Looking Dinner in the Eye

Cool:

"LAST Friday, in front of 4 million television viewers and a studio audience, the chef Jamie Oliver killed a chicken. Having recently obtained a United Kingdom slaughterman’s license, Mr. Oliver staged a “gala dinner,” in fact a kind of avian snuff film, to awaken British consumers to the high costs of cheap chicken.

“A chicken is a living thing, an animal with a life cycle, and we shouldn’t expect it will cost less than a pint of beer in a pub,” he said Monday in an interview."

Now I am certainly not a big PETA fan - I am the grandson of a classic Jewish furrier, a dyed-in-the-wool omnivore, and refuse to own a car without leather seats. But I do think that this new trend of being more aware of where your food actually comes from is, on balance, a good thing. The whole "garbage in, garbage out" thing is true for more than just our computers...
Recommended reading - The River Cottage Meat Book.

Bucatini all’amatriciana, an all-time favorite

I first learned of this dish watching Mario Batali make it on The Food Network. He described it as "The essence of pure porkness"; and it was the first thing I ordered when I went to Babbo. Now I'm a fan, and have gone to the trouble of making it myself (finding the guanciale is the hard part, but a trip to Arthur Avenue in the Bronx is the cure); and I order it whenever I see it on a menu.

If you are a fan of real Italian food then you have to be a bit partial to swine and it's derivatives. Highly recommended....