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Well Fed Buff: Perfect instant noodles
This Well Fed Buff is a tad bit of a cheat, in that, despite the title, the noodles aren't exactly the centerpiece of the recipe. That's okay though, because this is a favorite of mine and I make it all the time. Just because you may (or may not) be getting older and your nutritional needs have outgrown plain instant ramen noodles doesn't mean you have to give them up. You just have to jazz them up a bit! This is essentially a "we need to use the stuff in the fridge before it goes bad" kind of thing, so feel free to add and substitute your own preferred veggies as desired. This recipe only takes 20 or so minutes to make, and it tastes delicious.
New Microsoft app brings recipes and grocery lists to your Windows Phone
The Bing Food & Drink app for Windows 8.1 is handy if you need to look up a recipe on your PC, but what if you're searching for ingredients at the store? Never fear, as Microsoft has quietly released a beta Windows Phone version of its culinary software. Much like its desktop counterpart, the mobile port will let you both search for great meals and create grocery lists. Microsoft makes full use of its own platform by syncing selections with the desktop app, putting a Live Tile on the home screen and making it easy to share favorites. Lumia-toting amateur chefs will want to grab the app today from the Windows Store.
Well Fed Buff: Lunar Festival Fortune Cookies
Happy Lunar Festival! Need a little pick-me-up in between visiting your elders? Make your own fortune cookies! There's nothing like making your own Azeroth-related fortunes; our favorites are based on the coins of the Dalaran fountain or the humorous Twitter antics of Angryorc. Just make sure you get the fortunes all written up and ready to go before you start baking, because making fortune cookies is a fast-paced, hands-on project that will demand your full attention as you cut, bake, shape and cool the little guys in quick succession.
Well Fed Buff: Out of the frying pan and into the bacon
Photo: cookbookman17 Vegans and vegetarians, this is not the Well Fed Buff for you. This week, it's time to talk Thick-Cut Bacon. I loved bacon as a child, but once I had to cook it myself, I swore off. Popping, sizzling grease and I don't play well together, and so (I naively believed) that was that. But then last year, it was out of the frying pan and into the bacon when I discovered the wonderful world of alternative preparation methods -- that, plus a bunch of really good recipes (like Half a Lovely Apple ... With Bacon) that simply beg to be made on a regular basis. Got a hankering for some bacon? Let's go over the best ways to cook up some bacon with no fuss (and even with very little mess) and then dig in to a couple of delicious recipes from fellow WoW Insider readers.
New collection tracking feature on Wowhead
Our friends at Wowhead hav just announced the launch of a new site feature that should make many players very happy indeed: a collection tracker! You can now use Wowhead to track your characters' possession of pets, mounts, titles, achievements, and recipes. The new feature was green lit thanks to the popularity of their recently-implemented quest-tracking feature, which has been a big hit. The new collection tracking feature includes options to exclude items that fall into certain categories -- the example used by Wowhead is that of pets only available from WoW's Collector's Editions. In this way you can hide any items you may not be interested in pursuing, either by blanking out entire categories of items (i.e. exclude anything Horde-exclusive), or you can manually select individual items to exclude as well. Hop on over to Wowhead's announcement page to check it out!
IFTTT now lets iOS users automate their location
IFTTT (If This Then That) is a handy online service capable of connecting various apps and devices together and running automated tasks (or "recipes") that you'd normally find mundane and time-wasting. It's been around for a couple years and has built up a strong network of different services ranging from social networks like Instagram and Twitter to cloud services like Dropbox and Box.net, and plenty of stuff in between. One thing that's been missing, however, is the ability to automate your location; fortunately, IFTTT is introducing the iOS Location Channel to fill that void (well, for iOS devices anyway). The new channel leverages location information from your GPS, cellular, WiFi or iBeacon data and uses it as a "trigger" -- something that initiates an automated action. For example, you can instruct IFTTT to send a text message to your loved ones as you're arriving at your destination, or get an email when one of your Foursquare friends checks in somewhere near your apartment. If you use a Philips Hue, have it do a crazy light show to announce your upcoming arrival. There are plenty more ideas where those came from, but you'll have to go take a look at IFTTT's full listing of services and come up with a few clever recipes of your own as well.
Well Fed Buff: Dalaran Applesauce
You think I have a thing for apples, do you? It's autumn, people -- pick 'em while the pickin's good. Because you know what goes great with a meal of Half a Lovely Apple ... With Bacon but before Mini Candied Apples? A heaping serving of spicy, fragrant Dalaran Applesauce. The win to this encounter is the magical item we equip, the Dalaran Apple Bowl -- otherwise known as your slow cooker. It makes simmering fresh, homemade applesauce so magically simple that you'll find yourself grabbing a bag of honeycrisp apples every time you go to the store. Seriously, you do next to nothing, and the achievements just roll in. And the smell, oh, the smell ... Your whole house will smell like fresh-baked apple pie. In fact, we prefer to eat our Dalaran Applesauce hot like apple pie filling from tiny ramekins, although it's delicious in its more traditional chilled form as well.
Well Fed Buff: Mini Candied Apples
'Tis the season for candied apples! Toffee apples, caramel apples -- soft, gooey caramel wrapped around a crisp fall apple. It's the perfect blend of tart crunch inside a delectable, chewy wrapping. But I haven't always been a fan. Candied apples are just so big. Undeniably delicious for the first few bites, these sugar bombs always devolve into a sticky, gooey mess that's too much to finish and too messy to set down. Great -- now I'm walking around holding a stick with a gooey, half-chewed apple. Treated and then tricked, for sure. This Hallow's End, I'm going to solve this problem for you: We're going to flex this apple raid down to size with miniature candied apples. They're quick and easy to make, and they're quick and easy to eat. And because this is the Well Fed Buff, after all, we can guarantee if you spend at least 10 seconds eating one, you'll gain 200 parry for one hour -- yep, you'll devour the apple off that little stick just that fast. And then you get to play with the little stick afterwards. New offhands for all!
Well Fed Buff: Delicious Chocolate Cake
Delicious Chocolate Cake has an infamous history in WoW. Back in The Burning Crusade, this recipe dropped randomly as a prize in the goody bag you got for completing the cooking dailies in Shattrath. It had a pretty low drop rate, so cooking completionists would often try agonizingly every day for months to earn the recipe. I got it myself right toward the end of the expansion, which made me very happy until I learned that it was also available from the far-simpler Northrend cooking dailies. Oh well. In real life, I have not been a particular fan of chocolate cake. Typical chocolate cake is usually too dry or too sweet for me, and given a choice, I almost always prefer a yellow cake or carrot cake. Then I found this recipe. It's original name was "Million Dollar Chocolate Cake" and I discovered it years ago on a cooking blog that has long since disappeared into the aether. This is hands down the best chocolate cake I have ever eaten. The recipe is a bit involved, but take my word, it is worth it.
Well Fed Buff: Half a Lovely Apple ... With Bacon
As Ella in Valley of the Four Winds might say, "How are you today, WoW Insider readers?" Those Azerothian apples may be lovely indeed -- but everything's better with bacon. Ella's right about the satisfactions of sharing an apple, but you may find you don't especially want to share this version. We're going to show you how to skill up your apple-baking technique with one of the shortest, simplest, most delectable recipes we've ever run on Well Fed Buff.
Well Fed Buff: Way of the Brew
Editor's Note: Please consume responsibly; these beer recipes are for Way of the Brew fans age 21 and above. Who knew that there was such a widespread culture and fandom for homebrewing? It took me until last year to discover that brewing your own beer, ale or mead isn't difficult at all, and you can get started without a burdensome investment of time or equipment. Equally delightful has been the discovery that I already know quite a few homebrewers; the hobby seems to be a natural fit among those of us who enjoy fantasy, gaming, roleplaying, and related revelry. I knew all things ale would be a natural fit for Well Fed Buff, but I also knew I wouldn't have room here for a homebrewing play-by-play. Instead, we can cover how to get started with homebrewing, review some seasonal craft brews, and talk about cooking with beer -- amusingly enough, an accurate reflection of the reasons you might want to pursue the Way of the Brew in Azeroth. "Note that unlike the other ways, this one doesn't provide a specific stat and the only thing that gives stats are the banquets," writes Wowhead commenter Bardiches. "It's honestly for anyone who loves being drunk or wants to make some cheap banquets." ... Umm, we're all a bunch of WoW: Mists of Pandaria fans who love to cook, eat, enjoy a brew, and game around here. Perfect! What I've got for you this week, then, is a basic roadmap for anyone interested in learning more about homebrewing. Once we get that ball rolling, I'll share a few seasonal brews worth investigating this fall and divulge my not-so-secret secret of savory slow cooking. Join us in the comments afterwards to discuss your own favorite homebrew advice and share your favorite ale-augmented recipes.
Daily iPad App: Green Kitchen offers healthy recipes in a great-looking app
Green Kitchen was just featured on Apple's best of 2012 list -- it's a really well-designed cooking app with a focus on healthy recipes. It's all based on the Green Kitchen Stories blog, so looking through the content over there will show you what the app is all about: Healthy, interesting food. It's not necessarily the more traditional staples, so if you just want a heads up on how to cook some simple items, you should probably look elsewhere (I personally really like the How to Cook Everything app if you want a more straightforward cooking experience). But the Green Kitchen app does have some good and interesting ideas, and everything is organized well. Once you choose a recipe (which you can find either in a list or by browsing through big pictures in the app itself), you get an interactive list of instructions that clearly guides you through each step of the recipe. And throughout the whole process, everything is very clean and smartly put together. The app's big drawback is that while it is fun to browse through big pictures of the recipes, if you're looking for something specific (like a certain dietary restriction or a central ingredient), you just have to drill down through the recipes in there. There aren't a lot of recipes, either, especially compared to bigger and older apps. But more are being added all the time, and again, this isn't a traditional cookbook: It's more a nice list of options when you want to try cooking something different. Green Kitchen is available in the App Store now for US$3.99.
Evernote Food 2.0 delivers the goodies for foodies
The busy elves at Evernote have a new gift just in time for holiday noshing. It's a major upgrade to Evernote Food, which the company is describing as "Your entire food world in a single app." Evernote Food 2.0 should be hitting the App Store right about now, and it's been impressively bulked up in terms of capability. Previously, the app just had a "My Meals" feature to save details about your favorite caloric intake sessions, but now there's a lot more to love: An "Explore Recipes" tab provides access to a huge variety of searchable recipes. The "My Cookbook" tab organizes your saved recipes in one place. A "Restaurants" tab lets you not only search for nearby restaurants, but save a list of places you want to try. The "My Meals" tab lets you share the details (date, location, people, photos and notes) of your food experiences. %Gallery-173790% As you can see from the gallery images, there's also a new feature that everyone will love -- iPad compatibility. Evernote Food 2.0 is free, so get it loaded before those holiday mega-meals. A video with all of the highlights is embedded below.
UNOWHY brings its haute cuisine QOOQ tablet to the US for $399, teaches you how to fondue
If the PR is to be believed, French outfit UNOWHY (oh yes, really) has already taken its native Gaul by storm with its latest cuisine-focused tablet, dubbed QOOQ. (Actually, the 10.1-incher's formal title is "la tablette QOOQ," merci beaucoup!) And now the company's ready to translate the kitchen-based tech for stateside tastes, shipping the splashproof tab with English menus and instructions for $399. Originally shown off at this past CES, the unique device packs a 1GHz dual-core processor, runs a custom OS atop the Linux kernel and comes with over 1,000 recipes from top chefs (no, not the Bravo kind) pre-installed. There's also an optional subscription package for power users that'll run about $9.90/mo or $99/year for access to additional interactive content and updates. You can learn more at the source below if you're the culinary kind -- though we're willing to bet the far more frugal option is to download a cooking app and call it a day. The choice is yours.
Bad Piggies gets a ... cookbook
As if our recent exploration of the Angry Birds universe didn't convey the franchise's might, here's another sign. A Bad Piggies cookbook is available. Actually, the hardcover, real-life version of Angry Birds: Bad Piggies' Egg Recipes was out for the holiday season last year, long before the Bad Piggies game was ever announced. But now that the game itself is out, Rovio has decided to take the book digital, and so you can now buy the cookbook on the iPad as an interactive app. For a limited time, the book is debuting at a price of just 99 cents, so grab it quick if you like. Rovio has reached out its Angry Birds claws into yet another merchandising realm -- where to next?
Send Instagram to Dropbox for a cool Apple TV screen saver
Just recently, I posted about the Instacube, a Kickstarter project that allows you to more easily show off your great (or at least well-filtered) photography work on Instagram. But it turns out you don't need a whole cube to do that. With the proper tweaking of IFTTT (a tool we at TUAW also love), you can set up Instagram images to display on your Apple TV's screensaver, making for a fun party trick or just a cool way to show off the pictures you've been taking. All you need to do is save your Instagram pictures to Dropbox, and then share that folder out to the Apple TV, and boom, instant streaming screensaver. There are a few hitches, unfortunately, and the biggest one is that your Apple TV won't automatically pull in new images, so you'll have to sync folders after you add (or remove) any images yourself to see new pictures. If you want to pull in pictures from more than one Instagram user, you'll also have to set up multiple IFTTT recipes, one for each user you want to watch. But the good news is that you can pull in from any other photo feeds as well -- maybe a better solution, to show off pictures from a party, for example, would be to use a Flickr tag so that anyone can post to it. At any rate, it's cool idea for sure. IFTTT is a really powerful tool, and hookups like this can really give your Apple devices to some new and interesting uses. [via MacStories]
Lord of the Rings Online explains crafting changes coming with Riders of Rohan
One of the major issues facing crafters in Lord of the Rings Online is that gathering professions don't line up with crafting professions. Leveling up a non-gathering skill takes more resources than you gather while leveling up the appropriate gathering skill. The newest developer diary explains how Riders of Rohan addresses this problem with new "processing" recipes that allow you to turn a resource into shavings, which can subsequently be turned back into the original item. That's not the only change coming to crafting with the new expansion. Players can expect two full sets of armor for the crafting, one at level 80 and one at level 85. There are also new crafting instances, new crafted relics, and a new rank added on to craft guild reputations. If you like to get your hands dirty with crafting in Lord of the Rings Online, swing on over to the developer diary for the full details.
Get a job in Final Fantasy XIV
With patch 1.21, players in Final Fantasy XIV will have a new way to improve their characters. Leveling a class won't be changing, but the job system will allow characters to reach the full potential of a given discipline. The latest preview goes into depth about the process of unlocking and improving each of the new jobs, with each job requiring a primary class at level 30 and a supplementary class at level 15. Once a job is unlocked, players can equip the job's Soul Crystal to switch to the specific job. This will allow the player access to job-specific skills, but it will also carry limitations -- players will be limited in the number of actions that can be equipped from other classes, and they can only use actions from specific classes. If you're more of the crafty sort, of course, you won't be getting in on the new jobs, but you will be able to take advantage of the newly streamlined recipes for accessories, food, and medicines. So there's a little something for everyone.
QOOQ tablet gets a dual-core bilingual upgrade: We get our chef on (video)
Tablets need to specialize or die -- at least that's what the folks behind QOOQ are hoping. As an accompaniment to its cooking-centric tablet of yesteryear, it's announced a new upgraded tablet for 2012. With a dual-core processor clocked at 1GHz, the 10.1-inch tablet is now speaking several languages - and one of them's now English. While the tablet's still running on its own platform, there's still social network and streaming media access. There's a plethora of ports including USB and ethernet, with space for an SD card too. The QOOQ is set to arrive in the US in Q2 and is priced at an ambitious $400, with recipe updates delivered through a subscription system that costs extra.Roll up your sleeves, because our hands-on is right after the break.
Scarlet Legacy raises level cap, adds new dungeons and crafting recipes
GamesCampus is raising the level cap on its Scarlet Legacy MMO, and players can now strive for level 55 while toodling around the martial arts title's fantastical setting. The game's latest content update also boasts 35 new skills, a new story quest line, and more than 400 new items (including epic gear that is designed to do away with cookie-cutter avatars). GamesCampus has also added more than 130 new crafting recipes and several new maps. Windy Cliff and Windy Valley are designed for players between levels 51 and 55, and the new Altar of Wind dungeon is ideal for folks between 47 and 50. More info, as well as the client download, is available via the official Scarlet Legacy website. [Source: GamesCampus press release]
