Dr. Oetker/Daily Mirror

A cupcake portrait for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee

After Mother's Day, it seems only fitting that we celebrate the Queen. More so in a Diamond Jubilee year, as Queen Elizabeth II will be celebrating her 60th year on the British throne next month (the British monarchy is the exception to the typical 75-year diamond anniversary rule). You are planning an elaborate afternoon tea party to celebrate, yes? (If not, maybe try to win one at the Langham.)

If, like us, you're wondering what to make for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, which begins June 2, the Detroit Free Press has an excellent suggestion: Lamprey Pie. The eel pie is traditionally baked only for the Queen's special occasions, such as her coronation in 1952 and her Silver and Gold Jubilee. Unfortunately, the Queen has a little ingredient-sourcing problem: Lamprey are a protected species in England. Good thing we have plenty of the invasive, overabundant, slippery little bloodsuckers in the Great Lakes. Get more on the diplomatic lamprey pie relations, as well as a chocolate pie recipe from one of the Queen's former chefs, after the jump.

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Anne Fishbein

Mole Poblano at Moles La Tia

If there is a singular food worthy of its own museum exhibit, it's probably molé, the versatile Mexican sauce that ranges from the pitch-black Oaxacan negro to colorful varieties tinted with tamarind or pistachio.

On Saturday June 2, in connection with LACMA's current exhibition, Children of the Plumed Serpent: The Legacy of Quetzalcoatl in Ancient Mexico, the museum is partnering with food-tour company Six Taste to offer an exploration of pre-Columbian Mexican cuisine with a visit to Koreatown's Guelaguezta and East L.A.'s Moles La Tia to sample their molés. (Yep, a private shuttle takes you to the restaurants. How cool is that.)

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Don Bugitos

Worm Tacos

If your image of bugs as food remains comfortably plated in the novelty realm -- grub worm lollipops, chocolate-covered ants, Anthony Bourdain popping a few grasshopper snacks here and there -- you need to meet Monica Martinez of Don Bugito (get her fantastic video after the jump).

Martinez is not serving up the typical sensationalized, candied-bug affairs. She says her dishes are inspired by her native Mexico, where bugs were part of pre-Hispanic cuisine. Martinez wants you to learn to love bugs, so she treats them with carne asada respect. As Martinez describes it, she creates "amazing dishes that simply happen to have an unexpected ingredient." Think tacos made with handmade blue corn tortillas filled with wax moth larvae sautéed with garlic/pasilla peppers and served with red pickled onions, herb salsa and queso fresco (photo above).

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amazon.com

White Trash Cooking's anniversary

How fitting, in a marshmallow salad sort of way, that 25 years after Ernest M. Mickler first published White Trash Cooking, the final season of HBO's Eastbound and Down has wrapped up.

If you've missed "the best f--king show on HBO," as MTV's James Montgomery neatly summed up in Kenny Powers-appropriate lingo, you can still shell out those HBO subscription dollars and watch back episodes. Or you could go with the $19.99, cheap white trash spiral-bound alternative: the recently released 25th-anniversary edition of Mickler's cookbook.

Although Mickler died shortly after the first edition was published, we have a feeling the cookbook author would have been an Eastbound and Down fan.

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jgarbee

New Teahouse At The Huntington

The Huntington Library's circa 1911 Japanese Garden reopened Wednesday after a nearly $7 million renovation, including the addition of a historic ceremonial teahouse built in Kyoto. The teahouse first arrived in the L.A. area in 1964, when it was installed at the Pasadena Buddhist Temple; In 2010 the house returned to Kyoto for restoration before settling into its new home at the Huntington.

While the Japanese House (photo after the jump) will remain open to the public during Huntington hours, the teahouse will be used only occasionally for ceremonies, including tonight's dedication performed by Soshitsu Sen, the iemoto (grand master) of Japan's Urasenke tradition of tea.

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amazon.com

At a moment in our culinary history when even our everyday weeknight dinner focus -- or fuss, depending on your recipe perspective -- is on (more) sustainable, farmers market-friendly, nose-to-tail cooking, we were curious what we might find among the pages of a modern Betty Crocker cookbook. Slow-cooker pig trotters with Weiser Farm potatoes? Right. But surely, at least no more powdered mashed potatoes?

Just our luck, the latest in Ms. Crocker's series, The Big Book of Weeknight Dinners, was released earlier this year.

Before we go on, we should clarify that yes, we realize Betty Crocker is a commercial brand, much like her imaginary Prudence Penny and Marion Manners friends. All three emerged as part of the home cooking fun in the 1920s and were quite popular through the 1950s.

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Flickr/nebulux76

a bowl of spaghetti

When one thinks of Switzerland, one conjures images of a happy, armed and yet war-adverse people who wear chic watches, carry fussy little knives and hike in majestic mountains while eating milk chocolate bars. (Hopefully we crammed every possible stereotype in to that one sentence.) Who knew they're also small scale producers of grove to table spaghetti? And who knew spaghetti was a crop at all?

But it is, and the Swiss do it right, according to a recently resurfaced, and totally excellent educational BBC video. Check it out after the jump.

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amazon.com

We almost passed up Lard: The Lost Art of Cooking With Your Grandmother's Secret Ingredient when it landed on our desk -- as it looked like yet another candied bacon trend-of-the-year sort of cookbook. But this is not another cookbook from a celebrity chef or a blogger who specializes in rendered pig fat soliloquies. Lard, to be released in early April, is a compilation of 150 lard chocolate cakes and corn pot pie recipes from the editors at Grit magazine.

If you've never heard of Grit, there's probably a pretty good chance you don't own a John Deere, or at least have it on your "some day" wish list. The bimonthly magazine has been in print since 1882 and focuses on what it calls "country lifestyles of all kinds."

Here, that means the audience has long been large farming and ranching operations and, more recently, amateur backyard gardeners and those with big-city chicken coop dreams. (Join their e-newsletter online and you get a free guide to chicken breeds - gotta love it!)

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T. Nguyen

The Godmother sandwich at Bay Cities

Depending on where you live in this great big country, a submarine sandwich might be known as a Dagwood (Colorado), a wedge (parts of New York) or a poor boy (in the Gulf States, where, we once discovered, a banh mi sandwich is known as a "Vietnamese poor boy"). This is but one of the fascinating entries in D.A.R.E. -- no, not the attempt to war on drugs, but the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Dictionary of American Regional English, a multivolume dictionary that shows that there are many, many ways of looking at a sandwich, among other foods. The fifth volume, from Sl to Z, was just published last month.

The dictionary was compiled based on exhaustive interviews conducted by University of Wisconsin-Madison scholars between 1965 and 1970. According to The Wall Street Journal, chief editor Frederic Gomes Cassidy compiled more than 1,800 survey questions covering 40 topics, from the weather to tobacco to foods; researchers in "word wagons" then were dispatched to interview 2,777 people in more than 1,000 communities across the country. After the 2.3 million responses were collected, editors had the daunting task of analyzing and organizing the data into something manageable and meaningful.

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mountvernon.org

We like to think of Dining With the Washingtons as the cookbook antidote to all of those "breaking" news stories on what the presidential candidates are eating on the campaign trail. (In a nutshell, fast food: Burgers, hot dogs, fries and plenty of Pizza Ranches on the Republican side.) Nothing like an election year to get you back in that good old-fashioned cooking mood.

In the Washingtons' kitchen (in its current book form, at least), there are no political jabs, no contrived smiles for iPhone snapshots (ah, the glorious days of presidential portrait painting), nor does dinner with the president require a $35,800 campaign contribution. The cookbook will set you back all of $35 if you buy it directly from Mount Vernon, which we highly recommend so the entire net proceeds go toward maintaining Washington's nonprofit estate for the public, rather than a portion thereof into an Amazon executive's deep-discount corporate pockets.

Another reason to pony up the extra pennies? Dining With the Washingtons happens to be one of the best historic cookbooks we've seen in years.

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