Blog Posts by Esquire.com

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Europe's horsemeat scandal has brought food fraud to the forefront, so much so that we are still reading about horse-peddling restaurateurs back-pedaling on their convictions and what the EU health commissioner's office recommends. But, really, faked food is almost as old as civilization. Today's biggest scams are orchestrated by organized crime groups, and aided by black market chemists with deep knowledge of how to thwart food safety tests. Nobody is quite sure how big the problem is, but some ingredients regularly top lists of common fraud targets. "It's really hard to have a top ten, because we only know what we've caught, we don't know what we haven't caught," says John Spink, an associate director of Michigan State's Anti-Counterfeit and Product Protection Program. Here are five we definitely know about, though.

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HONEY

In February, the Justice Department charged two people and five companies what appears to be biggest food fraud case in U.S. history: a complex, $180 million

Doughnuts: For your health... and mine.


















It's sort of incredible to me what symbols of wanton excess doughnuts have become; what totems of over-indulgence and fat-kid behavior. They were once fed to soldiers as a health food during World War II, after all. I'm not quite sure when things went off the rails in terms of public perception, although I think Homer Simpson had something to do with it. Anyway, when Dunkin' Donuts said it was taking a "glazed donut breakfast sandwich" nationwide earlier this week, the country let out a collective gasp of head-wagging disapproval, as if Dunkin had crossed some kind of invisible threshold of common breakfast sandwich decency.

Plus: The Best Late Night Food in America

The thing is, the school-marmish reaction doesn't map particularly well onto the actual health credentials of doughnuts, which are hardly as ruinous to one's health or to the moral fabric of American society as everyone seems to believe (I'm particularly attuned to this topic because I've co-authored a doughnut

Swedish men wearing skirts

A small cadre of train drivers in Sweden is protesting the job's strict policy against shorts in the summertime by wearing skirts. The BBC is reporting that the workers were informed of a new dress code banning shorts when employer Arriva took over the Roslagsbanan line back in January, but sweltering heat has inspired about a dozen enterprising male drivers to employ the creative workaround. A company spokesman says that the men wearing skirts is permitted, as to ban them would be considered discrimination. Progressive.

PLUS: How to Look Better at the Office, Now

While the wearing of skirts by men isn't exactly Esquire-approved, comfort and industriousness are, so we applaud these Swedes for sticking it to the man in such a fashion. Plus, there's been an uptick in skirt-wearing men of late, with Kanye West leading the charge. Givenchy designer Riccardo Tisci often shows skirts at his seasonal shows (with some even selling out online). And that's not to mention Marc Jacbos's

By Mike Ayers

By Mike Ayers

Recently, I've grown fond of waking up on Saturday mornings and making pancakes for my wife and our son. The problem is they're less than appetizing. Yes, I've been relying on box mixes - some would say for too long - and while my family would never send back their breakfast, deep down I knew that they were flawed. Thin, unflavorful things that rarely look like circles and lacked a certain fluff I knew should be there. I wanted to be better. Our wives, girlfriends and friends dropping in for a weekend expect and deserve better.

Lo and behold, there's a new cookbook simply titled Pancakes from A Cozy Kitchen's Adrianna Adarme. My prayers had been answered. "Pancakes are really nostalgic," Adarme says about the pancake's wooing properties. "That's why they tend to be comforting. They're one of the first things you eat as a kid for breakfast with your family." If you're thinking you too might have a pancake problem, Adarme broke down five ways that

By Peter Biancamano, co-owner of M&P Biancamano Deli

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You chop up the cheese curds with a knife. I just slice it up, make little pieces - three by one inch slices - and put it in a stainless steel bowl. It's got to be stainless steel because you put in the boiling water, and stainless steel keeps the water hot.

You put boiling water inside - cover the cheese, but not too much - and you let it sit for 5-6 minutes so everything will melt. After six minutes, you take the water out and push down on the curd to get it all.

Then you pour more boiling water on, same as before and start to work on it. Work on it means with a spoon, a big wood spoon, and you turn it, and it melts, and you put it all together. You've got to keep on moving it. Sometimes you mash into it a little bit. If the curd melts right away, it's too much water, so you have to take some off. And if it doesn't work out smooth, you've got to put more water in.

That

By David Wondrich

It's a tricky time for bars: are they places to escape reality, or are they places to marvel at how a drink gets made? So, as well as adding to our ever-growing list, we assess the state of things: the bars, the bartenders, the drinkers. Drinking itself.

Esquire

1. The Woodsman Tavern

Portland, Oregon

You're having: a pint of cask ale, a half dozen raw

The Woodsman Tavern is like a rich man's hunting lodge: rustic but not too rustic and conspicuously well stocked with the good things in life: numerous Belgian beers on tap, cask ales, well-made cocktails, raw oysters and clams, a selection of country hams, carefully chosen wines and spirits. It would almost make you tired-if it weren't all so damn good.

4537 Southeast Division Street; 971-373-8264

PLUS: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO DRINKING SCOTCH

Esquire

2. Smuggler's Cove

San Francisco

You're having: an Expedition (in the take-home mug)

On the outside, there's nothing-a bland, unmarked storefront on a quiet

Getty ImagesBy Elizabeth Gunnison
Call me paranoid, but I have long harbored an absolute conviction that food heated up in the microwave cools faster than food heated on the stovetop or in the oven. I don't think I'm being delusional here. Whether I'm nuking a half-finished cup of coffee - which I do almost daily - or cooking a frozen pizza, or heating up last night's leftovers, it all comes out of the microwave sizzling hot and then seems to cool to room temperature before I can find a clean fork. Given that I am a person who once weasled my way out of a high-school physics class by inventing an independent study in poetry-writing, I have always simply chalked this observation up to karma: food heated hastily will cool hastily, just to spite your impatient ass. Makes sense!

Today, in a burst of science-y curiosity, I decided it was time to seek a more logical explanation for the phenomenon. I called up Harold McGee, a man who has made a career of applying chemistry, physics, and biology to

by Julia Carpenter

Esquire.com

Adulthood has no eureka moment. Author and blogger Kelly Williams Brown, whose new book Adulting: How to Become a Grown-up in 468 Easy(ish) Steps came out this week, believes true maturity is instead built on smaller stepping stones: using the correct screwdriver, wearing sunscreen, not going around telling everyone the foolish thing your friend did at 14.

"Those moments of feeling together and in-control, we kind of need them," Brown says. "Because life is chaotic, and so much is out of our control, and at any moment there's like 18 million things we're worried about, but when a little worry crosses your path and you're like, 'No, I've got it,' that's a great feeling." Indeed. And so, using her book and enlisting her boyfriend David and good friend Markus as a guide, Brown created a special male-centric appendix for Esquire.com.

Plus: The Best Relationship Advice for Men

1. Learn to tie a tie. Even better: learn how to tie a bow tie. Even better than