Grub Street Grub Street Chicago

What are the odds that there would be two mentions of eating raccoon here today? But Andrew Zimmern is hardly the only one snacking down on The Other Grey Meat this weekend. Saturday night, a half hour west of Milwaukee, will be the 85th Annual Raccoon Feed at the American Legion Hall in Delafield, Wisconsin. Lest you wonder why this event out of many oddball small town-Americana events rates a mention today, there are two reasons. One, this event seems to exercise a strange pull on the imaginations of Chicago foodies, as evidenced by the fact that Louisa Chu has written about it at WBEZ, and David Hammond has done the same at the Sun-Times this week, and Cathy Lambrecht of the Greater Midwest Foodways Association, who introduced everyone to it, has been tweeting and Facebooking up a storm. Second, this event has a Chicago connection no other church supper or Elks Hall dinner can claim— it inspired a dish at Moto which made it into Time magazine. Read the strange but true story at, well, any of the above links, or in a video about the event made a few years ago by your humble correspondent, which is below.

As the host of Bizarre Foods on Travel Channel, which kicked off its latest season this week (airing Mondays at 9 p.m. ET/PT) , Andrew Zimmern made his name eating some seriously strange stuff. But he swears that things are different when he's off the clock: "I go home at night, I pick up the dry cleaning, and I make a roast chicken and some crispy potatoes and my wife and son and I sit down to a nice dinner." But that doesn't mean it's impossible for some errant offal to sneak into his day-to-day routine, especially when chefs recognize him in their restaurants. "The disaster for me is when I'm with my wife and son and we stop at a burger bar or something," Zimmern says, "and the chef decides to send out a month-old pig head from the freezer. I just want to eat a burger with my son!" Fortunately for Zimmern, there were no surprise pig heads this week while he was in New York — Zimmern, a native New Yorker who now lives in Minnesota, says he gets back to town about once a month — but there were plenty of other interesting things. For tales of sauteed duck testicles, calf-brain sandwiches, and much, much more, take a gander at this week's New York Diet.