Click the images to find out more! HAPPY MOTHER's DAY to all the moms out there! And for all the kids- don't forget to call mom.
Tonight i went themed on our roundup for the week ~ top row, unusual frozen goods were trendy on TasteSpotting, from margarita popsicles and frozen eggs to Raw Banana Mango Malted Ice Cream with Agave Caramel... in the middle row, from NOTCOT.org had quite a nice selection of Architecture showing up this week... and finally, from NotCouture here is an assortment of bags, trunks, and 'waterproof backpack reviews'!
Top 25 from each site last week on the next page...
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Tags:
architecture
- fashion
- food
- roundup
Random spontaneous research of the morning - staring out the window at the finches that keep hopping along the sill and pecking at the window right in front of me, i started day dreaming about bird feeder designs, and as a result started hunting down unique bird feeders on NOTCOT.org - which naturally lead me to scouring the ends of the internet to see what else was out there. Here are 14 of the coolest things i found that don't meet your standard/gawdy options... also i'm kind of wondering whether a bird feeder could be a fun next project for NOTConcept?
p.s. like all roundups, click the images to find out more!
Tags:
animals
- bird feeders
- birds
- food
- nature
- NOTConcept
On a continued giddy morning, after a crazy long day running up and down norcal... while i avoided all things Web 2.0, i couldn't say no to playing with our Federated Media family at their party at the Web 2.0 Expo South Park Crawl... like all crazy parties, the open bar kept flowing, the people came and went, but we and the FMers pretty much stayed till the end, and then began the wander to hunt for food through SOMA... one place after another the kitchens were all closed so we ended up at Mel's Drive In. And not being famished, but in a silly mood, i couldn't resist ordering the Apple Pie with Cheese A La Mode... and as you can see from the menu screenshot below, it's really on there! And although i seldom post on a dare, well, i did promise that i'd document and share this bizarre combination with NOTCOT/TasteSpotters...
Keep reading to see the closeups, etc... and the bizarre fork sculpture the kids next to us were building...
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Tags:
cheese
- drink
- food
- pie
What more could we need to kick off a Monday in the making besides waldo hidden in the real world waiting for google maps, designer foosball, books transformed into sculpture, dragon bras, fun dresses and coats, martinis, cupcakes, carbonara, and more? Well here's a selection of things that grabbed me from the last week, and after the jump take a look at the 25 most popular posts from across the NOTCOT Network. Happy Monday! (and as always, click the images to find out more!)
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Tags:
fashion
- food
- roundup
Click the images to find out more! And as always - TasteSpotting and NotCouture roundups after the jump! Here are the most popular 25 posts over at NOTCOT.org this week! I'm still up in norcal, but theoretically heading back down to LA in a few hours... see some of the deliciousness on tastespotting and notcouture below - the bacon bra is particularly horrifying/fascinating.
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Tags:
fashion
- food
- roundup
On random buying based on pretty graphic design/typography/packaging... i couldn't resist snagging two packs of the Kopali SUPERGOOD SUPERFOOD (no, seriously, that's what it's called). And also how intriguing do these dried mulberries look? (they were new to me... and once i grabbed those i also HAD to try the Dark Chocolate Covered ones too.) They also have dried Mango, Pineapple, Goldenberries... and in the choc covered range - Cacao Nibs, Espresso Beans, Goji Berries, Mulberries and Bananas (i think i need to try the bananas next time). The site says "They're "Supergood" because they're so delicious, nutritous and righteous. They're "Superfood" because they're packed with energy and essential phytonutrients. " Also interesting is their "three bottom line" business plan, focusing on reaching not only financial goals, but also eco/sustainable goals and personal goals to support the people involved. Check out the video below with their company's fascinating business story, bus tour, and how Whole Foods have really helped get the ex-programmer and horticulturist working out of the beaches of costa rica on the map.... and a few more fun close up pics of these crazy mulberries.
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Tags:
food
- packaging
Click the images to find out more! Roundup Time! I just found out tomorrow was a bank holiday... apparently its Caesar Chavez Day? So i guess its a long weekend! (Not that life on the internet really takes weekends.) Anyhow, its been a fun week across the network, with everything from - skulls hidden in black and white line drawings, a hilarious record of a hipster teaching you "how to speak hip", a viral game in the making where you tilt your laptop to drive a motorcycle, a man with the patience to drill insane holes into egg shells, elephants carrying spy cams, backless bras that atatch like a baby carrier, egg filled nest cupcakes, and so much more... see the full roundups after the jump!
...and for TasteSpotting news, the Daring Bakers have just struck again with their latest March Challenge: Dorie's Perfect Party Cake, and the best are popping up as we speak... fascinating to see how all these different people have interpreted the same recipe.
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Tags:
fashion
- food
- roundup
Click the images to find out more! ~ and being a roundup of roundups, get your quick fix of this weeks fashion and food after the jump as well! (Courtesy of NotCouture and TasteSpotting) Fun to see that a lot of the most popular posts on .org this week seem to be some of the .com posts... and those terribly creeeeeeeeepy Pixeloo renders of Mario and Homer if they were real humans with their cartoon anatomy... freaky stuff! I am scared to see what they take on next...
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Tags:
fashion
- food
- roundup
*Sub-Studio in
food+drink
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0 Notes
NOTCOT Note: Here's another article from Anna Corpron of Sub-Studio!
Sub-Studio reader Kariann sent me a link to Edible's Aphrodisiac Pearl Chocolate Paste as a submission for February's chocolate themed Idea's column. Being that we were just switching over to a conceptual shoe column, I didn't get a chance to include the link, but I fell in love with Edible while browsing their site. I'll be the first to admit that I'm partially charmed by the exotic snacks that they carry, but beyond interesting items (chocolate covered scorpions, anyone?), their products are beautifully crafted and packaged. The Antlix Lollipop (below) is gorgeous - it looks like little black seeds frozen in ice. Check out more potentially tasty, pretty things after the jump. Oh - and if you aren't from America, Edible's wares aren't ridiculously expensive.
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Tags:
candy
- food
- sub-studio
NOTCOT Note: I sent Justine (aka Rugenius) on a mission since she's living in the UK, to go buy some of these delicious Fru Puds and Gu Puds and take some pics and let me live vicariously through her... Here's what she's reported back, with pics!
Fru Puds and Gu Puds certainly know how to do packaging. It's hard not to pick them up at the market. In fact, I picked some within my first few weeks in the UK! It's hard to deny the sensuous chocolatey goodness advertised on that packaging....and I'm alway a sucker for a nice black matte. I think we started with chocolate mousse, the traditional. So when the order came in from NOTCOT to check out some more of their range, I was all too happy to oblige. I thought we should go for something a bit different though. So we went for the Gu chocolate pots and the Fru carrot cake bites. See all my pics of packaging, unboxing, and indulging below!
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Tags:
chocolate
- desserts
- food
- gifts
- packaging
- shopping
Click the pics to find out more! Happy St. Patrick's Day! Figured you might need some food to go with the drinking that tends to go with this holiday... and also some green, to keep from being pinched! Here is a roundup of some of the St. Patrick's Day deliciousness that has surfaced over at TasteSpotting.
Tags:
food
- roundup
A+R is the closest thing out there to a NOTCOT store... and the novelty has yet to wear off, since Andy keeps the place stocked with far too much that makes me feel like a kid in a designer candy store. Aside from the Theosauruses that i showed you earlier... i fell for this Puzzle Dinner Tray from Royal VKB designed by Wendy Boudewijns. In a nice unbreakable melamine, this tray helps kids get used to what goes where... and having loved puzzles of all sorts growing up, i just know my mom would have gotten me one of these had it been around when i was a wee one. Although i'm sure i've seen this around the web, playing with it in person won me over to post about it... see some hands on pics below!
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Tags:
food
- gifts
- kids
- kitchen
- shopping
- toys
Papabubble. I was just watching the CoolHunting video (embedded below for easy viewing!) interviewing the candy makers at the new NY store, and it was incredible. I feel like those kids in the candy store, face pressed against my monitor drooling over the incredible candy making process ~ turning a simple mixture of sugar, water, and glucose combined with flasks of coloring and flavoring ~ into what looks like delicious candies, and perhaps just as fun, the perfect medium for sculpting random dioramas out of (as well as classics like Gehry's cardboard wiggle chair)! Truly impressive is watching how all of the candy is made by hand, down to the mixing in of coloring and stretching to aerate until its more translucent. With stores in Barcelona, Amsterdam, and Tokyo, the NY store is the first in the US.
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Tags:
food
- gifts
- travel
- video
The Edible Martini ~ incredible video at the NY Times - "Chef/mad scientist Dave Arnold of the French Culinary Institute has figured out how to vacuum infuse a martini inside a cucumber." Armed with a cucumber, a bottle of gin, vermouth, simple syrup, a paper clip, and a vacuum machine Dave Arnold does some impressive flash pickling ~ and this martini infused cucumber comes out as crunchy as when it started if not more. Essentially, the vacuum machine sucks all the air out, so when air comes back in, gin forced into the cucumber, and as the air returns it turns beautifully clear. See my screenshots of the process below, and watch the The Edible Martini video!
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Tags:
cucumber
- drink
- food
- martini
- science
Click the pics to find out more! Here we have another roundup of roundups ~ a full on best of last week showcasing 24 of the most popular from all of our sites below... and above we have lots of fun art, and a row of green themed foods. Why? Its just what inspired me as i flipped through a few pages this sunday! Oh, and if you haven't checked out Adam's Apple, that's a must! Brilliant illustrations coupled with quite the unexpectedly twisted creation tale.
RANDOMIZER! Also new, we've been working on/tweaking this new feature, and its getting there ~ new buttons are up on all the sites now (see the cute little push pinned polaroid stacks?). I begged dan to make me this one for a while, because with nearly 10,000 posts on NOTCOT.org and TasteSpotting, there is so much incredible stuff, its hard to keep track of everything, so when you just feel like something random and inspiring, perhaps a blast from the past or even something you might have missed... just click the stack! Personally i've lost hours browsing randomly.
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Tags:
art
- fashion
- food
- roundup
Roundup time! Trying something new again ~ i LOVE the roundups, i think its such a nice way to get a condensed speedy overview of what's been going on across the curated user submissions sites (NOTCOT.org, TasteSpotting, and NotCouture), but i've been finding myself quite torn. I just don't love the look of NOTCOT.com being cluttered with so many roundups on the front page at one time... yet there is so much awesome stuff on all the sites, i can't bear to pick one of the three... anyhow, so here's the new idea. Above you see three rows of 5 of my favorites across the sites! And after the jump you can see the top 24 from the last week of all three sites! So as always: Click the pics to find out more! and yes TasteSpotting's row is themed for people who might need some Valentine's inspiration.
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Tags:
fashion
- food
- roundup
Mmm Magic Berries. (I prefer that name for it.) Today i received some Miracle Fruit in the mail, and after much research and curiosity, did a bit of grocery shopping for bitter/sour foods, and then came the ultimate test (these tiny berries turn anything sour/bitter SWEET)! Pictures galore after the jump... and for those who haven't heard of these magic berries, here's the short version of their magic powers and background (also see the full wikipedia entry on it):
"The Miracle Fruit Plant, sometimes known as Miracle Berry, or Magic Berry (Sideroxylon dulcificum/Synsepalum dulcificum) is a plant first documented by an explorer named Des Marchais during a 1725 excursion to its native West Africa. Marchais noticed that local tribes picked the berry from shrubs and chewed it before meals. It is an evergreen plant that produces small red berries, with flowers that are white and which are produced for many months of the year. The seeds are about the size of coffee beans. The berry is sweet, and contains an active glycoprotein molecule, with some trailing carbohydrate chains, called miraculin. When the fleshy part of the fruit is eaten, this molecule binds to the tongue's taste buds, causing bitter and sour foods (such as lemons and limes) consumed later to taste sweet. This effect lasts between thirty minutes and two hours. It is not a sweetener, as its effects depend on what is eaten afterwards, but has been used to sweeten bitter medicines." See after the jump for how it went:
UPDATE ~ rumor has it that these berries might also be perfect for valentine's day, and not just because they are red. Their ability to help turn things sweet can be very handy...
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Tags:
food
- gifts
- magic berry
- miracle fruit
- shopping
Click the pics to find out more! Wow what a week its been over at TasteSpotting... honestly there was so much incredibly drool worthy deliciousness there this week, i dont know how i manage to not try to cook and consume it all. Looks like stand out trends this week were definitely those Cake Pops of Bakerella, who also brought us Oreo Balls and Nutter Butter Balls. There were also home made pop tarts this week! And my favorite and most inspiring post of all truly was Steamy Kitchen sharing her photo "food porn room" studio with us all! It certainly helped answer my questions about how some of the TasteSpotters get such beautiful imagery of their home cooked delights!
Oh, and if you click through any of those, you may have noticed a little experiment (in beta phases - still cleaning up design) on both notcot.org and TasteSpotting... we now have permalink pages... which also mean a single post view... where you can browse linearly (for those who dont like the overwhelming all at once view!)... AND you can play with the RANDOMIZER feature i've long begged for (and can spend hours exploring the nearly 9000 posts with now)... you can even try using Keybord Shortcuts! (although i haven't put up the image about this on the sites yet... try ctrl+r, <, > keys on mac, and use alt instead of ctrl on a pc).
Tags:
food
- roundup
Ok, i'm not a big fan of Valentine's Day. And certainly wasn't expecting any this year... or this early! But a Despair, Inc. generated email from Jef (you can see what he sent after the jump) ~ tipped me off to these hilarious Bittersweets. Just in time for Valentine's day, these candy hearts come in three tin variations: Dejected, Dysfunctional, and Dumped. "Dejected" sayings include: I MISS MY EX | PEAKED AT 17 | MAIL ORDER | TABLE FOR 1 | I CRY ON Q | U C MY BLOG? | LOSS LEADER | A FINE WHINE | MOMMY ISSUES | DIGNITY FREE | DORK MAGNET | PURE NAUSEA | WE HAD PLANS | MAIL ORDER | SETTLE 4LESS | I'M HOT INSIDE. "Dysfunctional" sayings include: ANNULMENT | I BEEN CREEPIN | HE CAN LISTEN | GAME ON TV | CALL A 900# | P.S. I LUV ME | DO MY DISHES | BOOTY INFL8N | PAROLE IS UP! | AWFUL INLAWS | SUB PRIME | I WANT HALF | RETURN 2 PIT | NO FIX 4 DUMB | RATHER DRINK | MUTUAL DISGUST. "Dumped" sayings include: I GOT SOBER | HE FIT U FAT | U LEFT SEATUP | USED U 4 FUN | JUST A FRIEND | BACK 2 KENNEL | DORKA PHOBIC | U HAVE A BLOG | RUSSIAN BRIDE | CELEB8 THX2U | DOG IS CUTER | TRADIN YOU IN | FORGET WE MET | KISS A FROG | SHE IS 22! | HE HAS A JOB. Wow. See more images after the jump!
p.s. Despair Inc is the company behind those Demotivators posters.
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Tags:
candy
- food
- gifts
- shopping
Click the images to find out more! Wow. On trends that i can't quite comprehend... BACON. Sure we've all been seeing the bacon toys, bandaids, etc floating around, but i am impressed that there are over 80 posts on TasteSpotting on bacon... and here are 15 of the most unique... we have: Bacon and cheese scones. Bacon wrapped tofu. Bacon weave. Bacon vodka. Bacon salt. Bacon wrapped asparagus. Bacon cookies. Bacon candy. Bacon kettle corn. Bacon dark chocolate. Bacon cupcakes. The Baconator. Bacon wrapped monkfish. Bacon alarm clock (yes it wakes you up with fresh bacon). Bacon spa wrap.
So really, what IS it about bacon that people love so much? Enlighten me?
Tags:
bacon
- food
Click the pics to find out more! TasteSpotting roundup! Totally late this week, my apologies, but while changing servers, had to rewrite pieces of my magical roundup tool! So here are some deliciously popular posts this week!
Tags:
food
- roundup
The perfect saber for roasting marshmallows while simultaneously skewering your arch nemesis? Too funny - add this one to the 
Click the tiny pics to find out more! Here is this weeks roundup full of roundups ~ showing you some of the most popular posts across 
Click the images to find out more! 25 popular posts across 
And to finish off my triple feature from the 