Our friends over at the Academy of Natural Sciences sure have a lot going on this Fall. New exhibits, events, and now a chance to eat farm-raised python.

Um… nom?

On October 27th, the Academy is hosting Cuisine From the Collections, which will invite adventurous foodies to dine on an array of interesting foods not found in most kitchens. A lot of the food is inspired by the collections, and will include options like venison, seaweed, crickets, and worms.

The party is open to adults, and proceeds will benefit the Academy. For more information and tickets, visit the Academy’s website.

Cuisine From the Collections
October 27th, 2012, $75 for Members, $100 for Non
academycuisine.eventbrite.com

Academy of Natural Sciences
1900 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA 19103
(215) 299-1009
www.ansp.org

The festival season is upon us and our beloved Drink Philly kicks things off with its presentation of Phestiv-Ale, a craft beer tasting event to benefit a good cause.

This Saturday, Sept. 8, the spacious Sheet Metal Workers Hall on Columbus Boulevard will fill up for an hours-long tasting session where you can sample “all you care to taste.” The sudsy event, developed by Drink Philly and other local organizations, goes to benefit benefit a local chapter of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.

“Cystic fibrosis is a life-threatening genetic disease that affects nearly 30,000 children and adults in the U.S., but recent advances in treatment and research for a cure have been especially promising, so every penny counts..The Phestiv-Ale event is produced by a committee of folks who both love craft beer and are willing to donate their time to raising money for a good cause,” organizers say.

So here’s what you need to know before you go:

1. Bring cash. Tickets are $45 online from now until the event at PhestiveAle.com, or $55 at the door. But there’s also an opportunity for raffle drawings where you could win American Airline miles, beer towers, autographed sports stuff, Eagles tickets, craft beer and more. Some sweet merchandise is available and all proceeds benefit the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. Plus, everyone is automatically entered to win a brand new kegerator. Your admission ticket also comes with a commemorative glass, and is partially tax deductible.

2. Arrive early. Two previously-advertised sessions are merged into one extravaganza from 3:30-7:30 p.m. Plan to get there a bit early, since this event is sure to be packed! Make sure you get your fill and don’t drag your feet hopping on SEPTA.

3. Have a snack. With more than fifty craft beers on display, including local faves such as Victory, Yards, Troegs, Sly Fox and Weyerbacher, plus out-of-towners like Allagash and Lagunitas, this event promises to be a full-day affair. Even though carnival snacks (and games!) will be offered by Penn’s Landing Caterers, if you’re the type to get pretty hungry, be safe and grab a sandwich ahead of time so you can get down to business – tasting all those sweet brews.

4. Get home safely. Designate a driver and they can get in for just $15 (that includes vouchers for non-alcoholic drinks). Complimentary bus shuttles are available too. Or you can call Uber if you haven’t already signed up, you baller you.

From the little mobile ice cream trikes that stole our hearts, now there’s a brick-and-mortar location where you can get your favourite Philly-style ice cream and then some.

Little Baby’s Ice Cream opened their brand new world headquarters last Friday in Fishtown, sharing space with the forthcoming Pizza Brain museum/restaurant (we’ll have details on that soon!)

The petite space has plenty of personality, with neon squiggles, zig zags and enough 90s-era prints to rival a Nickelodeon studios tour. In short, it’s awesome and you should make the trek.

Founded by quirky owners Pete Angevine, Jeff Ziga and Martin Brown, Little Baby’s churns up creative flavors like Earl Grey Sriracha (I bought a whole pint at the opening) and Cardamum Caramel. You can also get vegan varieties, shakes and ice cream sandwiches, plus limited take-home pints from the new HQ or at the Foodery.

For now, the shop has limited hours until its neighboring eatery opens, but they’re timed perfectly for the after work crowd. And you can still catch one of the three ice cream carts roving around town, with times and locations posted at LittleBabysIceCream.com.

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Our friends over at Drink Philly are throwing a new craft beer festival to benefit the Delaware Valley Chapter of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.  Phestiv-Ale will take place on Saturday, September 8, 2012 at the Sheet Metal Workers Hall on Columbus Boulevard and Washington Avenue.

You’re local faves will be there like Victory, Yards, Troegs, Slyfox, and Weyerbacher along with brews from around the country like Allagash, Lagunitas, and Oskar Blues.  Try your luck in the raffle drawings for American Airline miles, two towers of beer, and autographed sports memorabilia.  Enjoy carnival games, circus acts, and nosh on snacks offered by Penn’s Landing Caterers.  The best part is you’ll be raising funds for cystic fibrosis research and care.

>Tickets are $45 online or $55 at the door for either of two tasting sessions: 12:00pm – 3:00pm or 4:30pm – 7:30pm.  Designated driver tickets are available for an additional $15 per destination. Visit Phestivale.com for tickets and information

Image via Visit Philly

Ice-cream-related dangers are traditionally limited to allergies, brain freeze, and folks who cannot play music and drive a truck at the same time. The presence of liquid nitrogen rarely, if ever, makes that list.

On Saturday, July 7th, that all changes.

As part of their monthly series “Kitchen Science,” scientists at the Franklin Institute will use liquid nitrogen to produce the tastiest summer treat this side of water ice and bacon. An information-filled demonstration will be performed, followed by the all-important taste test and even a chance to vote on favorite flavors. The event is free with museum admission and runs from 1PM until 3PM at the Benjamin Franklin National Memorial.

If the demonstration truly takes off, all future Ben & Jerry’s applicants will be required to hold Master’s degrees in chemical engineering.

Visit the Franklin Institute’s official website for more information.

Summertime in Philly. No matter how much you enjoy your games, comics, science projects, and movies, eventually you’re gonna want to get outside, right? Guess what geeks? It’s hot out there. Like, fighting the Prime Evil in Inferno hot. Little Baby’s Ice Cream to the rescue.

For those unfamiliar (or just plain not hipster enough to be caught in East Kenzo), Little Baby’s Ice Cream has been slinging custom Philadelphia style (no egg) ice cream out of their East Kensington HQ for a while. How custom? Think Birch Beer Vanilla Bean and Vanilla Molasses Goldenberg’s Original Dark Peanut Chews. Up until now, this hometown goodness has only been available via one of the team’s mobile Scoop Service Kiosks and at a couple local watering holes, but with your help that’s all about to change:

Little Baby’s Ice Cream produces Handmade, Small-Batch, Super-Premium Ice Creams and Non-Dairy Ice Creams in the East Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania! We combine one-of-a-kind flavors with attention towards creating a singularly unique atmosphere for our customers! Melting your mind is free!

This we know and we want to share with you: ICE CREAM IS A FEELING!

Currently, we scoop from a Totally Custom and Tricked Out Tricycle, nicknamed the FlavorBlaster One. This is the Galleon of the fleet!, anchoring operations that also include Scoop Service Kiosks at Union Transfer Concert Hall, Morgan’s Pier Outdoor Riverfront Restaurant and Beer Garden, and our World Headquarters Full-Service Ice Cream Bar (opening this summer!).

“But where can we buy your Ice Cream in stores?”

The money from this Kickstarter will be used to front the cost of the reusable (by the consumer) Pint Containers (top lid and bottom container) that we would like to use and the associated packaging materials (design, stickers, labels, etc) necessary to sell our Ice Cream wholesale to fine groceries in the Philadelphia region.

Just think, next time you’re settling in to work your way through a few chapters of Beyond the Wall, you could be doing it with your own delicious pint of Earl Grey Sriracha by your side, and still have a sweet container left over at the end to store all of your D20. Or pogs. Or, well, you get the picture.

Oh yeah. watch that video up there too. Seriously.

The Project: Little Baby’s Ice Cream Funds for Responsible Packaging

Creators: Jeffrey Ziga (confirmed by Shmitten Kitten to be a “mega-babe”), Pete Angevine, and Martin Brown

The Sweet Spot: Ok, for $5 the dudes will call you up and read you a Shakespearean sonnet of your choice. That may be one of the cooler backer rewards we’ve seen here at Geekadelphia. The real goods though? $13 gets you a pint of ice cream in one of the fancy shmancy new containers. Get moving.

Funding Deadline: July 9th, 2012

More Info: You can find out more on the Kickstarter page, or on any of the various social networks. The Little Baby’s site also seems like a solid bet.

Every Monday Geekadelphia features a Kickstarter created by local Philadelphians. Check em out and support our local geek scene. If you have a project that you’d like featured on site, contact [email protected]

Meet my good friend Marisa McClellan. A celebrated blogger (and now a published author!), Marisa runs the wildly popular Food in Jars blog, where she teaches the Internet how to make delicious canned nibbles.

Yesterday Marisa’s book, Food in Jars: Preserving in Small Batches Year-Round, hit stores everywhere via Running Press, a lovely publisher here in Philadelphia. The book is fantastic, the photography is beautiful, and you should absolutely pick it up immediately.

Seriously. Do it now. Here’s a link to Amazon. You’re welcome.

In honor of her book release, Marisa’s our Geek of the Week. Enjoy, and make sure you visit her blog at foodinjars.com.

1. What made you decide to launch Food in Jars? Why canning?

I started Food in Jars in early 2009 because my job as the editor of Slashfood (AOL’s now-defunct food blog) was ending and I wanted to stay in the food blogging world. I grew up canning with my mom and have been entirely obsessed with jars for years, so it was something that was always part of my life. At the time, there weren’t really any blogs out there dealing with canning, so I figured it would be a good niche for me. At the time though, I had no idea that canning would effectively become my career.

2. A lot of times when a blog lands a book deal, we see those blogs go quiet, start updating less. You? You don’t stop. How did you find a balance between writing on the blog, pursuing your other writing interests, and working on your cookbook?

To my mind, it was never an option to stop writing the blog while writing my book. One of the reasons that I got the opportunity to write the book was that I had an engaged community of readers. A large part of my value as an author was that audience. I had to continue to feed that relationship and develop that community so that there would be people welcoming the book when it was finally released. So I kept writing.

I will say that the summer of 2010 was really hard, because that’s when I was developing all the recipes for my book and was still working full time. I spent all my free time canning and making sure all the recipes for the book worked, while also continuing to invent stuff for the blog. It wasn’t so much about balance as it was general brute force.

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Hey geeks! You like Philadelphia, right? Sure you do. And beer? Yeah, thought so. How about cupcakes? Uh huh. Well have I got a deal for you. Take a look…

Beer Cakes is the result of a girl who loves cake, loves beer, and loves going to breweries with her Dad…  After a couple fresh pints and some good pub food, I always wanted something sweet and was disappointed at the lack of dessert on the menu.  So I began to develop some recipes.  What I came up with was a way to make cake that tastes like beer!

Using the amazing craft brews that Philadelphia has to offer, I put beer in both my cake and my buttercream.  What makes every craft beer unique is the flavors and spices that are used to brew them.  I play with those same ingredients in my recipes to bring out the beer’s flavor. The result is an amazing dessert that has savory and sweet notes that will tickle your taste buds.

While you can check my website (www.beercakesphilly.com) to see a list of the flavors that I’ve created so far, there are so many more awesome Philly beers that are just waiting for me.

Right now Beer Cakes Philly is only a wholesale or special order business, and though it’s going very well, I want to bring my cakes to the masses. I want everyone in Philly to have the chance to stop in for a beer cake!

My bakery won’t look at all the way you would expect a bakery to look.  You will most likely walk in and think you’ve entered a dive bar.  My cakes are about the beer, and the shop should be too.

I see local art on the wall, eclectic decorations, wooden tables that you can carve your name into, old tin signs, white christmas lights… can you picture it?

I imagine my Beer Cakes Philly storefront everyday, and with your help I’ll be able to wake up every morning and actually live the dream.

We’ve all had sweets made with beer before, but made to actually taste like the beer itself (and its special ingredients)? That’s new. And she’ll be open late, so when you’re leaving the next Geekadelphia / Tatooed Mom’s Halloween Extravaganza, you’ll have somewhere to go! Pony up.

The Project: Beer Cakes Philly

Creator: Lexi Malmros

The Sweet Spot: A measly $25 gets you six pack of cupcakes from the shop. Way better than any actual sixer you could pick up for that price. Know a real hophead? Drop $100 and you can get a novelty cake or two dozen of the little guys.

Funding Deadline: June 16th, 2012

More Info: Learn more on the Kickstarter page, on the Beer Cakes Philly website, or over on twitter.

Every Monday Geekadelphia features a Kickstarter created by locals. Check ‘em out and support our local geek scene. If you have a project that you’d like featured on site, contact [email protected]

Welcome to this week’s Geek of the Week, where we highlight the fun and creative people of our city. This week, we’ve interviewed the amazing Hawk Krall – a very talented illustrator, food lover and writer.

So, Hawk. What’s your backstory, are you a native Philadelphian?

I grew up outside the city in Jenkintown and came to the city pretty often. Went to college in Brooklyn (Pratt) and lived there for a few years before moving back to Philly in 2001.

What’s your favorite part about the food scene in Philly?

When I first moved here, whether it was running good comics in the alt weeklies or putting sweetbreads on a restaurant menu, there was this idea with everything that “Philly’s not ready for that.. this isn’t New York..” but now it’s like the land of golden opportunity. So many of the people I’ve worked with over the last 10 years both art and food wise are opening their own restaurants and businesses and it’s just amazing to watch.

You’re a great illustrator. Do you have a background in art? How long have you been drawing food?

My parents are both artists so I was trained from birth, went to art school and have been illustrating for over ten years, at first mostly comics and humorous editorial illustration. I was working as a line cook and doing illustrations at night, and realized that combining the two would probably give me a better chance at making a real career out of it. (more…)

Carving up a turkey

This week’s Geek of the Week is a man of varied interests, my pal Brian Lim.

Philadelphia foodies might know Brian from his food blog Bridges Burgers Beer, where he rambles about local nibbles, or from his work with Foodspotting as a Philly Foodspotting ambassador. Those driving in and out of thte city… well, you probably don’t know him, but he’s the gentleman who helps engineer those bridges your car zips over.

Bridges. Burgers. Blogs. Brian does a lot. Read on to learn about this geeky gentleman.

So when you aren’t busy at your day job, you run a food blog. Tell us a bit about it.

I started my blog, Bridges, Burgers & Beer in October of 2009. It was sorta created out of boredom. I like to eat, drink, and cook. I’m also somewhat of a bridge geek. I hoped to combine my passions for all those things in my blog.

You party down with the Philly Foodspotting community quite a bit. Tell us about that group.

I got hooked on Foodspotting a few years ago when my friend/fellow blogger, Amy Cao, started to work with them. Because I take photos of my food normally and it was a fun, neat way to find food, I figured why not contribute to Foodspotting.

Since then, a Philly Foodspotting community developed and I became one of the two Philly Foodspotting ambassadors. We hold a food eatup or crawl every month, open to everyone. (more…)

Beyond its luxury steakhouse offerings, Del Frisco’s Double Eagle Steak House encompasses some of the most marvelous architecture in the city. The building exhibits a “Classical Revival” style, an architectural trend popular around the time of its completion in 1924. Design and construction was led by the firm Ritter & Shay.

The Packard Building, as it’s known, won a gold medal award from the American Institute of Architecture (AIA) the following year. Today, the Packard building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Ritter & Shay was also responsible for the U.S. Customs House located in Old City and The Drake Hotel building in Center City.

The entire building is a 407,000 square-foot, mixed-use tower rising 26 stories. The space that Del Frisco’s occupies on the ground floor was once the First Pennsylvania Bank. Many of the bank’s key traits are still intact. The ornately-carved ceiling soars high above the marble floor, being held by tall stone columns.

Near the entrance, steps lead down to the vault, once the home to bank customers’ safe deposit boxes but today it contains a large private dining room. In the rear of the restaurant on the main level, a grande staircase leads to the mezzanine where an delicately designed clock face can view almost every inch of the 23,000 square foot space.

Additions to the space include a 34-foot-tall (two stories) glass wine tower, capable of holding nearly 2,500 bottles. Along the mezzanine wall, a large sound-deadening piece of art stretches from floor to ceiling. My favorite installation would have to be the “memorial pole” — rumored to have been installed to ironically honor a certain restaurant critic in Philadelphia when he had stated that “the only thing missing is a stripper pole.”

In regards to Del Frisco’s, the thing I hold near and dear to my heart would be its mention in 2009′s Law Abiding Citizen. Sous Chef Orin told us that some of the movie’s producers came in for dinner one evening and loved it so much that they returned on another visit with others working on the movie, including actors Gerard Butler and Jamie Foxx. The food that appeared in the movie was actually prepared at the restaurant.

In the month of April, you can sample some of their food yourself. They’re running a filet mignon and lobster tail (surf ‘n turf) special for $79. On April 5th they’re also the exclusive after-party location for Brews & Bowties, a fundraiser for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

As most Pennsylvania residents know, the Liquor Control Board has executed firm ownership over the state’s alcohol dissemination ever since the end of Prohibition – a time period from which the Board often seems a relic. But, last month, the LCB made a concerted effort to modernize and join the digital age by getting onboard with a popular new technology: the smartphone app.

That’s right – a new free application, titled Fine Wine & Good Spirits, was released by the LCB at the end of February. The app provides searchable databases of alcohol and alcohol stores, a feature that allows people to search out nearby locales, shop for wines online, and get more information about a beverage in which they have interest. There are currently about 40,000 products included in the application.

When accessing the app a user is provided with four options. He can either (1) shop online, (2) locate the nearest LCB store, (3) scan a bottle in his possession and get more information, or (4) browse items that are currently on sale. While there are several other apps that provide alcohol-locating features, none offer Pennsylvania residents with the same breadth of information.

There are a couple great uses for this app. First, let’s say you’re out on a date and your significant other has enjoyed a bottle of wine that the two of you have just consumed. At this point you can whip out your smartphone, scan the empty bottle, and then immediately learn where the closest store has that item on sale. You can also learn more about the wine in case you decide instead to try something new but similar while still at the restaurant.

Secondly, the app can also be useful in a more professional setting. Assume, for example, that you are conference calling with a client using something along the lines of MegaPath VoIP services. If the client is coming to town and needs a recommendation, gets upset and requires a bottle of wine to patch things over, or simply aggravates you to the point that you’re going to need some self-medication, you can simply glance down momentarily from the hosted pbx and insure that a bottle will shortly be arriving at your door – or at the door of your client. It’s almost too easy.

Fine Wine & Good Spirits can be downloaded free from the Apple and Android app stores, as well as at FineWineAndGoodSpirits.com.