MORSELS

A world of food at your fingertips

6/16/2013
BY DAN NEMAN
BLADE FOOD EDITOR

Their motto is “Serving up the best recipes from around the world.”

But in point of fact, they are serving up the best recipes from Levis Commons in Perrysburg.

Bluefin Media, formerly known as Brand Technologies, is a sort of all-encompassing advertising/branding/Internet-content Web site with its fins, so to speak, in many pies. Along with four Web sites devoted to celebrity gossip and three related to fashion and beauty, the company also boasts two Web sites that are all about food. 

You can guess which ones caught our eye.

One of these sites, DIY Food, seems to be mostly search-engine optimization, a simple repetition of key words designed to drive Internet traffic to the site without regard for writing or content. It also appears to have a relationship with celebrity chef (and former Toledoan) Susan Feniger, a great number of whose recipes it runs.

But the other site, RecipeCorner.com, is worth visiting. That is the site that serves up the best recipes from around the world. It offers hundreds of recipes of every type, for every occasion, and from many different ethnicities.

Most of the recipes appear to be taken without credit from other sources (I can’t complain too loudly about that; most of the recipes I run are from other sources, too, though I do always say which ones). However, a significant number are developed in-house by editor Amanda Patton.

The site’s food editor, Morgan McDonald, also appears in a number of helpful videos showing exactly how to make many of the dishes.

The Internet certainly has its share of sites devoted to collecting, collating, and aggragating recipes, many of them much bigger than RecipeCorner.com. But everyone has to start somewhere; even Google began its existence in a garage.

Besides, Bluefin isn’t small at all. According to Sophia Fisher, the company’s director of marketing and public relations, “Bluefin is ranked in the top 25 companies on the Internet and in any given month has over 50 million unique visitors from around the world.”

Pretty impressive. RecipeCorner.com is slick and sleek. Best of all, it’s in our own backyard.

Hot dog!

Do you, like us, simply live for National Hot Dog Month?

It only comes once a year. Thankfully, it is one of those months that has a full 31 days.

The good people at French’s Mustard (it would be them, when you think about it) want to remind us that July is National Hot Dog Month — as if that were something we could ever forget. According to the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council, it is a month during which some 2.3 billion hot dogs are eaten — just part of the 7 billion hot dogs that are consumed between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

To save you from having to do the math yourself, that works out to some 818 hot dogs eaten every second during that stretch. It is safe to say that a good number of them are eaten in front of a baseball game, which, scientists have proven, is where they taste the best.

On the Fourth of July alone, Americans are expected to eat 155 million hot dogs. If laid end to end, they would stretch from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles five times over, and then some.

Unanswered is why anyone would ever want to lay 155 million hot dogs end to end. First, it would take forever to do it, or you would need a whole lot of help. And then they would be all dirty, and who wants to eat a dirty hot dog? And you just know that some car is going to drive all over a bunch of them.

Anyway: With National Hot Dog Month being such an important part of America, the mustard folks thought you might be interested in this apparently brand-new, quick, and convenient way to eat hot dogs:

Hot Dog Burritos

1 (16-ounce) can baked beans

8 hot dogs, sliced

1/3 cup ketchup

2 tablespoons yellow mustard

2 tablespoons brown sugar

8 (8-inch) flour tortillas, heated

French-fried onions, optional

Combine beans, sliced hot dogs, ketchup, mustard, and sugar in a medium saucepan. Simmer about 5 minutes to heat through.

Spoon the mixture into tortillas, dividing evenly. Add french-fried onions, if using. Roll up jelly-roll style.

Yield: 8 servings

Items for Morsels should be submitted up to two weeks before an event to food@theblade.com.