Food

AP: By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 6:14 p.m. ET FONTANA, Calif. (AP) — A hunger for carnitas nearly led to some carnage after a Fontana man was robbed of a bag of tacos at gunpoint. Police Sergeant Jeff Decker said the 35-year-old victim had just bought about $20 in tacos from a street-corner stand Sunday night and was bicycling home when the suspect confronted him and said ”Give me your tacos.” Decker said the suspect grabbed the bag of…

Sarmad Ali writes: Throughout my entire year at Columbia, I was scared of almost all other ethnic food, especially sushi, which I found weird and repulsive. “Eating raw fish?” I would say to a friend in disgust. Just before graduation, a close friend from California said he would like to have me try sushi with him before he went back home. Not wanting to disappoint him, I went with him to a sushi place. He ordered for both of us…

Taco trucks are once again under threat, this time in Tulare County. This smells of the saga down in Salinas. The Fresno Bee: By Erik Lacayo / The Fresno Bee 12/08/07 22:21:02 TIPTON — Taco trucks across Tulare County could be driven out of business, some vendors fear, because of a proposed ordinance that would regulate where they can sell food. The Tulare County Board of Supervisors is expected to vote Tuesday on the new rules for mobile food vendors…

Wired News publishes CQ’s insistence that their reporting on this falafel fiasco was right all along. Like you, we take the issues of national security and civil liberties very seriously, which is why Jeff Stein thought it important to write about the domain management program. His sources described to him the intelligence-gathering program that involved the sales of Middle Eastern food in some detail, and we had no reason to believe that those sources inaccurately portrayed it when the column…

The FBI denies all knowledge of the falafel story: Having never heard of this, I spoke to the counterterrorism managers, who in the story were identified as having hatched the plan, as well as everyone else who would have had any knowledge of it. Nobody did. At one point in the story, writer Jeff Stein opines “as ridiculous as it sounds,” in reference to the alleged food monitoring plan, which reportedly was described to Mr. Stein by “well-informed sources.” In…

This photo captures the perfect transitory nature of taco trucks in the night. [via Houstonist]

So on Wednesday, when I drove from Oakland to Santa Monica — a drive that I’ve made since I was a kid easily over 100 times — I decided to spice things up a little bit. I-5, as most people know, is California’s most boring section of highway, and it serves exactly one purpose: getting people from the north to the south and vice versa as fast as possible. However, some research on Chowhound turned up the presence of a…

CQ: Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists. The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area. The brainchild of top FBI counterterrorism officials Phil Mudd…

I made this squash soup on Sunday night, except with a few modifications: I replaced chorizo with whiskey fennel chicken sausage from Ver Brugge. I replaced cayenne sauce with Tapatio and tripled it, and added a few dashes of cayenne powder. I replaced oregano with basil and added kale. And, I didn’t bother with the croutons. It was probably the best soup I’ve ever made.