| It works better than looking up a dozen cookbooks, and depending on what you want, you could either compare and contrast over a hundred ways to cook paneer-matar, or focus on the three or four really excellent recipes for rose petal soup. |
| If you're willing to broaden your horizons beyond recipes, though, some of the quieter and less flamboyant sites online have a lot to offer the open-minded foodie. |
| Start by touring Weird Food, which offers helpful and often terrifyingly exact descriptions of unusual foods: "When a mountain potato is grated, it secretes a translucent slime that is the exact consistency of mucus, yet is totally without flavor." |
| It's full of useful information: the green abdomen of Australian ants tastes exactly like lemon sherbet, where to get alligator on a stick, how to fatten dormice for a stew, and how to make rootworm beetle dip. |
| Weird Food: One man's meat is another man's unstoppable retching fit: http://www.weird-food.com/ |
| Far more palatable "" and useful, given how seldom any of us will need to know how to cook witchety grubs "" is the nascent Africa Cookbook Project, started by the good souls at Betumi.com. |
| They're collecting old African cookbooks, especially those written by locals rather than expatriates or foreigners, in an attempt to preserve some of the classic recipes of the past. You can browse cookbook covers at the Flickr page, or keep checking on the blog to see what's come in. |
| Current titles include the usual collections of recipes from Zanzibar, Tanzania, Ghana and other places "" some of these cookbooks have been on the hard-to-find list for years "" but also have such gems as Cassava Song & Rice Song, the complete guide to cooking with cowpeas, and guides to traditional herbs. |
| It would be wonderful if someone started a similar project in India, but until then, stick with Betumi's recipes for kelewele ""fried plaintains coated with salt, ginger, onion, aniseed, cloves and dried red pepper "" and other such gems. |
| http://www.flickr.com/photos/91371400@N00/610201333/ http://www.betumi.com/blog.html |
| One of the strangest, most pointless but oddly compelling sites on the web is the utterly whimsical Online Museum of Shopping Lists. It's hosted at an annoying page with far too many pop-ups, and most of the shopping lists are from Sheffield, England, but it's an interesting if bizarre idea. |
| Online Museum of Shopping Lists: http://shoppinglists.bravepages.com/archive.htm |
| If that doesn't do anything for you, take a look at one of the more venerable sites on the net "" a whimsical site devoted to "Superhero Food". The comics fan who put this up wasn't interested in figuring out what Superman, Batman and company have for breakfast "" instead, he set his sights on collecting the products endorsed by superheroes over the decades. |
| Some of the exhibits are truly bizarre, like the Incredible Hulk BellyWasher Juice Drink ("Green Smash" flavour), or the Superman Pasteurized Process Imitation Cheese Spread from 1967, which features a caped wonderboy on the label with a manic cow beaming at his leggings. |
| Judging by his lists, superheroes survive on a diet of cereal, chips, candy, colas and awesome quantities of vitamins "" perhaps now we know why they put their underpants on over their tights, it's just the effect of the junk food on their brains. http://www.geocities.com/superherofood/ |
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