This post is spawned from a weird radio commercial I heard on the way to the office this morning. In it, a friendly male voice plainly says “In Minnesota, it is illegal to cross state lines with a duck on your head.”

I wondered if it was still illegal if the duck in question was cooked.

This led me to think about other food laws and bans that are currently in place in America. The foie gras ban in California for 2012. This whole business with the Roquefort tariff — where cheese lovers will soon pay a 300-percent markup for the cave-aged, French bleu – is a current hot-button topic, too. (The L.A. Times recently reported on a delay in the tariff)

I started searching for other serious food bans and tariffs, but then realized that exposing our country’s strange food-related laws would be more fun. Read on, dear readers, and judge for yourself if these are too wacky to be true.

• In Alaska, it’s illegal to give a beer – or any other alcoholic beverage – to a moose.
• Missouri cities can levy a tax to support a band, as long as the city’s mayor plays the piccolo and band members can eat peas with a knife.
• In Greene, N.Y., don’t eat peas and walk backwards down a street during a concert. It’s illegal.
• Clawson, Mich.: There’s an actual law that makes it legal for a farmer to sleep with his animals. (I hope this means “sleep,” as in “catch some Zzs” and not “sleep” as in “sexy time.” Gah.)
• In Texas, if you take more than three sips of beer while standing, you’ve broken the law.
• Connecticut law says that a pickle is officially a pickle only if it bounces.
• To Idaho women in hetero relationships: It’s against state law for your man to give you a box of chocolates that weighs less than 50 pounds. (Cash in, sisters!)
• Residents living in a small town in Colorado may not own chickens, but may own up to three turkeys.
• In Gainesville, Ga., it is illegal to eat chicken with a fork.

Sources: MundayWeb, TurtleZen, The News Journal, Mental Floss, Roadside America.

– Cynthia Furey

Side note: March Madness is a month-long challenge in which I will post Monday through Friday for the entire month. Thank you for reading!

Dim sum is one of those beautiful mid-morning traditions that’s been around for ages in Hong Kong and China. Without getting into its historical traditions (read here for that), I’d like to point out some of its modern traditions. These are the traditional pre-dining hoops you have to jump through before you can taste that char siu bao or nibble on steamed chicken feet.

You must do the following to ensure an excellent dim sum meal:

• 1. Choose a Saturday or Sunday, between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m.
• 2. Drive across town(s) and sit through at least 20 minutes of traffic.
• 3. Arrive at a crowded, strip-mall parking lot.
• 4. Acquire temporary, vulture-like qualities while watching finished diners slip out of their compact spaces. Swiftly maneuver your car into the space before someone else does (trying not to make eye contact with the other guy waiting for the same space). ***
• 5. Take a number from the shrill-voiced hostess standing at the podium with a microphone she doesn’t really need.
• 6. Wait until she shouts your number in both English and Chinese. Three times.
• 7. Wave your number around and cheer — you’ve completed the model and can now begin your excellent meal in a ballroom-like dining space next to a giant fish tank under a glass chandelier.

Unless these lucky-seven steps are completed, you’re going to have a sub-par dim sum meal. Why? Because if you’re at a dim sum restaurant with an empty parking lot and no wait-time, it’s probably not that great (this applies to more than just dim sum). The harder you have to work for your dim sum meal, the better it will be.

*** Regarding driving: If you live in a town/city where you do not need to own a car, transportation to/from dim sum restaurant may include any type of wheel or rail, or walking.

Photos used in this post are from Capital Seafood BBQ & Dim Sum Express, 2700 Alton Parkway, Irvine, Calif. 949-252-8188. Though not the greatest dim sum, it’ll do in a pinch.

– Cynthia Furey

Side note: March Madness is a month-long challenge in which I will post Monday through Friday for the entire month. Thank you for reading!

Oh, the places you’ll go. This set of links is all about what’s going on in the food world outside of our kitchens. Have a good weekend!

A slide show of highlights from the San Francisco International Chocolate Salon last week: Choffy, dutch chocolate cream liqueur and chocolate art. From YumSugar.

• Morimoto, Le Cirque, the Spotted Pig and Melissa’s Produce will be at Yankee Stadium starting next week. (Anyone taking notes, Dodger Stadium? Angel Stadium?) The New York Times
• L.A. eatery Animal lives up to its name with a new dish: Foie Gras Loco Moco, with beef, rice, teriyaki sauce, a slab of foie gras, Spam and quail egg. Tasting Table via Eater LA.
• Gourmet explores “Eight Great Rock Venues with Great Food,” written by a former member of a British rock band.
• Andrew Knowlton, aka the BA Foodist, writes five tips for handling a bad waiter.
• Dorie Greenspan is a guest at cookbook author Patricia Well’s dinner table in Paris.

– Cynthia Furey

Side note: March madness is a month-long challenge in which I will post Monday through Friday for the entire month. Thank you for reading!

Hey all! Here’s my latest Food 101 column, published in The Orange County Register’s print edition today. It’s not on the OCR site, so I’ve placed it here. Enjoy!

Go for croque
By CYNTHIA FUREY
Special to the Register

Not many can resist the call of buttery, crunchy sandwiches oozing with Gruyère and piled with lacy slices of Black Forest ham – especially the ones that require a knife and fork. These lunchtime and brunch-time French staples, called croque-madame and croque-monsieur, are simple ham and cheese sandwiches with toppings to dress them up. A bonus: The sandwiches can easily be prepared at home, usually for a fraction of the cost that a single croque would fetch at any restaurant.

Croque-madame and croque-monsieur are toasted in the oven so the ham heats through and the cheese melts into a blanket of gooey bliss. Croque-madame has an egg on top, its yolk serving as a sauce. Ditch the egg and ladle on some Mornay sauce, and you have a croque-monsieur. Because there is little preparation time, you can make both croque versions without spending all afternoon over your stove.

Traditionally, croque-madame’s egg is served sunny side up, but an egg cooked over easy works just as nicely. Part of the fun of eating a croque-madame is piercing the yolk with a fork and watching it dribble over the sandwich and rest in a puddle underneath. The other fun part is sopping up the puddle with the sandwich bread.

For the croque-monsieur, you will be making a Mornay sauce, which is essentially a béchamel sauce with cheese added. A béchamel is a milk- or cream-based sauce. It’s considered one of the five classical “mother sauces” – the others are Espagnole, made with brown stock; velouté, white stock; hollandaise, butter; and tomato sauce. With the addition of other ingredients, hundreds of sauces are derived from these five.

Start the béchamel by making a blond roux, made of equal parts butter and flour. Heat this mixture until the flour’s starchy flavor cooks away, leaving behind a nutty smell and flavor and an ivory or off-white mixture. The roux will help thicken the sauce once the milk is added, and the little bit of Gruyère added at the end will transform the béchamel into a Mornay. Once the sauce is ladled onto the sandwich, an additional bit of cheese goes on top to give that gorgeous, bubbly look when the sandwich is heated under the broiler.

You can serve these sandwiches with a spring salad, with french fries or as appetizers: Cut the sandwiches into smaller servings, skewer with a toothpick or wooden skewer and place on a tray. (Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for recipe.)

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So there’s a story making its rounds through many of the major news outlets right now claiming that read meat is harmful to your health. In fact, a headline from the San Francisco Chronicle grimly reads, “Study claims red meat can be deadly.” The lead:

“Eating red meat increases the chances of dying prematurely, according to a large federal study that offers powerful new evidence that a diet that regularly includes steaks, burgers and pork chops is hazardous to your health.”

By “regularly,” the National Cancer Institute study means “the equivalent of about a small hamburger every day.” It followed more than 500,000 people ages 50 to 71 over the span of 10 years. Those who ate meat “regularly” during the span were “30 percent more likely to die during the 10 years they were followed.” (click on this link to read exact numbers and other details.)

The problems I have with this study — thought it does present some useful information — is the “regularly” part. Does the general population really eat red meat daily? What if the study was on fish: If you ate tuna every single day, would you suffer the same (or similar) diseases as the red-meat-eating population? (Jeremy Piven’s mercury poisoning, anyone? Ha.) Do these findings reveal anything about people who eat red meat in moderation?

– Cynthia Furey

Side note: March madness is a month-long challenge in which I will post Monday through Friday for the entire month. Thank you for reading!

If ever I opened a restaurant, it would be modeled after the Ramos House Café.

The San Juan Capistrano, Calif.-eatery is as romantic as it gets. It’s nestled in the heart of the city’s Spanish-influenced downtown area where kitschy shops share narrow roads with tiny, 19th-century homes built by early settlers whose future generations still live there today. This is the kind of place you bring your out-of-town guests to fall in love with California — if they haven’t already.

Being there is like traveling back in time when everything was made from scratch, from food to clothes – when nary a homeowner’s association existed to send these residents angry letters about unruly gardens or wrong choice of paint color. Here, beauty is achieved without conformity.

The Ramos House itself was built in 1881. Chef/owner/CIA grad John Humphreys lives there, cooking meals out of his home (in an updated commercial kitchen) to diners he serves on his covered patio. The bathroom is a converted outhouse, while herbs used are grown on site.

Humphreys’ food is of the southern variety, like the kind I imagine you’d eat on the wraparound porch of a Georgia plantation home. Buttermilk biscuits, citrus compound butters and jam are made by hand. Dishes are homey, and some are given a California twist that lightens the fare — like the macaroni and cheese with artichokes and lemon.

Beignets are pillowy, with textbook-perfect brunoise of apple (We should expect nothing less from a CIA grad). The crab hash, dotted with crispy bacon, scrambled eggs and sweet potato curls is my go-to. And if it’s on the menu, a slice of huckleberry coffee cake is a great way to start or end a meal. (Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for more.)

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On paper, the Vietnamese language fools those not familiar with it into thinking that the language is monosyllabic, and I don’t blame them — not one Vietnamese word appears to stretch farther than a single syllable.

Looks are deceitful, however, as whole Vietnamese words are actually broken into smaller, monosyllabic morsels, seemingly to make them more palatable for the reader. The word Vietnam is an example. In English, Vietnam is written as a three-syllable word. In Vietnamese, it becomes Viet Nam, hacked in half, as if someone had found the joint between the syllables and butchered them cleanly apart. The syllables are meant to be read together even though space forces them apart.

A lot of Vietnamese food is served like its language. After visiting Pho Bac in Irvine last week, I wasn’t surprised to find my bun cha gio thit nuong cut into pieces, just like the name of the dish itself. Egg rolls, a pork cutlet, and even vermicelli noodles were like little monosyllabic bites, coming together to form a complete meal, yet also making sense when chopped apart.

I wonder if this thought has ever crossed my grandfather’s mind, if he has any idea that the way he cleavers a whole chicken to make it easier to eat is much like the way his native language cleavers words into syllables to make them easier to read.

Pho Bac, 4250 Barranca Parkway, Irvine, Calif. 92604. 949-857-8808.

– Cynthia Furey

Side note: March madness is a month-long challenge in which I will post Monday through Friday for the entire month. Thank you for reading!

It’s Friday, which means it’s time for some link love. This edition is brought to you by Gumduck, a piece of gum we spied years ago that reminded us of a rubber duckie. Have a good one!

Having trouble eating with chopsticks? Whip out this nifty invention whenever you need a little help.

• In case you haven’t seen this resignation letter on a cake yet, here it is.
• Chef Grant Achatz (Alinea) has started blogging for The Atlantic this month. Check out the “Back of the House” for some of his insights on molecular gastronomy, and this year’s Madrid Fusion.
• Erickson blog/Cooking Single offers a recipe for a raspberry tartelette for one. Finally, a dessert recipe that isn’t meant to share.
• Seen on Tastespotting: A cute “ham”burger lunch.
• Got tomatoes, salt, sugar, vinegar and allspice? Great! Now you can make homemade ketchup.
• Amanda’s Cookin shows us how to make our own powdered sugar. Who knew it was so easy?
• A how-to video from Gourmet on how to buy and serve absinthe.

– Cynthia Furey

Side note: March madness is a month-long challenge in which I will post Monday through Friday for the whole month. Thank you for reading!