Recently on [Serious Eats](http://www.seriouseats.com/):

A Dispatch from the Old School

> **Pancake parties:** This reminds one that last year pancake parties were all the go at the fashionable seaside places in France. At Étretat especially it became quite a mania. The pancake batter was brought on the beach ready mixed in a jar, and a small portable charcoal stove was erected in a sheltered corner against the rocky shore.

There Will Be Fish Blood

> “Hey Iris,” I called. She was in the living room watching TV. “I’m going to clean this fish. Want to help?”

> “No.”

> “There’ll be fish guts.”

> “I’ll pause!”

There’s chile that is spicy
There’s chili that is pork
There’s chilly that is cold
And chili that’s a fork.

–Iris

This week in [Gourmet](http://www.gourmet.com/):

[Three meatless tacos worth your time](http://www.gourmet.com/food/2008/03/veggietacos)

> Sure, textured vegetable protein is cheap (it’s a byproduct of soybean oil production) and the reconstituted soy flakes are filling. The texture is even reminiscent of ground beef, which is why it’s often used for vegetarian sloppy joes and other meat substitutes. Yes, TVP would make a perfect taco if it didn’t taste like reconstituted soy flakes.

I was making macaroni yesterday, and after the shells were boiling, I realized we were completely out of butter. “We have cream,” said Laurie. “You could put a little of that in instead.”

But I had another idea. “Are you whipping the cream?” asked Laurie when she heard the whir of the hand mixer.

“Not exactly.”

“Are you making butter?”

“Yes.” I’d never done it before. The cream turned into beautiful whipped cream, then grainy overwhipped cream, and then a yellowish sludge. It stayed in the sludge stage for several minutes, when suddenly the beaters began splattering me with whey. I strained off the whey and squeezed the butter in a paper towel.

The homemade butter is good, a little better than supermarket butter and certainly more expensive. But it saved our macaroni, and there’s a small log of it left for other experiments today. I might even run out of butter again in the future, on purpose.

Today in the Seattle Times:

With rice and all manner of toppings, donburi makes a treat of tradition

> Eager to know more about donburi on its home turf, I e-mailed Rob Ketcherside, a Microsoft employee who transferred from Redmond to Tokyo in 2006.

> “I’ve had donburi twice this week so far,” he wrote back. (It was Wednesday.)