Then do I have the thing for you –

Yes, it’s true. The only thing better than a soba sandwich? A soba iPhone cover.

From the always-innovative Japanese comes a series of plastic iPhone protectors designed to defend your most prized possession from nicks and scratches while making your stomach growl with gluttonous glee.

In addition to yaki soba, iMeshi the company behind the ingenious device is offering an assortment of other protectors “featuring some of the most popular Japanese food” like bento box, a sunny side up egg with bacon, and tonkatsu.

If you weren’t already rushing to buy one, perhaps the following description from iMeshi will entice you -

So Realistic, you might think about eating Your iPhone

Even one piece of rice looks extremely realistic, your iPhone might start looking like your favorite dish. Who would have ever though of making your iPhone looking like food? We did!

Yes you did iMeshi, and the world is a better place for it! I want one NOW!

(via Serious Eats)

Mattatouille

As a little tease for our upcoming examination of  potato sandwiches, Mattaouille includes of the cacharro hotdog, topped with corn and potato sticks in his review of LA’s new Brazilian lunch truck.

How to find out if you truly are what you eat? Go get an MRI, and then check out this site, that features MRI imgages of your favorite fruits and veg (Serious Eats.)

Food Section reports on a robot that each sewage. Kinda like a garbage disposal?

When panting just isn’t getting the job done, your pooch can hit up the world’s first ice cream truck for pups (Eater.)

Linda Lundgren

Embrace the Monday blues with blueberries, blue fin tuna, and some bright blue packaging.

For those feeling slightly more sunny on this fine July day – corn, pineapple, and lemons -

Linda Lundgren

All courtesy of Swedish food stylist Linda Lundgren. Check out more pretty monochrome mania here.

So yesterday while Joey Chestnut downed 54 hot dogs in ten minutes at Nathan’s annual competition (and his arch rival Kobayashi got arrested in his efforts to compete) and while less prodigious eaters grilled up burgers and franks and steaks all to celebrate our great nation’s birth, I ate a staple of the Chinese soldier’s diet – egg and tomato.

I am not an anti-patriot — a barbecue just wasn’t happening for me this year — and as Elena Kagan joked during her confirmation hearings, when outside of the American mainstream holiday celebrations, Chinese food becomes the next best thing.

So I whipped up some Chinese tomato and eggs — a simple, but gloriously flavorful and satisfying dish that I fell in love with while traveling through China a few years ago — and listened to the sounds of fireworks in the distance. And after all, doesn’t being American mean the freedom to take off from hot dogs sometimes and to embrace ones’ inner Chinese soldier.? God bless the USA. Here’s the recipe.

Katie’s Fourth of July Chinese Eggs and Tomatoes

Ingredients

-two eggs

-seseame oil

-salt and pepper to taste

-olive oil or butter

-soy sauce

-three green onions (diced)

-one clove garlic (diced)

-one tomato (cut into small wedges)

-soy sauce

-fish sauce

Directions

-Beat eggs with a dash of sesame oil and salt and pepper.

-Heat olive oil or butter in pan. Add eggs, scramble as you would normally, adding a dash of soy sauce, and leaving the eggs pretty loose. When they reach a cooked but still runny consistency, turn eggs onto plate to keep from overcooking (you’ll cook them more soon.)

-In same pan, add more oil or butter. When heated, add green onion and garlic. After about a minute, add tomatoes, soy sauce, and about a half teaspoon of fish sauce (more if you’re like me and love the stuff.) Stir fry until the tomatoes have grown soft and let go some of their juices.

-Add eggs back into the pan and stir fry until combined. (At this point you can also add a few tablespoons of Chinese brown sauce if you like.)

Serve over rice. Delicious.

(Serves one. Easily doubled, etc.)

In last week’s Time, food writer Josh Ozersky offered advice on how to have a delicious wedding. Instead of going through a caterer, he suggests, pick and choose your favorite dishes from your favorite restaurants, and voila — goodbye dry chicken and rice pilaf, hello banh mi and bucatini all’amatriciana.

If only it were so simple. As one in the throes of nuptial planning, who is forgoing a caterer in favor of some restaurant favorites (prior to reading this article mind you, so don’t go calling me a copy cat), let me tell you, this is a tough road. No caterer means no wait staff, no serving dishes, no steam plates, no linens. It is a serious DIY undertaking.

So I was a little irritated when I read Ozersky’s piece. First because he stole my idea, the rat, but more because for him, with a bevy of celebrity chef friends, the whole curated reception seemed like a piece of (unconventional, gourmet wedding) cake.

But I felt vindicated today when one of my favorite restaurant critics, the Village Voice’s Robert Sietsema ripped Ozersky a new one on the Voice’s Fork in the Road blog. Like me, Sietsema was critical of Ozersky for framing the article as a service piece, advice on how to have an “uncatered” wedding, when the Time writer’s experience was clearly a rarefied one. But his larger criticism is that Ozersky failed to disclose that he received the food for free. That the chefs mentioned in the article were receiving invaluable Time Magazine coverage in what was clearly some kind of quid pro quo arrangement goes against all sort of journalistic ethics, Sietsema argues. And besides, the rat stole my idea.

Stayed up way past my bedtime Sunday night to attend a 10 PM screening of  Bitter Feast at the LA Film Festival.

The film centers around celebrity chef Peter Gray whose career is ostensibly ruined by a scathing review on the ficticious food blog “Gastropunks.” When Chef Gray is fired (by none other than Mario Batali in a cameo as a restaurant owner improbably named Gordon), he exacts revenge, taking the blogger hostage and torturing him in a series of Food Network worthy extreme cooking challenges. If the blogger can cook a perfect over easy egg, he can eat it; if not  he’s got egg on his face — literally and delivered by way of a sizzling frying pan to the noggin.

It’s a pretty brutalizing film, kind of torture porn meets food porn — full of lots of close ups of rabbits  being butchered  and then sauteed into beautiful ragus juxtaposed with raw faces being beaten and then, well, beaten again.

Probably not everyone’s cup of English Breakfast. But here’s the trailer in case you’re feeling brave. I for one will give serious thought before speaking ill of the chef’s for a while.

Last Saturday the Mr. and I hit up La Super-Rica Taqueria in beautiful (and I mean BEAUTIFUL) sunny Santa Barbara. The little taco stand, with it’s big back porch was fabled to be Julia Child’s favorite Mexican spot.

The queue is apparently often scores of people deep, but since we didn’t get there for lunch until about 4, we didn’t have to wait too long before placing our order at the counter, which is particularly fun because you get up close to watch the kitchen folks making handmade corn tortillas.

For such a wee place, there were loads of options, and it was difficult to make a decision, but I’d heard that when at Super Rica, be sure to eat loads of tortillas and go for the special tamales, so I did as told.

A deceptively simple taco de bistec — perfectly grilled meat on one of those impeccable fresh tasting tortillas. (Really it’s two tortillas, but when splitting one taco between two people, the Mr. and I each take a tortilla and half the filling and it works out just fine. Blasphemous perhaps. But just fine.)

Guacamole. Believe it or not, there are two tortillas lurking under that mountain of avocado. What initially seemed like an excess of guac quickly became a dearth of the glorious green stuff. Especially with a drizzle of one of the three complimentary salsas. Especially when scooped onto the taco de bistec.

One of the specials — a tamal de verduras. (Though I get the sense this “special” is often on the menu.) Fresh masa stuffed with chayote, corn, zucchini, potato, chili strips, and cheese. Topped with a crema sauce. This was kind of the fettuccine al fredo of the tamale world. Decadent. Comforting.

And finally my first favorite. The itty bitty tamalito de cambray.  A pint-sized tamale fit for a pint-sized taco joint, stuffed with chicken, raisins, almonds, and tomato sauce, packed into a banana leaf. Moist, a little sweet, a little savory. A little corny. I literally licked the banana leaf clean of all traces of this one.

Thanks Julia! Thanks Super Rica!

Photo Charlotte Ommedal

Only the Brits could hatch a scheme like this. Starting June 24th, London’s Barbican Art Gallery will be selling “Occult Jam” made by darlings of the culinary art world, Bompas and Parr. With names straight from Hogwarts, the pair Sam Bompas and Harry Parr, are famous for their wild food related adventures, having previously create a jelly shaped like St. Paul’s Cathedral, a futurist aerobanquet, and scratch-and-sniff cinema, have now created a series of jams infused with “powerful artifacts.” For purchase will be absinthe and pineapple jam made with sand from the pyramids; plum and oak jelly with wood from Lord Nelson’s ship The HMS Victory; and most of all, milk jam with a speck of Princess Di’s hair.

What are you waiting for? It’s time to book those tickets to London. It would be hell if they ran out before you snagged a jar.

Like hypoallergenic cats before them, low allergy peanuts may soon hit the market. Through the amazing powers of science, these peanuts have been cross bred to reduce the concentration of three key proteins thought to be the culprit in debilitating allergic reactions. Hopefully this development will mark the return of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to kindergarten classrooms everywhere. Not to mention the come back of my personal favorite airline snack – wee packets of honey roasted peanuts.

Although Mr. Henry will continue to write about food, just for the moment he prefers not to.

Instead, please find him on Manolo for the Men.