Food News, May 6, 2005 — The Chicago Tribune decided to do a blind tasting of a series of coffee liqueurs. Since coffee isn't really my thing I suppose I'll have to take their word for it. Still, it was neat that newcomer Starbucks, yes Starbucks won the tasting. I think it's cool when a big company still can focus on doing things with high quality. In many ways I think it's harder for big companies to deliver quality than small ones.

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It's so weird but I'm now getting 1-2 offers per week from various PR folks to review products. It's mostly books, but this week I got an offer to try out a pre-release of a new brand of disposable "tupperware". Freaky. I think I'll pass on that one, though I do always appreciate the offer of free stuff. I think employees of PR firms are taking seminars where they tell them how cheap it is to get bloggers to write about their products. We're not used to getting free stuff.

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If you're in New York on May 17th you may want to check out "The Cuisine of Queens and Beyond" a sort of food festival presented by Dish du Jour magazine. Honestly, I have no idea what this magazine is, or what the event is all about. But Debbie thinks Rocco di Spirito is "hooooot", and as he'll be there, I imagine there's others that would like to get a glimpse of him as well. Is he still even cooking? Or does he just go around being good looking. Debbie says: "I don't care."

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Passover has been over for a few days now (I needed bread so badly) and Amy at Cooking With Amy did her own Passover post as well as a roundup of a bunch of other Passover posts from various food blogs.

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One of our readers, Aaron, pointed us to this comparison of various salts from Slate. Jeffrey Steingarten had a great article about whether salt could really taste any different. The conclusion I've come to is that since salts are chemically identical, dissolved in water there is no way to tell the difference between them. That said, I do think that different salt crystals have different shapes, and before dissolving, I feel the shape can dramatically affect the flavor as the salt crystal hits different spots on your tongue.

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We're going to Hawaii for a few days at some point down the road. Is it wrong for me not to be enamored of Hawaiian food? My experience with Hawaiian food is generally large portions of shredded meat (usually pork) and overly sweet flavors. I'm sure this is an unfair generalization, but it's based on my semi-limited experience. The other food I've seen in Hawaii is high-end Japanese restaurants catering to Japanese tourists - authentic but somewhat antiseptic, and "higher end" chains like Roy's. Bottom line, does anyone have any suggestions on where to eat while in Maui? Thanks.

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I feel like food scares are somewhat faddish. Then again, you never know what to really listen to. Got Mercury has a mercury calculator to see if all that sushi you're eating is slowly killing you. Though, if you eat that much sushi, how bad a life could it have been?

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You know what a wiki is (actually, you very likely might not, so here's a definition). You know what a recipe is. But a wikipe?