CULINARY OCCASIONS

Free Slurpee day has been celebrated on July 11 (7/11) for years, but this year 7-Eleven has added another day for Slurpee giveaways. Tomorrow, on May 23rd, everyone is welcome to enjoy 7.11-ounces of Slurpee on the house between 11 a.m. until 7 p.m. at participating 7-Eleven stores across the U.S.

The extra SlurpFree Day is to celebrate 7-Eleven's first Slurpee branded, sugar-free frozen drink, Slurpee Lite. Slurpee™ Lite Fanta Sugar-Free Mango, has been available since the beginning of May. The 8-ounce slurpee is sweetened with Splenda and flavored by Fanta, making it a low of 20 calories!

CULINARY OCCASIONS

Ribalta, the “institution of higher pizza,” brings pizza connoisseurs a slice of heaven through their authentic Italian ingredients. Ribalta uses imported Italian-milled flour and 8-year-old yeast generated from an Italian mother dough for each pie. Besides Italian ingredients, Ribalta utilizes their three ovens to create 25 different pizzas, all cooked in their appropriate oven determined by style. Want to learn the science behind the perfect slice? Sign up for a class at the world renowned pizza school, Scuola Italiana Pizzaioli, which calls Ribalta its home away from home. If all of that won’t satisfy head pizzaiolos Max Bruno and Massimiliano Crocetti desire to bring New York diners a pure and complete Neapolitan pizza experience, flying over a master pizzaiolo directly from Naples for four days might do the trick.

DAILY BITES

Buying fruit juice at the supermarket can be a surprisingly complicated task. The "100% Juice" label is not as straightforward as it seems. Legally, it means that everything in the bottle came from a fruit or vegetable, but not necessarily the fruit of vegetable you think you're chuggin.

Well, this innovative juice box won't leave you wondering. Brazilian fruit juice company, Camp Nectar, hired ad agency AGE Isobar's to create a marketing campaign to underscore their all-natural products. Together, they came up with a concept to grow fruits in the shape of juice boxes.

LIQUID COURAGE

The craft beer revolution has been making major waves in the bar and restaurant world for over a decade but what about the small, craft distilleries that create fine, handcrafted spirits? We’re talking about the small batch bourbons, vodkas, mezcal and other liqueurs being made by dedicated craftsmen and craftwomen. These operations aren’t bootleggers using bathtubs or a makeshift still deep in the woods but rather expert artisans creating unique spirits…legally.

The Indie Spirits Expo, a part of the Manhattan Cocktail Classic, is dedicated completely to these small batch operations. You won’t find Bacardi at this event and it’ll make you reconsider your drink choice the next time you order a cocktail. Joonbug attended the expo, held at Crimson nightclub, on Tuesday. We learned a ton about the process, ingredients, history, and some very interesting people while at the event. Below you’ll find some of our favorite spirits we sampled along with some of their cocktail recipes for your drinking pleasure.

DELICIOUS DEBUTS

This morning The Squeeze debuted their first bio-diesel food truck made from a repurposed UPS delivery truck. The Squeeze is a wellness and beauty lifestyle company that serves living and organic foods and drinks at catered events throughout New York City. CEO and Chef Karliin Brooks, a former model, lifetime vegan, and animal advocate, wanted to add a healthy and fun alternative to the street food and food truck phenomenon. Starting at 10 a.m., patrons who order a tasty cold-pressed juice, shake, smoothie, or beverage will receive a bonus treat, coconut truffles or a sweet treat.

CULINARY OCCASIONS

Between pigging out at the Hamageddon pavilion, traversing The Market and all its artisanal goods, and getting your sugar fix at the Sweets Circus at this weekend’s Great Googa Mooga Festival in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park (May 19 & 20) you'll find amazing seminars and demonstrations given by the industry’s leading professionals. If you were lucky enough to snag a general admission ticket—if you didn’t make the cut, don’t feel bad, tickets sold out incredibly fast—here’s a rundown of the some of the not-to-be-missed foodie happenings at the festival.

CULINARY OCCASIONS

Hummus is a healthy culinary staple in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cuisine that has been enjoyed in the area for a millennia. Used as either an appetizer dip or as an addition in many popular dishes, hummus is simply prepared from the same ingredients used in the earliest hummus recipes recorded in 13th Century Egypt. Hummus is prepared from cooked and mashed chickpeas, tahini (sesame seed paste), olive oil, fresh squeezed lemon juice, and a dash of salt. In Lebanon, they love hummus so much that in May of 2010 they set the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest dish of hummus ever prepared. 300 chefs came together in a village near Beirut to make a batch of hummus that weighed approximately 23,000 pounds!

RESTAURANT 101

When deciding where to go in New York City, many factors influence your decision. What are you in the mood for? Want to go somewhere fancy or casual? Are you trying to impress someone? Sometimes, we just want to eat good food. Danny Meyer’s restaurant empire gives us many options and you know wherever you go, service will be fantastic and the food will be produced to satisfy. If you want to sit in the park and have a burger, you can go to Shake Shack or if you are looking for some live jazz and barbeque with an urban feel, you could visit Blue Smoke.

RESTAURANT 101

Reynards

80 Wythe Ave. at N. 11th Brooklyn, NY

Located in the Wythe Hotel, Reynards just opened and is now serving breakfast, lunch and dinner from their wood-fired oven and grill. From the same people that brought you Marlow & Sons, Andrew Tarlow and Sean Rembold, Reynards is a bigger space than their other restaurants. Come watch the cooks prepare your food from their open kitchen.

LIQUID COURAGE

When it comes to wine, some prefer white or red, while others enjoy Rose during the warmer months. There is a wide range of varietals and regional wines to choose from when you go to a wine shop; some are biodynamic, organic, sustainable, from small, rural European producers while others have a high alcohol percentage. We all have our own way of determining what wine is well-suited for us. Wine basics tells us that we should drink Riesling when we eat Thai food and have a big bodied Bordeaux when having a meal at a steakhouse. What if what we prefer goes against the food pairing and seasonal norms? Well, if you are a red drinker and worrying about how the heat might affect your palate, we have a couple of suggestions for reds that you should sip while soaking in the sunny weather.

DAILY BITES

Bravo has taken one part cooking show and one part travel show to bring viewers a culinary whirlwind spanning the entire globe. The network’s new culinary competition series, Around the World in 80 Plates, takes twelve chefs around the world to cook, learn about unfamiliar cultures and their cuisine, and most likely stab each other in the backs with their perfectly sharpened chef knives. The combination of Top Chef skill, the Amazing Race stamina, and Survivor strategy is sure to satisfy the hunger of even the most discerning reality TV junky.