What Your Valentine’s Day plans say about your relationship.

By: Charisma Madarang 

Since we fancy ourselves to be highly unprofessional advice givers when it comes to love, we here at Foodbeast present to you the ultimate guide to Valentine’s Day. Whether you’re taking the boo out to a swanky candlelight dinner or snuggling in your PJs while knee-deep in Chinese take-out, what you choose to do on that special night speaks volumes about the dynamics of your relationship.
So, in honor of bad chocolate and fat babies shooting arrows in the sky, here’s a comprehensive look into what your Valentine’s Day plans say about your relationship status.

romantic-valentines-day-dinner

The 5-star restaurant with $$$$ on Yelp
You looked up this place at least 2 weeks ahead of time and made sure it had a Yelp rating of at least 4 stars. You also double checked the reviews to make sure it wasn’t one of those fancy places where they charged $50 for a plate of soggy fettuccine but justified it by the fabulous ocean view. You’re definitely getting laid tonight. That, or you’re both 60 years old and hate each other.

“The Happiest Place on Earth”

Why are you on the teacup ride right now with a bunch of screaming 5 year olds? Oh, yeah, because your S/O is convinced that the churros here are super authentic and the 2-hour wait for “It’s a Small World” is a great time for both of you to beat each other’s single-digit Flappy Bird highscore. On the brightside, you successfully snuck in a handle of vodka — hello, Space Mountain!

Netflix and Chinese Food Night

You’ve been together for at least 3 years and you both know what’s up. You’d rather throw on Ocean’s Eleven and order take-out from your favorite Chinese spot. You’re also the couple that farts around each other and hold contests on who can let one go the loudest. Ew.
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The Buffer Group Date

You literally met each other last night but didn’t want to be forever alone, so you invited your friends as a buffer in case your date turned out to be psycho who owns 20 cats. Now you’re awkwardly standing next to each other at a loud dive bar and debating if you should hold hands or not.

The “Surprise” Picnic

You’re either a modern day Casanova who makes bomb tuna sandwiches or you just wanted an excuse to play “Such Great Heights” on the guitar while you both boozed up on two buck chuck.
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The Overpriced Gastropub

You wanted to do something “different” for Valentine’s Day. At first you considered sky diving but after you came to your senses, you figured an edgy gastropub would be the next best thing. Now, you’re both nibbling on overpriced truffle fries and feeling super “hip.”

The Mini Golf Date That Precedes First Base

You’re in high school and you have a curfew at 10 pm. That, or you both just really love greasy arcade pizza and you definitely can’t be mad at that.

The Romantic Dinner at Home

You’re a romantic and after watching a few episodes of Iron Chef thought, “Shoot, I could do that.” Now you’re covered in spaghetti sauce and trying to throw in jalapenos for “taste.” It might not be edible, but gosh, aren’t you two the cutest?
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The “I Thought You Didn’t Want to Do Anything” Date

You’re the chump who listened to your S/O when they said they “Didn’t feel like doing anything for Valentine’s Day.” You fell for the trap and now you’re alone eating SpaghettiOs and drinking sad beer tears.

The Anti-Valentine’s Day/Singles Awareness Party

You’re single and wanted to show all your friends in relationships what a poor life decision they made. So, you’re throwing a Pinterest-worthy party and only inviting your single friends. There will be strong martinis and you’ll be Instagramming the whole time to make everyone else jealous.

The McDonald’s Date

fast-food-valentines-dinner
You did this for Valentine’s Day. Strangely enough, you are now single.

The Worlds Most Expensive Valentine Meal

For those looking to impress this Valentine’s Day, here’s a dinner that will run you a cool £61,000 (US $99, 594.70). In collaboration with GreatBritishChefs.com, British luxury site VeryFirstTo offers what the Daily Meal claims to be the most expensive Valentine’s Day menu on Earth.

Michelin-starred chef Adam Simmonds (formerly of Danesfield House) created the eight-course menu for “no expense-spared” romantics. The meticulously extravagant menu includes “aphrodisiac-infused” components like Alums white caviar with a price tag of nearly $5000, gold leaf worth more than $3000 and Native South Sea oyster pearls at almost $10,000.

Looking to emphasize the menu’s theme of exclusivity and rarity, Pacific bluefin tuna also make the list — a species many wildlife activists say are as close to extinction as the white rhino. Of course, throughout the dinner, only the most rare and beautiful wines will be poured including a $ 27, 755.90 bottle of 1990 La Romanee-Conti, Domaine de la Romanee-Conti.

Well, pish posh.

Peek the full menu below.

By: Charisma Madarang  

How to Make Jägermeister Pulled Pork Sliders Read

Pulled-Pork-Sliders-recipe

This weekend, serve up something delectable for the Super Bowl. If you’re doing it right, you already have Doritos-crusted chicken wings on deck. Of course, you’ll want to pair it up with some equally indulgent dishes, so we found the perfect boozy pork slider recipe to chow down on.

The Jägermeister adds a distinct sweetness to the bbq sauce, complimenting the slight lime flavor of the Jicama Avocado Slaw. Now, add a few brews to this mix and you’ve got the ultimate game day feast.

Jägermeister BBQ’d Pulled Pork Sliders

What You Need

5 lbs. pork butt

12 slider buns (brioche or potato)

4–6 cups chicken stock

Pork Butt Rub

1 cup Jägermeister + 2 cups olive oil

2 tbsp. smoked paprika

2 tbsp. cumin

2 tbsp. celery salt

1 tbsp. chili flake

4 tbsp. light brown sugar

3 tbsp. salt

2 tbsp. paprika

BBQ Sauce

32 oz. ketchup

2 tbsp. olive oil

1 tbsp. brown sugar

1/4 cup honey

1 cup Jägermeister

1/2 cup molasses

1/4 cup Worcestershire sauce

1/4 cup Dijon mustard

1/4 cup cider vinegar

1/3 cup coffee

1 tsp. coffee grinds

1/2 cup red onions, sliced

1 chipotle pepper

1 tsp. adobo sauce (can of chipotles, use sauce they are packed in)

Jicama Avocado Slaw

1/2 cup jicama, julienned

1/2 cup carrots, julienned

1/2 cup red pepper, julienned

1/2 cup yellow pepper, julienned

1 tbsp. scallions, chopped

2 tbsp. cilantro, chopped

2 cups  avocado, mashed

1/4 cup lime juice

Pulled-Pork-Sliders

How to Make It

1. In a large mixing bowl combine all of the dry rub ingredients and mix well. Score the pork butt. In a separate bowl, pour the olive oil/Jägermeister mix over the butt and rub it to coat. Add the entire dry rub and rub aggressively.Refrigerate covered overnight.

2. For the bbq sauce: Sauté the onions in olive oil until translucent. Add the honey and the brown sugar. Allow the honey, brown sugar and onions to come to a boil and simmer for about 15 minutes. Turn off the heat and add the Jägermeister, ketchup, molasses, Worcestershire sauce, Dijon mustard and cider vinegar. Stir well and bring to a boil. Reduce to a simmer and allow to cook for 2 hours. Add coffee and coffee grinds. Simmer for 4 hours, stirring continuously. Add the chipotle and the adobo sauce. In a blender, blend the sauce and season with salt and pepper. Strain through a china cap and allow to cool.

3. For the jicama slaw: Use the lime juice to first preserve the color of the avocado. Then, combine of all of the ingredients in a large mixing bowl. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

4. Preheat the oven to 300 degrees and heat grill to high. Char the pork on the grill on both sides. Then, slather the pork in 2 cups of the bbq sauce and place in a deep half-hotel pan. Fill the hotel pan with chicken stock until the butt is mostly covered. Bring the liquid to a simmer on the stove-top over medium/high heat. Cover with parchment paper and tinfoil and finish cooking in the oven for 2.5–3 hours or until the pork meat can be loosened with a gentle tug of a fork.

5. Allow thepork to cool in the braising liquid. Pull the pork and place into a separate bowl. Mix with the remaining bbq sauce until the pork is moist and saturated.

6. Portion approximately 4 ounces of pulled pork for each slider bun and top with the jicama slaw.

Humans Can Use Smell to Detect Levels of Dietary Fat

Jan. 22, 2014 — New research from the Monell Center reveals humans can use the sense of smell to detect dietary fat in food. As food smell almost always is detected before taste, the findings identify one of the first sensory qualities that signals whether a food contains fat. Innovative methods using odor to make low-fat foods more palatable could someday aid public health efforts to reduce dietary fat intake.

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"The human sense of smell is far better at guiding us through our everyday lives than we give it credit for," said senior author Johan Lundström, PhD, a cognitive neuroscientist at Monell. "That we have the ability to detect and discriminate minute differences in the fat content of our food suggests that this ability must have had considerable evolutionary importance."

As the most calorically dense nutrient, fat has been a desired energy source across much of human evolution. As such, it would have been advantageous to be able to detect sources of fat in food, just as sweet taste is thought to signal a source of carbohydrate energy.

Although scientists know that humans use sensory cues to detect fat, it still remains unclear which sensory systems contribute to this ability. The Monell researchers reasoned that fat detection via smell would have the advantage of identifying food sources from a distance.

While previous research had determined that humans could use the sense of smell to detect high levels of pure fat in the form of fatty acids, it was not known whether it was possible to detect fat in a more realistic setting, such as food.

In the current study, reported in the open access journal PLOS ONE, the researchers asked whether people could detect and differentiate the amount of fat in a commonly consumed food product, milk.

To do this, they asked healthy subjects to smell milk containing an amount of fat that might be encountered in a typical milk product: either 0.125 percent, 1.4 percent or 2.7 percent fat.

The milk samples were presented to blindfolded subjects in three vials. Two of the vials contained milk with the same percent of fat, while the third contained milk with a different fat concentration. The subjects' task was to smell the three vials and identify which of the samples was different.

The same experiment was conducted three times using different sets of subjects. The first used healthy normal-weight people from the Philadelphia area. The second experiment repeated the first study in a different cultural setting, the Wageningen area of the Netherlands. The third study, also conducted in Philadelphia, examined olfactory fat detection both in normal-weight and overweight subjects.

In all three experiments, participants could use the sense of smell to discriminate different levels of fat in the milk. This ability did not differ in the two cultures tested, even though people in the Netherlands on average consume more milk on a daily basis than do Americans. There also was no relation between weight status and the ability to discriminate fat.

"We now need to identify the odor molecules that allow people to detect and differentiate differentiate levels of fat. Fat molecules typically are not airborne, meaning that they are unlikely to be sensed by sniffing food samples," said lead author Sanne Boesveldt, PhD, a sensory neuroscientist. "We will need sophisticated chemical analyses to sniff out the signal."

What is Yuengling’s Ice Cream and Why Everyone is Excited It’s Back /McDonald’s New Zealand Intrigues with 4-in-1 Stackable Packaging

Established in 1829, D.G. Yuengling & Son is the oldest brewing company still operating in the United States. During the prohibition, many brewers were forced to turn to other markets in order to stay in business. Looking to take on the ice cream industry, Yuengling’s survived by selling “near bears” with a 0.5% alcohol content, opening dance halls in Philadelphia and New York City, and (most deliciously) creating ice cream.

After the 18th Amendment was repealed in 1933, the beloved ice cream was later discontinued. Now, nearly three decades later, Yuengling’s ice cream is set to hit shelves in a few short weeks. The flavors will include Black &  Tan (sadly sans buzz), chocolate fudge, and root beer float, among several others. At the moment, the new frozen treats will be available in select locations on the East Coast.

Nothing like sticking it to the man with a pint full of creamy ice cream.

Remember how KFC was trying to change the world by introducing their cup holder-fitted Go-Cups? Well, McDonald’s New Zealand just trumped that on 4 different levels.

The chain posted the above photo to their Facebook page, posing the question, “McGenius?” The curious prototype is a juxtaposition of a warm hamburger stacked on top of a cold drink, which is further stacked with a fry compartment that also doubles as a condiment container. While this ambitious packaging aims to be as clever as it is functional, it falls short in the latter department.

Stacking a hot sandwich on top of a cold drink creates an enviroment prone to condensation, melting ice, and undesirable leakage, the Consumerist critiques. As for the top-heavy fry and condiment layer, it makes for very precarious attachment that would topple like a pile of Jenga blocks if jostled.

Alas! Perhaps we’re just being Debbie downers and the possibility of being able to nibble on your burger and fries while sipping on soda at the same damn time is simply too glorious for us to digest at the moment. Perhaps.