Slashfood

While you're whiling away the afternoon at Uncle Joe's barbecue on July 4th, we won't blame you if your mind drifts to more exciting places. Life & Style Weekly and Slashfood.com want to know:

What happens when the country's most prominent cheesemongers come together to celebrate cheese? Imagine cheese paradise – a room with a long rectangular table covered by tantalizing geometric patterns of cheeses ranging from dried-fruit-covered German Limburger to Oregon's Caveman Blue, meringues topped with creamy Strathdon Blue and juicy sweet raspberries, the full range of Tom Cat Bakery breads, and a selection of refreshments from Butternuts Beer and Ale.

That's exactly what the scene was like this past Saturday at the first ever Cheesemonger Invitational. Filling up a vast food warehouse in the Long Island City neighborhood in Queens, N.Y., the event celebrated the country's best cheesemongers, from Anthea Stolz at San Francisco's Bi-Rite Market to Matthew Rubiner at Great Barrington's Rubiners Cheesemongers & Grocers. In town to attend the Fancy Food Show, pretty much anybody else in the food business who's interested in or even remotely involved in cheese was also in attendance.

A couple nights ago, in the 90-degree summer heat, I tried making whipped cream. It's a neat trick: pour heavy cream into a mason jar, cap, shake, voila! But beware of shaking the cream too vigorously, thus creating butter. As I did. I'm sure Deschutes' president Gary Fish can feel some empathy.

Last weekend, Bend, Oregon's Deschutes Brewery was ready to release its Reserve Series Black Butte XXII, a supercharged porter brewed with cocoa nibs, then partly aged in bourbon barrels. It's one of Deschutes' crown jewels. That's why it's such a shame that it's mostly going down the drain.

According to Fish, the chocolate used in this year's recipe coagulated in the dark beer, forming a buttery top layer. Uh, yum? "While the beer tastes perfectly fine, the visual in the bottle is not up to our long-held commitment to quality and positive customer experience," Fish said in a statement.

For you eaters who avoid farm-raised salmon and instead seek out wild-caught varieties, your job just got a little more complicated.

According to The Oregonian, the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch program has assigned a red "avoid" recommendation to wild-caught California and Oregon salmon, based on continued low levels of salmon returning to the Sacramento River. While that advice may seem clear cut, the change in recommendations can be confusing.

The avoid rating for Oregon salmon applies only to fish caught south of Cape Falcon. It does not apply to the entire state of Oregon. That's because there are two different salmon stocks being fished on the Pacific coast -- those that spawn in the Sacramento River, where stock levels have been troubled in recent years; and salmon fished from the Columbia River, thought to have moderately healthy population levels.

There's a wine book for lots of food-pairing needs -- but what about the foods that don't fall into specific categories like desserts, cheeses, meats or fish? There are a lot of what we like to call "in between" snacks that deserve a wine marriage too. Jeanette Hurt and Jaclyn Stuart understand that -- and it's what motivated them to co-author "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Wine and Food Pairing" (Alpha Books, $16.95). It published on June 1. its pocket size is perfect for toting along on a summer road trip.

We got a hold of Stuart, director of wine education at Third Coast Wine Werks and a certified Master sommelier, and picked her brain for some food and wine pairing ideas not on most wine critics' radars.

Hurt is a widely published freelance writer (about all things food and wine) and a book author. Her other books include The Cheeses of California, The Cheeses of Wisconsin, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Cheeses of the World and The Complete Idiot's Guide to Tapas.

Stuart's favorite pairings after the jump...

Two non-profit organizations are the recipients of the 2010 World Food Prize, an award recognizing the achievements of people who have "advanced human development by improving the quality, quantity or availability of food in the world," VOA News reported.

Jo Luck of Heifer International and Dr. David Beckmann of Bread for the World are the 2010 recipients. They will split the $250,000 prize. It's the first time the award has been given to non-governmental organizations.

Heifer International donates livestock -- from honeybees to cattle -- to poor farmers in 50 countries, helping them become self-sustaining.

Bread for the World is a grassroots organization that attempts to influence food policy through letter writing campaigns and political advocacy.

Bright-red soda, rainbow-hued kid's cereal, electric-yellow popsicles...most of us have eaten them. But unlike the public health uproar over salt and trans fats, there hasn't been much said about the dangers of food dyes. Fed up with consumer apathy, The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) is calling for a complete government ban of food dyes. The advocacy group says the three most widely used dyes -- Red 40, Yellow 5, and Yellow 6 -- contain cancer-causing substances. Another dye, Red 3, has actually been identified as a carcinogen by the FDA, but you can still find it on supermarket shelves.

"These synthetic chemicals do absolutely nothing to improve the nutritional quality or safety of foods," says Michael F. Jacobson, executive director of the nonprofit group. "[They] trigger behavior problems in children and, possibly, cancer in anybody."

Think you're immune to the problem because you don't gobble Fruit Loops in the morning? Think again. The dyes are in a staggering array of foods, from salad dressing to matzo balls. In fact, manufacturers put about 15 million pounds of eight synthetic dyes into the food supply each year, according to CSPI. Even scarier? Per capita consumption of dyes has risen five-fold since 1955. A lot of it has to do with the kinds of foods now marketed to children. The wilder the color, the more cash a product often brings in.

There's no doubt that bacon has become one of the trendiest food items in the last few years. Many of us have already had bacon in our brownies. Some of us have even had bacon in our bourbon in the form of Don Lee's Bacon Infused Old Fashioned (a.k.a. the Benton's Old Fashioned, named after the smokey bacon brand used) at New York's PDT bar.

You can infuse your own vodka or bourbon with bacon at home by adding an ounce of cooled smoked bacon grease to 750ml of spirit. I've seen people infuse their spirit from four hours to two weeks. After the infusion process, freeze the spirit to solidify the fat for at least a couple of hours, and strain with as fine a strainer as you can -- I use a micron filter, the kind used in fish tanks -- to remove any oily residue.

If you don't want to go through all that trouble, a commercial product was introduced on the market about a year ago called Bakon, a bacon flavored vodka from Black Rock Spirits in Seattle, Washington, that costs about $30.

If bacon isn't your thing, Alaska Distillery has just introduced its new Smoked Salmon Flavored Vodka. The distillery is located in the town of Wasilla, the home of Sarah Palin. Outside of Alaska, the first state to get it is Texas, but the distillers hope their vodka makes a show in California and Washington state soon.