These little pumpkin and goat cheese pastries look pretty ambitious, but Arctic Garden Studio claims they're not difficult. Plus, they're delicious, so we should all give them a go:

Via the Burlington Free Press: an inmate working at the Vermont Correctional Industries Print Shop has been up to some barnyard mischief, concealing the silhouette of a pig inside a logo applied to some 30-odd police cruisers.

Relevant to culture readers, the porcine epithet was steganographically inserted into in the spots of a treacherous dairy cow. Response from authorities has been remarkably sanguine:

“This is not as offensive as it would have been years ago. We can see the humor,” said Public Safety Commissioner Keith Flynn, a former state trooper and state prosecutor who was named commissioner a year ago. “If the person had used some of that creativeness, he or she would not have ended up inside.”

Naturally Ella was having a poetic day when she posted this twice baked butternut squash recipe, but we don't hold it against here. Click below to view the full recipe:

Instead of an elaborate post, I leave you with a haiku:

Oh Butternut Squash

You are so good and tasty

Get in my belly

Ingredients:
1 large butternut squash
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 medium shallots
1/2 cup quinoa
1 cup water
1/2 cup gorgonzola cheese, plus extra for topping
pinch of salt

Read the recipe here

In preparation for this weekend's football-centric festivities, Bill Chappell at NPR has some beer and cheese pairing advice:

Nothing classes up a party — even one that's focused on watching football on TV — like good cheese.

And as I learned recently, nothing tastes better with cheese than beer. That's the word from Garrett Oliver, author of The Brewmaster's Table, an influential book about how to make beer-food relationships work.

When I called Oliver to ask which cheeses and beers are simpatico, he was traveling around to support his more recent work: the encyclopedic Oxford Companion to Beer, which he edited. In what may be the most enviable book tour I've ever heard of, Oliver hosts "tasting dinners" for audiences at craft breweries and restaurants around the U.S.

The National Restaurant Association is predicting great things for the American restaurant business this year, and unbelievable as it may seem, we're confident that Americans are finally putting good food at the top of their priority list! The LA Times has the story:

If the National Restaurant Assn. is right, eateries across the country will end this year with record high sales.

The trade group is expecting $632 billion in revenue for the industry – a 3.5% increase over 2011. The still-shaky economy, it seems, won’t be getting too much in the way.

Restaurants with table service will haul in an estimated $201 billion, while fast-food joints such as McDonald’s are expected to end up with $174 billion in revenue for the year. Food-service options at convenience stores and grocery stores are also expected to grow.

Via metro.co.uk, the story of John Sears, a retired London engineer, and his persistent failure to clean out his icebox. To wit:

"The cheese was a Christmas present I was given years ago but I missed the use-by date and left it in the fridge. I was making a cheese sauce and didn’t have enough strong cheese so I dug it out. When I opened it I thought it would be all shrivelled up but it was perfect, a very good mature cheese."

[cheesemakers] Ford Farm had never heard of one of its cheeses lasting for so long, so the company collected the rest from Mr Sears to conduct tests on it in exchange of a hamper of cheeses.

If your suffering from a cuteness deficit in your life, then we've found a temporary solution! It's not you, it's brie just posted a roundup of favorite baby animals photos. Mind you these are all dairy animals, which makes it even better:

I woke up inspired this morning to share some favorite photos from dairy farms I visited while traveling for the book. But the photos aren’t of cheese. While taking pictures of wheel after wheel of fermented milk is gratifying, one just doesn’t experience the same excitement level they do when taking pictures of dairy animals. Cheese is alive, ever-changing, sure, but it always holds still. It’s cute, but not baby lamb adorable. Then again, it’s a heck of a lot easier to get it to pose for the camera.

Jeanne Carpenter at
Cheese Underground is championing a new cheese shop, and it's spunky future owner:

Trying hard not to yawn, and instead thinking this was my requisite "call of the week" from a crazy person with a crazy idea who wanted me to magically help them achieve their dream, I politely listened. This caller did seem a little more enthusiastic than the usual suspects, and she did actually have a business plan and numbers to back up her dream.

Then she called me again. And again. And again. And by the fourth phone call, I really started to like Sarah Kowal. Because really, how many people are passionate enough to start a specialty food shop and cafe in a town of 15,000 people, and where winter is the predominant season?

Adam Moscowitz of Larkin Cold Storage has more talents than first meet the eye, one of them being musical. Check out this Cheese's Brothers music video and you'll see what I mean:

Aidan Gardiner of The New York Times has the story on the FDA's effort to shut down the Mexicali Cheese Corporation in Queens, New York, after the company's repeated failure to clean up their operation:

The Food and Drug Administration is trying to shutter permanently a cheese factory in Queens whose owners failed to clean up the plant after a potentially deadly bacteria was discovered on more than one occasion, according to the government.

This week, the agency filed suit in Federal District Court in Brooklyn to halt all dairy production at the company, Mexicali Cheese Corporation in Woodhaven, due to what it called a history of unsanitary conditions and its managers’ refusal to change their practices.