Red Pepper Flakes. A blog by Imelda Suriato

Glorious! Soups: Super alphabet soup

Glorious! Soups® packaging caught my eyes when browsing through I Love Dust‘s portfolio. Beautiful illustration and typographic approach sets this packaging apart. Glorious! Soups® takes alphabet soup to another level.

Glorious! Soups®‘s simple black site allows the letters of the alphabet—an ‘A to Z of Global Flavors’—prominently displayed. Iconic, bespoke illustration represents each letter, showcasing authentic global influences and flavors of each product. The illustration is well done (if you know I Love Dust’s work, it’s not surprising at all).

“We wanted to build brand that was bold, adventurous and gutsy to inspire people to try out the new product, ” explains Mandy Taylor, commercial director at Glorious!. Working with Glorious!’s branding agency, Lambie-Nairn, I Love Dust has successfully delivered just that.

The new Glorious! Soups is bold yet eloquent, bringing some ‘zing’ to boring ol’ soups and sauces. It’s simply stunning—both the concept and the design.

How can you not love “M is for ‘Malaysian Chicken’” with delicate Asian flower motif while “T is for ‘Toulouse Sausage and Bean’” and is flanked by legs of can-can dancer?

The Geometry of Pasta

The Geometry of Pasta is not just a recipe book from critically acclaimed chef, Jacob Kenedy. It is a stunning book of over 100 recipes designed in black-and-white that reveals the science, history and philosophy behind spectacular pasta dishes from all over Italy.

It’s designed by award-winning designer, publisher and Creative Partner at Here Design, Caz Hildebrand, who is also responsible for other sumptuous cookbooks by Nigella Lawson and the Hairy Bikers.

The book presents a striking fusion of design and food:  “The book tells you everything you need to know about cooking and eating pasta like an Italian.” The punchy graphic design paired with simple recipes is cheeky, yet efficient. It’s gastronomic pop art, and I want a giant print of the cover as wallpaper in my kitchen!

Visit The Geometry of Pasta for more.

Making sweet real web fonts

The days of HTML built-in fonts are now over. Well, sort of.

Typekit, a product of Small Batch Inc. (who is now not so small anymore after their first round of VC funding), is offering beautiful, real fonts for use on the web. This means headline or title graphics don’t have to be created and there really is no need for sIFR anymore.

The best part: The subscription-based service offers Open Type fonts from some of the world’s best type foundries to be used gloriously on the web.

The fee is very minimal, but if you’re a super-starving designer, you can start with their free trial package.

Then comes Google Font API and Directory. No worries, Google isn’t trying to bully Typekit. Both companies openly collaborated to get Typekit Font Events into the open source project WebFont Loader. To boot, Google’s web fonts can be accessed from Typekit so if you’re using both services, there won’t be any compatibility issue.

So it looks like Typekit and Google Fonts are making sweet, sweet real web fonts together. The best part, of course, is the fact that designers will now be able to explore web font usage without having to worry about production, search engine-friendliness, Mac vs. PC font fibs, and the need to buy every single font you want to use for comps.

Yes, I’ve been there, knee-deep in “beg, borrow, steal” font territory. Can you smell the freedom now?

Greenmarkets NYC

What is Fresh lists all the local food and farmers markets in New York City. On top of showing the days when the Greenmarkets are open and where, it also provides you with what is available in which locations.

My fave has to be the Union Square one for the number of vendors and variety. Favorite greenmarket snack: Raspberry nut bar from the one in Bowling Green. Yumm!!

The Faces of 2009

Interesting project by designer Richard Holt. These are faces that made the news in 2009, made from the news of 2009. Taken from the Evening Standard’s headline board outside the tube station, which he diligently photographed every day for most of the last year.

Can you guess?

Orthorexic I’m not!

I’m glad I found this on The Guardian: Orthorexia nervosa = fixation on righteous eating.

According to the the article, orthorexics commonly have rigid rules around eating, refusing to touch sugar, salt, caffeine, alcohol, wheat, gluten, yeast, soya, corn and dairy foods, and on and on… Of course any foods that have come into contact with pesticides, herbicides or contain artificial additives are out… This obsession about which foods are “good” and which are “bad” means orthorexics can end up malnourished.

Well, I love my coffee, my bacon, my alcohol, my butter… There are those who always let me know what they think about my eating, but you only live once and I like to live mine with lots of finger-lickin’, lip-smackin’, delicious food. Call it my little plates of heaven.

“Our Kitchen” Food Blog

The passionate foodie/chef people at Fisher Paykel shared their love for food and cooking in a blog aptly named Our Kitchen. I love offices that cook, just like we do here at Squeaky.

BTW, my boss, Anthony Del Monte, just handed me a nice plate of beautifully-layered, gourmet BLT sandwich. Yumm!!

NYC Restaurant Week: ‘Til July 31

Go! Mangia! Eat! Enjoy! Lunch is $24, dinner is $35.

I should too because seriously, I don’t even have to mention my order over the phone because my delivery people know me so well.

Mini-wave

This is too cute! Heinz collaborated with microwave expert Gordon Andrews and Stephen Frazer from Frazer Designers and here comes Beanzawave, the world’s smallest microwave. Powered via USB to your laptop, it uses the combination of mobile phone radio frequency to create the heat to cook both on the outside and within in under a minute.

So now you can eat a warm, nutritious super mini-meals without leaving your desk. Of course you can heat up 8 mini-meals in a row if you want. But that’s not the point, is it?

The Dumping Guide

The write up on Barnes & Nobles for Dump ‘Em: How to Break Up with Anyone from Your Best Friend to Your Hairdresser is hillarious. I love the one comment about finally breaking up with her hairdresser of 20 years because the guy eventually died. Touché!

MixMyGranola

Cool container from MixMyGranola, an online store where you can (yes, you’ve guessed it!) mix your own granola. I always like weird food combo so anything that allows me to mix whatever gets a thumbs-up.

Meat Cards

This made my day! I guess you shouldn’t leave home without it, especially if you may be stranded in the middle of nowhere with no food. I wonder if you can order different flavors… like mesquite or honey BBQ. That would be awesome!

Current favorite food sites

• Delicious:Days – nicely laid out and beautiful, fresh photography. Round thumbnails add a nice touch.
• Serious Eats – covers a lot of grounds, with it’s sister-sites Slice, A Hamburger Today, SE: New York and Photograzing.
• Recipe Star – the site aims at “making you rock at cooking”. Who wouldn’t want that? Plus, I love the Bacon Quiz section.
• Waitrose – this UK’s version of FreshDirect has sections on food & entertaining with a hefty resource section
• PointClickHome – from Elle Decor and Metropolitan Home, has some very appetizing food photos.
• Kraft food & family – surprising new section from the trusted brand. Very nice & robust.

Cilantro!

Finally, someone who loves cilantro as much as I do: F*** Yeah Cilantro, a blog dedicated to all things cilantro and its awesomeness. It’s juvenile and yes, I laughed at some of the posts. You just have to applaud the passion. I knew I wasn’t alone in this world…

Food note: I love, love, love cilantro. Lovely colors, fantastic taste, just that right flourish on top of your food making it look finish and tempting. The smell is a love/hate thing, but of course, I love it.

Via Serious Eats

Tweet this bun!

BakerTweet from POKE on Vimeo.

Hot cakes flying out of the oven… and Poke gets to spread the sweet, sweet joy across the Twittersphere.

How about making one that will tweet your friends when you overdosed on sugar or ice cream or just getting fatter by stuffing your face. It will be called HaterTweet. I’d love that!