Just yesterday, a NYC maple syrup mystery was solved. For several months now, there has been a mysterious smell over Manhattan that's been identified as maple syrup-like. Scientists in New Jersey and New York examined chemical registries, air samples, weather reports and 311 call logs. So what is the cause of this stink? Mayor Bloomberg states - New Jersey.

Frutarom factory in North Bergen is responsible for what the New York Times calls an "aromatic mystery". Mayor Bloombery assured reporters yesterday that the smell is harmless. The factory produces this smell on nights when it processes fenugreek seeds. To see what these seeds look like, check out AOL's coverage on the story. So, what's the deal with these seeds?

Fenugreek seeds are often used as a spice in Indian cuisine, in particular curry. Interestingly, in the U.S., fenugreek is often used as a flavor in industrial less expensive maple syrups. In the Middle East, it's used in many sweets. And, in Egypt, it's made into a tea and sold at coffee shops. For me, what began as an intriguing story over a syrup mystery has spurred an interest in discovering this aromatic spice and herb.

Each many Friday afternoons, I sort through the list of recipes, newspaper articles and blog posts that I've bookmarked over the previous week (or two) in order to dish up a tasty assorted eight. Here's the selection this week:

• Several weeks ago, Amy made Franks & Beans and I just haven't been able to get them out of my mind.
• We all have beloved kitchen tools that serve us well over the years. In this fun little post on Simmer Til Done, Marilyn says goodbye to her oven mitt.
• Food Networks stars immortalized in pancakes?
• Trix Are For Kids makes Lara Bars at home. Easy, cheap and you avoid any possible contact with contaminated peanut butter.
• Love the taste of roasted garlic, but can't quite seem to manage to make it successfully in the oven? CNET's Appliance and Kitchen Gadgets blog introduces us to the counter-top garlic roaster.
• Need a romantic dessert for your sweetie? Bake up a cake in this silicone cake pan that spells out LOVE.
• Did you know that Thin Mints make up one quarter of all Girl Scout cookies sold each year?
• I love cakes that get better after a day or two. This Danish Sand Cake from Kate at Warm Olives and Cook Cocktails sounds like it deserves a place in the rotation.

Today, Slashfood wishes prominent food writer, speaker, and celebrity Michael Pollan happy birthday. Pollan's revolutionary and compelling arguments about the direction of the food industry continues to influence both food enthusiasts and politicians. The Omnivore's Dillemma has become somewhat of a bible for gourmands, farmers, and people simply concerned with reforming the modern food chain.

When I think of the trend to eat local I think of Pollan and his impressive impact on American food culture. It's no wonder that on May 8, 2007, the James Beard Foundation named The Omnivore's Dilemma its 2007 winner for the best food writing. Recently, Pollan published In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto which reveals the relationship with what he terms "nutritionism" and the "Western diet." Recently, he is investigating practices of the meat industry.

While Pollan did not initiate the current discourse on food, he has contributed enormously to it. Pollan's work on the food industry and trends in American agriculture have drastically opened up people's minds when thinking about how to eat. In 2002, he received the Reuters World Conservation Union Global Awards in environmental journalism.

Ah, the rich velvety taste of hazelnuts and chocolate! What started as a small Italian company, from the 1940s, has become a world sensation. Indeed, yesterday blogs around the world celebrated World Nutella Day. Based on Piedmontese Gianduja, a chocolate containing about 50 percent almond and hazelnut paste, Nutella was created by Pietro Ferrero in his small patisserie in Alba.

World Nutella Day falls just before Valentine's Day, just in time for people to purchase a bottle and concoct a delicious Nutella-based cake. In fact, World Nutella Day even has it's own website with recipes that range from breads, cakes, and ice creams to savory dishes, like pizza. It turns out that you can have a three course meal with nutella! Check out some of our favorite recipes below:

• Banana and Nutella Crepe
• Butternut Squash Ravioli with Nutella Sauce
• Creme au Nutella and Macarons - This gorgeously seductive dessert is certain to increase your taste for love this Valentine's Day.
  
• Super Simple Nutella Ice Cream
• Nutella Champagne Shooter - Okay, the title of this recipe is misleading. This is an exquisite cocktail made with chocolate and hazelnut liqueurs, and a sparkle of Champagne (no Nutella). It's more of a tribute to Nutella worthy of making the list.
• Nutella Espreso
• Coffee Macarons with Nutella Cream
• Nutella Peanut Butter Chip Cookies
• Creamy Nutella Cheesecake with Chocolate Ganache and Toasted Hazelnuts
• Cinnamon Nutella Cake

There are also a whole bunch of delicious nutella-based treats in our Flickr pool. What are some of your favorites?

In many ways, New York's Inside Park restaurant could not have found a worse time to open. Located in a prime spot on Park Avenue, its first week was overshadowed by the excitement of the United Nations' General Assembly meeting. Moreover, the extensive security surrounding the delegates, many of whom were staying across the street at the Waldorf-Astoria, made it next to impossible for interested patrons to find their way to the restaurant's door. Over the following months, further events, ranging from the Jewish holidays to the downfall of the economy, conspired to tank the fledgling restaurant. Still, Inside Park soldiered on, determined to succeed in a falling market and a restrained city, where a night on the town had started to seem like a luxury, instead of a birthright.

Luckily, Inside Park has a lot going for it. Located in the former community center of New York's St. Bartholomew's Church, the restaurant has undergone a multi-million dollar restoration that tranformed the old, battle-scarred institutional space into an elegant yet intimate venue. From the rafters painted in folk art-inspired designs to the the whitewashed walls that look like they belonged in a monastery, to the dramatic stage that dominates the dining room, the restaurant exudes a kind of grandeur that seems a product of the twentieth, not the 21st century. The addition of a crisp, friendly-yet-efficient wait staff and a thoughtfully-prepared and innovative menu complete the picture.

Still, for all the ambiance of its space and skill of its staff, Inside Park has fought an uphill battle to find customers, particularly with a falling economy dictating that many New Yorkers are more inclined to eat in than go out. Over the past few months, the expensive delicacies that have so long fueled New York's fine dining scene have not been an easy sell. With that in mind, the restaurant has organized a series of "Heritage Cuisine Dinners." Priced at $35 per person, the three course dinners each focus on a distinctive regional food, offering a perfectly prepared meal at a price that is slightly less than that of a standard entree. Although the dinners, including cassoulet, paella, and bouillabase, have humble origins, Chef Matthew Weingarten's emphasis on local ingredients and thoughtful, respectful preparation elevates them to the level of fine dining.

So by now you've probably heard on 60 Minutes or read in numerous news stories that red wine is good for you, and that you have resveratrol to thank for the excuse to tip one back every night. Resveratrol is a powerful antioxidant found in the skin of the grapes that has numerous health benefits, most especially for the heart.

So, really, can you think of a better love gift than a resveratrol necklace, handmade by a scientist-turned-artist in San Francisco? It's the perfect expression of wine, science, and love, all rolled into one piece of jewelry.

I was born in Los Angeles, in the waning months of the seventies. This means that I grew up with easy access to avocados, a Meyer lemon tree in my grandmother's backyard and a Trader Joe's just down the street. Some of my earliest memories of life are intertwined with the Trader Joe's on Colorado Blvd. (in Eagle Rock).

Back in the early days, Trader Joe's was more of a full-service grocery store and had a deli counter where you could order sliced meats and cheeses, as well as made-to-order sandwiches. My father was a huge fan of those sandwiches, and somehow managed to always include reference to Trader Joe's sandwiches in the bedtime stories he told to my sister and me. After my family moved to Portland (before TJ's expanded northward), we'd drive to California at least once a year to visit relative and stock up on precious snacks, juices and dog food from Trader Joe's.

The last two paragraphs were all to say, I love Trader Joe's. My life is inextricably intertwined with the Hawaiian-themed grocery store and so it's no wonder that I was totally charmed by the above video.

I was drawn to Tartelette's latest post about Milk Chocolate and Chestnut Mousse Verrines by the picture. Supreme deliciousness! But the delicious shots of sweetness were only part of the story, because it was all linked into her memories of pre-US life. That got me thinking about foods that remind you of home -- the flavors and tastes that immediately transport you to another time and place, those Thanksgiving-like moments where food becomes much more than a taste-bud experience.

Personally, I never gave up my at-home basics, but thinking back, I realized that I never order that juicy, medium-rare prime rib anymore, teamed up with steak fries and some shrimp scampi. The poor, juicy pink staple was replaced by the rib eye, and all of the other wonderful foods I can't resist. But to taste that prime rib again, well, I'd feel like the kid who loved going out to the local steakhouse and out-eating all the adults. For years, that was my staple. My love. Partially because it was so delicious, and partially because I loved to disprove the doubtful faces that would tell me it was too much food. Oh, the good times I had with that youthful digestion.

But what are the foods that take you back? What smells and tastes feel the most like home?

At Slate, Nina Shen Rastogi answers the question of whether or not it's necessary to thoroughly wash out recyclable containers before tossing them in the bin. As someone who's often tempted to secretly trash empty peanut butter jars rather than spending ten minutes cleaning them with soapy water (I never do, don't worry), I was glad to hear that the answer is, apparently, no. "Recycling facilities are well equipped to handle dirty cans and bottles, so some caked-on tomato sauce and the occasional stray chickpea won't significantly hinder the process," she writes. Still, it's better to rinse out containers, especially smelly ones like mayo and tartar sauce, before binning them, if for nothing else but a courtesy to the workers. Rastogi suggests using a small spatula to swish out most of the residue before giving the containers a quick rinse.

I stumbled across this old post on How to Feed Yourself For $15 a Week from Get Rich Slowly, and it seems particularly apropos for the current financial climate. Tips range from the obvious - don't allow leftovers to go bad, don't eat out - to the thought-provoking. Who would have really considered, for example, that a single small item of pre-packaged snack or junk food, like a candy bar, bag of chips or pack of gum, can cost more than a full homemade meal? Other tips include filling up on oatmeal, buying seasonal produce in bulk, and using powdered milk (that would have to be a true desperation measure, IMHO). Be sure to check out the comments section as well - lots of valuable ideas.

If you don't mind my asking, I'd love to hear how much you spend on groceries. How little do you think you could get by on if you had to? I've spent as little as $20-30 a week, but that when I was living alone and eating a lot of free pizza at work.

Yes, you read that right. Thanks to the modern phenomenon of solutions to problems no one has, there exists concept design for a device which, depending on your viewpoint, is genius, preposterous, useless, or somewhere between the three. Please meet the CHOMPr hamburger grasper, which according to the copy is "a conceptual hamburger grasping device for high-end restaurants." Looking like two coffee tables from a dollhouse from the Eames era held together by those pins Ikea gives you to keep your bookshelf from collapsing, the CHOMPr seeks to ameliorate the conflict between the informal process of eating a hamburger and formal surroundings.

To some, whether you need a hamburger grasping device beyond those at the ends of your arms is sort of, well, silly. But it is very interesting as an etiquette question, because it raises the related issues of utensils as a dimension of table manners and hands as a dimension of utensils. For the former, utensils are a mark of civilization precisely because they aren't your hands, and the development of utensils has followed a trajectory more or less complimentary to the Industrial Revolution, culminating in the Victorian era, when a fully outfitted silver trousseau could top out at 500 pieces and counting.

There's something about this picture that keeps grabbing my eye. I love the color of the table in combination with the ketchup, mustard and bannock-wrapped hot dog. I've never had bannock before, but the recipe that Jeannette (of Everybody Likes Sandwiches) posted seems really quick, easy and versatile. From her blog post, it sounds like a useful quick bread that's good to keep in the rotation.

Thanks Jeannette!

Each Thursday, we round up a selection of scrumptious links from our friends over at YumSugar. Here's what they've got cooking this week.

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• In need of a quick, portable and impressive amuse bouche, PartySugar settled on making a batch of Spanish Cream Cheese Toasts and says they're a real winner.
• Did you hear that Burger King is adding mini breakfast burgers to its morning menu? Called breakfast "shots," they hope to capitalize on the cute factor.
• Northern California is having something of a dry spell, which means that the region's wine production will be affected.
• Nothing like a good veggie stew to lighten up after some heavy eating. Check out this recipe for Indian Cauliflower Stew.
• Maybe you're in need of even more vegetables! What about this Greeniest Salad.
• Disneyland is going green, by reusing the oil from the park's fryers to power the trains that circle the park.
• Inquiring minds want to know, do you prefer to cook alone or with friends and family?