Taste Buds

At West Chester East High School, a recent service day for teachers had multicultural experiences and delicacies as its theme. Teachers and guests served up a lunch using recipes from their former home countries, then made presentations in the school auditorium.

Black and white. Hot and cold. Loud and quiet. Put them together and what do you get? Gray. Tepid. Subdued. But try the same thing with opposite flavors and watch out. When they unite, culinary sparks fly. Take sweet and sour, for example. This is the pairing of opposite ingredients such as sugar and vinegar, but rather than meshing into a new and improved flavor - swour? - they refuse to combine. Instead, they vibrate along our taste buds: sweet/sour/sweet/sour/sweet/sour. As soon as we try to commit our palates to one flavor, the other appears.

Question: Can you explain how taste buds work? Answer: We all have taste buds, the "chemical receptors" that detect the four basic tastes: sweet, salty, bitter, and sour. The reason taste is so subjective is that the sense of taste involves much more than your tongue. Your brain interprets taste and texture through an important interaction between your nose and your mouth. Try eating an orange with your nose pinched shut. It doesn't have much taste, does it? There are receptors in your nose leading to the brain that start to form an impression of taste even before food enters the mouth.

Here's a new batch of beverages that can tweak your taste buds as surely as they quench your thirst. What we've done is doctor some classic coolers and bring them into the '90s (that's the decade, not degrees Fahrenheit). These days, standards such as lemonade, iced tea, coffee and soda no longer follow formula. Lemon shares the - pardon the expression - limelight with other fruits in the new lemonades. Teas get punch enough for a party. Flavored syrups, familiar from coffee bars, spill over into cool carbonated beverages.

LEAVING HOME If your teenager has just finished high school and is preparing to start college, the present time is a difficult adjustment period. Parents who have been in control for so long must now relinquish some of that control while the young adult pushes headlong toward independence - often with some apprehension, says University of Wisconsin Hospital clinical psychologist Sharon Foster. She says it's best if parents honestly confront and let their young adults know about their feelings - and send them off with a sense of the parents' pride and confidence in their offspring's abilities.

What's cold, has whiskers and 200,000 taste buds? Why do bees have hair on their eyes? Why do moles tie worms into knots? If you want the answers to those questions and more, try visiting the Elmwood Park Zoo in Norristown, which this weekend opens what it says is the only exhibit of its kind in the United States. The zoo's new $350,000 Sensorium offers films, electronic games, audiovisual displays and a series of colorful, informative panels that explain how animals use their five senses to survive.

Some vegetables seemed to have been put on Earth to torture small children. "No dessert until you finish your [insert Mom's choice of bitter-tasting green roughage]!" For many, part of the passage to adulthood is swearing off brussels sprouts and their ilk forever. And so silent cheers lingered behind the public outcry when President George H.W. Bush declared: "I'm the President of the United States, and I'm not going to eat any more broccoli. " But just when adults thought they were free from cruciferous nemeses came news that this crunchy class of veggies contains remarkable powers to combat cancer, build bones and strengthen hearts.

When Minar Palace closed two years ago, Center City takeout aficionados went into a momentary tandoori tailspin. The void was partially filled by the arrival of some new Indian stars, but excitement over Minar's recent reemergence in a snazzy new Walnut Street space cannot be denied. To my taste buds, the cooking here isn't as vivid as at the slightly more expensive Tiffin. But Minar's incredibly cheap prices (like this chicken tikka masala, $8.95 with rice, salad and raita) are still such stellar values, I'm reminded why it became a staple to begin with.

The culinary cocktail fad has spread - its emphasis on classics revamped with boutique liqueurs and surprising house-made mixers - into a required accessory for most striving new restaurants. And Adsum's moody bar, run by former Apothecary mixologist Preston Eckman, is no exception, with its own battery of infused wines, smoked blackberry syrups, house apricot liqueurs, and shaker-whipped eggwhite froths. But few of the cocktails here show the sharp kitchen cross-over moves of the genre quite as artfully as the Logical Consequence.

  Throughout the 2011 baseball season, the Daily News was inundated with emails and calls. Nonetheless, Phillie Phoodie is back for another season as the guardian of Phanatics' taste buds. This year, the Phoodista will sample new offerings at Citizens Bank Park, as well as some nearby eateries that are popular game-day stops for Phillies fans. We may even hit the road to taste test some of the region's minor league ball parks.   First up: Outlet: Panini's, at Section 133. We went: Pregame, 12:30 p.m. Wait: None.

Question: Can you explain how taste buds work? Answer: We all have taste buds, the "chemical receptors" that detect the four basic tastes: sweet, salty, bitter, and sour. The reason taste is so subjective is that the sense of taste involves much more than your tongue. Your brain interprets taste and texture through an important interaction between your nose and your mouth. Try eating an orange with your nose pinched shut. It doesn't have much taste, does it? There are receptors in your nose leading to the brain that start to form an impression of taste even before food enters the mouth.

Dozens of cooks carefully navigated the steep stone steps that lead to the basement of the First Unitarian Church. They carried boxes and bags filled with their kitchen bounty: peach-amaretto preserves, pumpkin bread, cherry-lime jam, pickled carrots, spiced maple-pear butter. They were there last Thursday for the first Philly Food Swap, a crafty event organized by a quartet of local food bloggers, in which home-cook aficionados brought their signature goods to trade with other cooks.

Outlet: Schmitter We went: 6:10 p.m. (pregame) Wait for service: None. Order: One Schmitter. Cost: $9.50, not including chips or beverage. The legend: For reasons unknown, the Phillie Phoodie had never had a Schmitter, either at the ballpark or its ancestral home, McNally's Tavern in Chestnut Hill. But for years, he had heard raves about this grilled-on-a-Kaiser-roll Frankensandwich made of roast beef, salami, American cheese, fried onions and tomato, topped with a Russian dressing-style sauce.

The culinary cocktail fad has spread - its emphasis on classics revamped with boutique liqueurs and surprising house-made mixers - into a required accessory for most striving new restaurants. And Adsum's moody bar, run by former Apothecary mixologist Preston Eckman, is no exception, with its own battery of infused wines, smoked blackberry syrups, house apricot liqueurs, and shaker-whipped eggwhite froths. But few of the cocktails here show the sharp kitchen cross-over moves of the genre quite as artfully as the Logical Consequence.

Fish on fire The amusingly pushy Han Chiang has for several years been the opinionated spark to cajole guests at his self-named suburban restaurants in Exton and Royersford to enter the well-spiced realm of authentic Szechuan cooking. Since opening a branch of Han Dynasty in Old City earlier this year, he's quite literally lit a fire beneath his efforts. This is especially true with the dry pot-style fish, a mini-wok that comes to the table sizzling over a flame. It's hot in more ways than one, with the numbing heat of Szechuan peppercorns that defines the regional cuisine.

Manhattan purists and infusion-phobes, turn away. I used to be one of you, too. But no matter how much I pooh-poohed the idea of a cinnamon whiskey drink and looked askew at the vaguely "'hatten-esque" cocktail passed across the bar at James Restaurant, a few sips set my taste buds straight into a happy hum. That's because the James-hattan is a rarity in the land of fooffie drinks - a cocktail concocted with the same attention to balance as the often...

WHEN TAP lineups at your local pub change every day, challenging taste buds and pushing flavors to the extreme, it's not hard to feel less than excited by the old standbys. Or worse. It's an unfortunate truth, after all, that familiarity breeds contempt. So the other day, I sat down with three stalwarts of the craft-beer renaissance with a clean palate and a fresh eye. Are they as outstanding as they were a generation ago when they were trendsetters? Or have they lost a step as competitors have improved?

Can you imagine a diner's life in Philadelphia without our taquerias? I shudder at the thought. Of course, the notion that we have mole now so genuine that it's fresh off the FedEx truck from Puebla may be odd for a town that not long ago considered the Speedy Gonzales platter at Tex-Mex El Azteca to be the piñata pinnacle of authentic. But in the span of less than a decade, we've seen Philly evolve a seriously sizzling salsa scene, from its high-end nuevo tequila palaces to a growing collection of humble taquerias that answer virtually every craving for genuine Mexican home cooking.

Part of the list is runovers, unfinished business, cryptic notes to self: A fireside dinner at the Carversville Inn once again seems like the venue for good winter material; and has for about three years running. Its problem is that something always jumps the line in that neck of Bucks County (up toward New Hope) - a gorgeous lavender farm where they're making their own honey, or Solebury Orchard in cider season, or the homespun pork and oyster dinner they've been holding at the Carversville Christian Church since 1871.