Best of YouTube: Blumenthal Part II: Bacon and Egg and Liquid Nitrogen

Heston Blumenthal - Bacon & Egg Ice Cream
Uploaded by lesterfontayne onto YouTube, January 11, 2011
From "How To Cook Like Heston," Channel Four

Background reading on the restaurant whence it was served: "Mix snail porridge, sardine sorbet and you have a Fat Duck" [Guardian], by Richard Jinman (April 19, 2005)

GOOP: The Hunt for the Perfect Academy Award Attire

In her serving of GOOP from the week of March 22nd, Gwyneth Paltrow generously offers an insight into the grand and complicated process of selecting a dress and of embarking on her final preparations for the Academy Awards back on February 26th.

THIS year she chose a white dress with cape by the designer Tom Ford, and it was surprisingly flattering and unusual and to my recollection well-received by armchair and proper critics. (It also appeared, in near-identical form, in the designer's Fall-Winter 2012 collection.)

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Illustration: Irises, by Vincent van Gogh (Rijksmuseum)
via Wikimedia Commons
[BEFORE she decided on her final ensemble on the day of the Oscars, Paltrow tried out a cuff by Anna Hu "inspired by Van Gogh's painting, Irises, and [. . .] made up of garnets, emeralds, sapphires and diamonds in the same colors as those of the painting." This could in fact refer to any of several still-lives of irises by van Gogh. (Another, 'orchid' cuff "was inspired by Monet's color palette and designed while listening to Chopin.")]

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