Meet The Bears Of Sweet Paul

The foodies among you may already be familiar with Sweet Paul, which began years ago as Paul Lowe's personal cooking blog and has since grown to become a wildly popular print and online magazine. Lowe (above left, also known as "the gay Martha Stewart") does the kitchen work while the business side of the enterprise is handled by "the other Paul" - my longtime pal Paul Vitale. The fifth anniversary issue of Sweet Paul launches next week and I'm just the worst friend ever not to have mentioned them before now. And hey, they've even put out a well-received cookbook, Sweet Paul: Eat & Make. Join their 70,000 fans on Facebook.

No, No, That Wasn't A Question

"International Food & Restaurant Consultants, Baum + Whiteman, have sent out their 2015 trend report, which tells us all what we'll be eating next year. What, you think this has nothing to do with you? You go to your refrigerator and you select... I don't know... that lumpy blue cheese, for instance... But what you don't know is that that cheese was filtered down from high end restaurants and then through farmer's markets and then it trickled on down into some tragic grocery store clearance bin, where you, no doubt, fished it out. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs, and it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the food and restaurant industry when, in fact, you're eating a cheese that was selected for you, by the people behind this memo." - Jen Carlson, writing for Gothamist. (Tipped by JMG reader Rob)

Exit The Cronut

 Grubstreet reports:

As you've no doubt seen, this year, the first full day of Hanukkah is Thursday, November 28, which just so happens to also be Thanksgiving. And so, to celebrate this year's hybrid holiday, Zucker Bakery in the East Village has released pumpkin-flavored doughnuts stuffed with turkey and your choice of cranberry sauce or gravy. (Gravy!) They'll also offer a pumpkin doughnut with cranberry filling sans turkey, and a sweet-potato version filled with marshmallows.

The bakery doesn't show a price on its website. Will New Yorkers line up for hours, as they've done for cupcakes, macaroons, and cronuts? (Tipped by JMG reader Bill)

New Yorkers Wait Hours For Cronuts

In case you haven't been following along, the cronut has displaced the macaroon and the cupcake as the hot foodie item that hipsters will stand hours in line for. Eater reports on today's hubbub:

Cronut Mania is definitely not over: Above is a photo from the epic line in Madison Square Park, where people lined up as early as 4 a.m. to get the one-day-only Cronut Concrete from Shake Shack. As of 9:02 a.m. the line was out into the street. The novelty treat — a Butter Caramel frozen custard blended with Cinnamon Sugar Cronut Holes and served with a Cronut Hole on top — will be served starting at 10 a.m., and only 1,000 are available.

And this is what you get for all that waiting.