Also: It's Mark Mitchell sends an update on the pork shoulder roast he's making right now. Take it away, time-lapse photography:

"Dry rubbed with brown sugar, paprika, garlic, and love, then refrigerated overnight."

"Seared and smelling like my favorite Chinese barbecue, the Kau Kau. That's encouraging." [Eds. note: Kau Kau: hell yes.]

"I'm gonna give it another 3 hours while the yams and onions get sweet and soft, I hope."

Slog HUNGRY!!!

(Once or twice a week, I take a new book with me to lunch and give it a half an hour or so to grab my attention. Lunch Date is my judgment on that speed-dating experience.)

Who's your date today? The Lagoon, by Lilli Carré.

Where'd you go? Pizza Fusion, across the street from La Spiga.

What'd you eat? Personal meat pizza ($7.95).

How was the food? It was fine, thin-crust pizza, although the sauce and cheese could both use a little more pep. The cheese was a little on the bland side and the sauce, although peppery, required a whole lot of garlic salt to make the pizza memorable. As a side note, I know I can be an idiot sometimes, but it honestly didn't occur to me until I looked it up just now that Pizza Fusion is a coast-to-coast franchised restaurant. When I thought it was just a start-up, locally-owned restaurant, the slogan ("Saving the World...One Pizza At a Time") seemed annoying, but Seattle-earnest and tolerable. Now that I know they have branches in Kansas, it's flat-out obnoxious. I feel vaguely manipulated, although I have nobody to blame but myself.

What does your date say about itself? "Each member of a family reacts differently to the seductive siren song that can be heard down by the water after dark in Lilli Carré's haunting and lyrical debut graphic novel. Rhythms—Grandpa's taps, the ticking of a metronome—are punctuated by silences in this "sound"-driven story. Readers are invited to imagine an enigmatic creature's haunting, ever-shifting tune as it reverberates through weedy waters, eventually escaping the lagoon to waft through the windows at night..."

Is there a representative quote?

Will you two end up in bed together? Well, we would've, except for I read the whole thing at lunch, twice. It's a really nice story, about a lagoon monster and his relationship with a family. The art, to me, resembles Richard Sala and Charles Burns making sweet, sweet love. I reviewed Carré's short work in the Best American Comics 2008 here, and I was charmed but not blown away. As a first long-form work, though, this is phenomenal.

Get your very own fetus cookie cutter here.

"I was just looking for educational/less commercial gifts for my kid and felt like I was assaulted by this thing," writes JL. The Banana Bunker is "For for Kids," according to MOMA's website, and was designed to "protect delicate fruit." Says JL: "I find it freaky and weird that MOMA sells these dildo-shaped things and for some reason felt that I should let you know about it."

I don't share JL's concerns. Phallic objects assault our children pretty much everywhere they go—tree trunks! tall buildings! parking meters! The innocent banana itself, once liberated from its bunker, is itself dildo-shaped. And the banana, as anyone that's ever put one in a gym bag and them dumped books and a computer on top of it can attest, is a delicate fruit. So I don't look at the "Banana Bunker" and see a dildo. But I have to admit that it reminded me of another kind of banana bunker:

That's a CB 6000, a "male chastity device." Straight guys blog about their experiences wearing CB 6000s here and here.

Because nothing's more natural than an African lion munching on a defrosted turkey from Albertson's.

WHEN: Saturday, November 22, 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. Jaguar, 10:00 a.m. Snow leopard, 10:00 a.m. Golden lion tamarin monkeys, 11:00 a.m. Arctic foxes, 11:30 a.m. Piranhas, 11:30 a.m. Wolves, 1:15 p.m. Pigs, 1:30 p.m. Komodo dragons, 2:00 p.m. Grizzly bears, 2:00 p.m. Lemurs, 2:00 p.m. Tiger, 2:00 p.m.

Jaguar, sure. Snow leopard, got it. Wolves, duuuh. But piranhas? Lemurs? Golden lion tamarin fucking monkeys? These are not exactly turkeys' natural foes. Do monkeys even like turkey?

Okay, okay. Point taken, you goddamn monkey.

I promise you, it looks much better than it tastes. The lovely, deep ruby color draws you in. You think "Something that pretty must be tasty, right?" Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. The label is as conflicted as I am about the product. It says it's made of 100% natural flavors, yet it also claims to "contain no juice." So the 100% natural flavor isn't the flavor of pomegranate juice? What is it the flavor of? Red isn't a natural flavor, but it sorta tastes like red. It doesn't taste like natural pomegranate, that's for sure.

You confuse me, Pomegranate 7-Up. Happy Holidays to you too. Bah, humbug.

Every QFC in Seattle has been inexplicably blessed with a surplus of pork shoulder roasts, which they're pretty much giving away at 99 cents a pound. I've got about 5 pounds of it sitting in my fridge right now. But I've never cooked such a large cut of meat before. Right now, I'm thinking about doing this. Sloggers, what do you think? Should I make Cuban sandwiches? Roast it whole? Turn it into pork chili? Repent and become a vegetarian? Let me know in the comments.

Photo by Rockies, licensed by Creative Commons.

A question, to which I suspect many Slog readers are searching for an answer:

Where's the best place in Seattle to get a bloody mary with breakfast on a Tuesday?

It shouldn't be so difficult to answer this one, but seemingly it is.

Thank you.

Well, Brad, here is a piece that the lovely Marti Jonjak wrote on the topic of bloody marys (or would that be bloodies mary?); however, I don't believe any of these places are open before 11 a.m. on Tuesday. Two places spring to mind that are: the Mecca and Cafe Presse.

First, sorry for posting beef pics, vegetarians. Second, I have real doubts about the curative properties of mass-produced beef, as I'm sure the vegetarians agree. And third, what an unfortunate use of the word “tender.” But I did my part--I made chili for the cure.

Two large Japanese food manufacturers have found insecticide in their instant noodles, triggering a food scare.

First, Nissin - which invented the instant noodle - recalled 500,000 pots after a woman became ill. She had eaten from a cup containing insect repellent.

Now another Japanese food giant, Myojo, says it too has found the same substance in two of its own pots.

That's bad timing—a ramen panic just as global markets are "diving," "plummeting," and having a "meltdown."

Instant ramen was invented for economic depressions—during the food shortages after WWII, Nissin founder Momofuku Ando saw people lining up to buy bowls of soup from black-market street stalls. And voilà. He became a millionaire and dead last year of a heart attack at the age of 96. When I lived in Japan, my neighbors told me not to eat instant ramen because the flavor packet was poison that would kill all my sperm. It's population control, they said, to get rid of the poor people.

Ramen became popular in the west during England's economic depression in the 1970s. (In Mexico, they combine the poverty food from both hemispheres by cooking instant-ramen noodles in the orange glop you get in instant mac 'n' cheese.)

The first time I ever saw ramen was at my elementary school in a New Orleans. Justin Rambo—a tough-ass Cajun kid whose dad once came to class to give him a whupping after the teacher called to say he'd been acting up—would step on the plastic package to break up the noodles, then open it and pour in the flavor pack, then eat the little chunks. Soon, all the kids were eating ramen during recess.

^{From Burning Beast: Matt Dillon (of Sitka and Spruce/The Corson Building) sewed two small goats into conjoined twins and stuffed the cavity with more meat.}

P.S. Feeling poor? Brasa's happy hour rules.

The Virginia Inn got a new chef—Josh Green, the executive chef from Ponti—and merely emailed about it. The last time I ate at Ponti, it was not very good; however, Ponti's lounge menu, which is more like what the V.I. serves, has always been fine. And the last time I ate at the V.I., it was pretty terrible.

This ought to work out well on both counts.

to find this:

WTF, Kit-Kat!? You are a chocolate candy bar. Chocolate is not orange. Let me repeat: CHOCOLATE IS NOT ORANGE. I don't expect my mass-produced supermarket candy bars to be crafted by monks from the finest quality organic ingredients (if you're going to make a 5-cent peanut butter cup, you're going to have some wax shavings and asbestos in there), but come on. At least pretend like you are made of food.

CANLIS RESTAURANT TO HOLD PRESS CONFERENCE

SEATTLE – Oct. 22, 2008 – In its 58-year Seattle history, Canlis Restaurant has been no stranger to being credited with “firsts”: team-style service, designing an open kitchen, pioneering what has become Northwest cuisine. Now, in a bold statement about how much the restaurant has evolved and its envisioned future, the Canlis family is holding its first-ever press conference to share momentous news.

You are cordially invited to join brothers Mark and Brian Canlis for this event....

They offered to fetch me by car service (thanks, guys!), but I can't make it. But will there be a live webcast? Yes, indeed! Take it away, live webcast:

Free Webcam Chat at Ustream

UPDATE: Apparently they got a new chef, Jason Franey, the executive sous chef from Eleven Madison Park in New York (Frank Bruni on that place here). If only you could live webcast free champagne.

(This latest round of Things About Advertising That Can't Possibly Be True brought to you by Bread & Honey blog.)