Culture

Weekend Reading: Horse-Butt Wine, Vending-Machine Caviar, and More

A look at what we’re reading, cooking, and clicking this week

• "It smells like a horse's butt." Jason Wilson writes in The Smart Set about leading novice wine drinkers to challenging wines. —Karen Shimizu

• In this week's New Yorker, the great Calvin Trillin looks to the positive culinary outcomes of his family's geographic dispersal. —Cory Baldwin

• Turkey can be an intimidating animal—most of us find a recipe that works, thank our lucky stars, and stick with it until death do we part. So it was a pleasure to check out Serious Eats' post-Thanksgiving slideshow of turkey shots. Enthusiastic cooks around the country shared images of their turkeys roasted, spatchcocked, smoked, turduckened, and more. My family may make a mean turkey, but this slideshow provided an inspirational reminder that it never hurts to change things up. —Niki Achitoff-Gray

• Baker Allison Robicelli has set up Bay Ridge Cares Kitchen, a place where she—along with a staff of volunteer chefs and home cooks—prepares and distributes free, rib-sticking food (think: goulash, pulled pork, meatloaf) to folks still living with the aftermath effects of Hurricane Sandy. In two weeks of cooking, they've served well over 11,000 meals! —Betsy Andrews

• This story in the Times covers a program I love: the International Rescue Comittee's "New Roots" community gardens, set up so that refugees living in the U.S. so that folks can grow and eat the veggies they know from home, plus discover new ones. It's a crucial part of helping folks establish new lives here. —Betsy Andrews

• From First We Feast, the website that brought us "I got Benihana Issues: Our 10 favorite Rap Lyrics About Benihana" (think Camron: "Been into plenty drama/flame it like Benihana"), we learn that Angelenos can now do their caviar shopping at a vending machine. So there's that. —Sophie Brickman

•Eater Las Vegas reports that Denny's—ground zero for the affected disaffection of my Midwestern adolescence—is opening a glitzed-out "flagship" in Sin City, a 6,400-square-foot neon behemoth complete with a wedding chapel, of course. —Helen Rosner

[Pictured] Turkish art photographer Sakir Gokçebag takes a beautiful, regimented, geometric approach to produce, as featured on Designboom.

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