read entire article.

image courtesy of Bella Irae

You

Soft-boiled, sunny-side up, over-easy, gently poached.

Uh uh. Not these days. Runny yolks are out. Hard-boiled is the safest way to go.

And you think you know how to boil an egg, but I’m here to tell you that you can do better. Read entire article.