Food news antipasto

We’ll start off this week’s edition with some relatable news (at least I was able to relate to it): an opossum ended up at an animal rescue facility after it devoured an entire Costco chocolate cake. Luckily, the critter was able to make a full recovery and return to the wild after arriving in some distress. The Nebraska wildlife center said in a social media post that the opossum was “definitely a little cranky about our strict ‘zero chocolate’ policy! Same, opossum…. same.”

Australian baker Emelia Jackson recently shared some of her baking knowledge with The Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Food. Jackson’s recent cookbook Some of My Best Friends are Cookies: Recipes for Baking Perfection, enjoys a five-star rating in the EYB Library. There’s an EYBD Preview available so you can take a gander at the cookbook, and the article is an edited excerpt from the book that focuses on finding the best ingredients for your baking.

Returning to news about Costco, shoppers are worried that the store’s famous $1.50 hot dog combo might be headed for a price hike. Costco’s CFO Richard Galanti retired last year, and it was due to his influence that the price of the hot dog combo remain at $1.50. The new CFO is allegedly “notorious” for raising prices. In an interview late last year he said the $1.50 combo price was “safe” but a recent post on Instagram hinted there might be a change. Costco shoppers went into a panic, with one commenting that “A price adjustment to the food court will be the tipping point that sends the masses scrambling in a manner that will make the French Revolution look like tea time in a geriatric ward.”

This week marked food critic Jay Rayner’s final column for the Observer Food Monthly. He capped his career by distilling the key points he said have remained true after fifteen years of writing about food. These nuggets of wisdom include realizing that “Fat is where the flavour is and salt is the difference between eating in black and white and eating in Technicolor, even if your cardiologist would disagree,” and “Often, good food takes a while to cook and sometimes it requires skill; all those cookbooks with words like “simple” and “express” in the title may not be your friend.”

With egg prices remaining sky-high for many of our Members, we thought they might find useful Food & Wine’s recent column featuring 25 eggless desserts. You definitely won’t miss the eggs in this list of delicious items including cheesecake, cookies, panna cotta, tarts and pies. If you really have your heart set on a recipe that requires eggs, you may be able to use one of the egg substitutes recommended by Chowhound. One of the suggestions tries to replace all of the attributes of an egg by combining vegetable oil, baking powder, and and water.

Gordon Ramsay’s new London restaurant, Lucky Cat 22, isn’t living up to its name as nearly 500 cat figurines were stolen from the restaurant last week. The figurines, beckoning Japanese cat models called maneki-neko, cost £4.50 each, according to Ramsay, adding up to a loss of more than £2,100 in just a week’s time. I wouldn’t risk the potential bad karma involved in stealing a symbol of luck.