Darcy, a stubborn dairy cow from Colorado, escaped from her pen last week and showed up at the local McDonald's, where she opted for the drive thru:

Williams-Sonoma, the brand known for fine cookware ware and specialty foods, recently launched a new product line called "Agrarian" for urban and backyard homesteaders. Are they simply jumping onto the DIY bandwagon or actually making sustainable living more accessible?

Six stores nationwide, including Palo Alto, also started carrying the products and resources for gardening, beekeeping, raising chickens, canning and more. The Post Street location in San Francisco stocks the DIY kits, so you can easily make your own cheese or kombucha. Some of the larger products, like the backyard chicken coop, cedar raised beds and copper-topped beehive, are only sold online.

Read the full story here.

Dr. Michael Catapano of Catapano Dairy Farm in Peconic, NY, left his day job as an emergency physician for a few years to help his wife build up their farm from 15 goats to 80. They now make goat cheese, yogurt, soap, skincare products, and fudge.

He and his wife, Karen, had spent time on farms as children and were attracted to a more rural life, although the challenge of doing so turned out to be significant. They had to learn from scratch how to manage the goats and turn their milk into something edible.

“We knew nothing,” Dr. Catapano said. “It was a lot of trial and error. I think we underestimated how much work it would take to get it to the point to where we wanted it to be.”

Read the full interview here.

Roxy Todd and Emily Newton are interviewing farmers and families living along US Route 219, a winding Appalachian highway that hugs the ridges of the most rural counties of West Virginia.

They are returning to towns first visited by the Federal Writer's project during the Great Depression, discovering communities largely unchanged, still without a traffic lights, but rich in storytellers. Gathered around kitchen tables, they found a rich history of dairy farming along Route 219:

Listen to radio stories crafted by Roxy and Emily, featuring:

Memories of dairy farming before refrigeration

Thickening Milk, a farmhouse treat

Ice cream kept cool by the chill of the creek

You may have heard that Pizza Hut has created a cheeseburger-pizza hybrid called the "Crown Crust Pizza," which is only being sold at franchises in the Middle East. While American foodies may be put off by the melding of these two dishes, NPR's food blog, The Salt, gets behind why it's more acceptable to a Middle Eastern audience.

Many foodies have decried it as a "culinary abomination," "a sign of the apocalypse," or proof that America is finally losing its monopoly on gluttony. A reviewer at Serious Eats, who tried the Crown Crust in Dubai, wrote: "There seems to be no rational explanation as to why this pizza was created."

Fuchsia Dunlop at The Financial Times has the story on an ongoing scientific project surrounding the relationship between metals and taste. The most recent culmination of the project was a seven course meal of delicately spiced Indian food served alongside spoons with different metal coatings at Quilon, the Michelin-starred restaurant in London. Materials scientists, culinary mavens, and psychologists thoughtfully sucked on their spoons throughout the meal. Suffice it to say, the results were fascinating, and may make you think twice before you set the table at your next dinner party
Read the article at ft.com

Photo by Jordi PayA

Cornell Food Science researchers have unveiled their newest creation, Big Red Cheddar, which will be sold at the college and incorporated in the menu at the school's dining facilities. This is Cornell's first original cheese, and there are big plans afoot for its future distribution and sale:

“Our target aging period is six months, so we had to wait it out, all the while flipping cheese every four days for even aging,” Ralyea said. “We looked at various bacterial cultures and their nuances: benefits, drawbacks, culture characteristics and how they react over time during aging.”

As to what is special about the new aging process, Ralyea called it “the ‘top secret’ secret behind Big Red Cheddar.”

In addition to creating the cheese itself, the team behind Big Red Cheddar has also begun creating business model for distributing the cheese. Chinavanichkit was responsible for developing the project’s business plan.

This easy but elegant salad has the ultimate balance of flavors: sweet honey-roasted pears, peppery arugula and nutty Comté, all tossed in a lively vinaigrette. An older Comté works best here, providing a delicious contrast to the aromatic pears.

Preheat oven to 400˚F. Line large baking sheet with parchment paper. Line rosemary sprigs on top of parchment.

I recently earned my PhD in Food Science & Technology from Cornell University, where my love for the science of cheese prompted me to help found Cornell's Cheese Club.

In January four fellow students and I (including two other Cheese Club founders) were invited to spend two weeks in Kenya working with Brown's Cheese, an artisan cheese company founded in the 1980s. We went as part of Cornell's SMART program, which partners teams of students with organizations and entrepreneurs in developing countries. Below, I share the story behind Brown's Cheese, its current trajectory in the hands of a new generation, and finally, our experience as student consultants, working with familiar food in an unfamiliar country.

The Beginning

Over 30 years ago, Sue and David Brown moved to the Eastern Highlands of Kenya to sell solar water heaters, but a scarcity of local cheese set them on a different course.

Yikes! Is this pizza ad warning us of something?

Posters to Reddit noticed the frightening death mask peering out from the slice's melting cheese. Notes one commenter, astutely:

"Ristorante Italia Pasta italiana Coincidence.[sic] I think not."

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Photo by Huffington Post