Sliders inside a gorgonzola bacon cornbread muffin and slathered with chipotle mayo - what's not to love about this recipe? Perfect for pre-dinner nibbles, or serve three to a person for a complete meal. Fresh chives baked into the cornbread give it even more flavor and add color.

Get the full recipe here.

Photo by Mary Birtton Seanseney

Ellen Cushing of the East Bay Express offers an article on what happened to the health-food revolution. Organic food and school lunch reform had its roots in the Bay Area, but somewhere along the way the movement veered off in favor of ultimate comfort food and indulgences made with whole, local ingredients such as uber-cheesy mac 'n' cheese and artisan cheese slathered, local bacon and beef burgers.

Farm-to-table is all the rage - and we love it as much as anyone else - but sometimes we forget that what we see in restaurants is an all-too-perfect version of our food. Patrise Shuttleworth of the Houston Press shares her own farm-to-table personal narrative that reminds us of the less delightful side of farming.

Well okay, I understand the birds and the bees. A farm is a great life lesson in the real, uncensored birds and the bees. What no one tells you is that male goats emit a particularly foul odor that is very close to what goat cheese tastes like. It truly catches you by surprise the first time, and then it just becomes sickening. As a lover of goat cheese, I swore I would/could never eat it again.

Read the full story here.

Farm Power Northwest is building two new methane digesters in Tillamook, OR. Methane digesters are an expensive investment, but a win-win-win situation for all involved: they create methane gas to heat homes while keeping methane from releasing into the atmosphere and make manure more viable for farmers' fields. Instead of relying on farmers to invest, Farm Power Northwest will build and maintain the methane digesters and pool local farmers' cow waste.

“It’s like our own little natural gas well except we’re not taking it out of the ground,” said Daryl Maas, a co-founder of Farm Power Northwest. “We’re harvesting it from manure.”

Read the full story here.

Photo by Razvan Antonescu

Cocoa, a female goat from New Jersey, has been frequently spotted around Manhattan with her owner. She was seen a few weeks ago eating pizza, and has since then been spotted eating gelato and strolling (leash-less!) in Central Park. There's some concern that perhaps Cocoa's getting a little too much attention:

Cocoa now has a Twitter feed. "1 week ago I was just another jersey girl crazy for a good slice...it's all happening so fast...the book deal, the interviews…," @Pizza_Goat writes. This is your moment, Cocoa. Try not to get overwhelmed.

Read the full article and see "citizen" paparazzi photos here.

Doug Speirs at Winnipeg Free Press has brought a very important news item to our attention: April is National Grilled Month. (For Americans and Canadians, apparently.) Speirs has compiled a thoughtful column filled with more grilled cheese stats than you'd ever need to know. We're already warming up the frying pan even though there are a few more days left in March...

After spending several arduous minutes conducting research on the Internet, it has become obvious we are not the only ones for whom the grilled cheese sandwich -- perhaps with a steaming bowl of fresh tomato soup -- borders on a religious obsession.

Read the column here.

Five men and their sidekick, a goat named Wrigley, are marching their way across the country in hopes of breaking the Cubs curse. The Chicago based baseball team hasn't won the World Series since 1908. It's not entirely clear how this pilgrimage will help the Cubs win the World Series, but the five men are also walking for a good cause; they're raising money in support of cancer research. Don't worry - Wrigley the goat gets to come along in a bike stroller rather than walking the whole way!

Matt Gregory, 32, brought up the idea to the other four guys when they were all working at the same Denali Park camp in Alaska last summer. Gregory already completed two 5,000 mile walks. He said all the guys were Chicago Cubs fans, so they went for it. But to complete their ensemble of a Cubs-curse march, they needed a goat. So they went to Craigslist and found a goat for $60. Appropriately, they named him Wrigley.

Goat Lady Dairy in North Carolina recently put out this handy cheesemaking video for anyone interested in how cheese is made:

In only 15 minutes Steve Tate and the staff at Goat Lady Dairy in the North Carolina Piedmont explain the basic steps of cheese making and show how they do it at their family farm.

Cheese Making: At Goat Lady Dairy from 7 Finger media on Vimeo.

Click here to see the video

It seems incredible, but a recent genetic study has shown that all modern cows are descended from a single herd of ox that lived 10,500 years ago - talk about the Adam and Eve of cows! Gizmodo has the story

A team of geneticists from the National Museum of Natural History in France, the University of Mainz in Germany, and UCL in the UK excavated the bones of domestic cattle on archaeological sites in Iran, and then compared those to modern cows. They looked at how differences in DNA sequences could have arisen under different population history scenarios, modeled in computer simulations.

Kirstin Jackson has made the discovery that the word "stinky" can be applied to cheeses she would never deem such. Now she's blogging about what stinky is, and the best cheeses to match your level of stink:

The first time I heard someone call Comté “stinky,” my jaw dropped. Comté, a semi-hard lightly washed rind from France’s jura region, is a sultry, sweet wheel with flavors of butter, toasted walnuts, caramel, and from time to time, notes of caramel or beef. I would have sooner called a rose stinky than Comté. It wasn’t until that French friend told me that on one of the many gastronomic field trips that French children take during elementary school, she fainted in a Comté cave because the scent was so fierce, that I really thought about the term stinky.

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