I've been beating this drum for months now and finally we're getting somewhere. The push to get an official state food for Arizona has hit the front page of the New York Times:

PHOENIX — Florida has its key lime pie, Idaho its potatoes and Georgia favors grits as its official state food. Arizona, hungry to lay claim to a state food of its own, is circling the chimichanga.

There is a fierce rivalry here over who exactly dropped the first burrito into a vat of hot oil and thus invented the chimichanga. But evidence supports the contention that the first mouth to savor the fried concoction, and the first stomach to churn in torment from it, may well have been that of an Arizonan.

Read the rest of the story here.

I don't know who proposed the unholy idea of fusing cookies and pancakes or who thought of whatever "Pancake Puppies®" are supposed to be, but they should be forced to apologize to America:

· For a sweet treat to be enjoyed at any time, Denny’s new Red Velvet Pancake Puppies® with Cream Cheese Icing offer bite-sized season’s greetings. Made with white chocolate chips, sprinkled with powdered sugar and served with a side of Cream Cheese Icing for dipping, these Pancake Puppies ® are perfect for sharing with family and friends.

To celebrate the release of Sony Pictures holiday Blockbuster animation “Arthur Christmas”, Denny’s is offering children of all ages the chance to enjoy two new dishes - Arthur’s personal favorites available exclusively at Denny’s over the holiday season.

[...]

· Arthur’s Christmas Cookie Pancakes is the dish that every kid wishes to wake up to. Three silver dollar pancakes with sugar cookies baked right in are topped with whipped cream and even more bits of sugar cookies. Served with a choice of two bacon strips or two sausage links, one egg cooked to order and a side of warm syrup.

Heard of the Tucson egg business Zen Hens? Its eggs and composted chicken manure fertilizer can be found at a couple of farmers' markets around town. Every time I hear of the company's name it brings to mind a chicken in deep meditation, which makes me happy.

In other chicken news, Food Conspiracy Co-op is getting ready to hold its extremely popular annual backyard chicken coop tour. The self-guided tour takes place Saturday, Dec. 3, and tickets are $5. Call the co-op for more information.

I feel like there are a lot of questions left unanswered by the DeliToYouDirect.com page for the "Banguet, Mini Piglet, Approx. 8Lb" item they have for sale, including what exactly the pig-shaped product is actually made of. I'm into any sort of molded food product, but the page's tactic of telling the "piglet"'s story in the first person might not be the best strategy:

Hello! My name is Banquet Fiesta Piglet!
My middle name IS BONELESS!!!
I'M EASY, just fire up the oven to 300F (I fit almost each of them).
Cover me with the aluminum foil for the first 2 hours, then bake me at 350-400F for additional 1.5 hour or until golden brown.
I'LL BE PERFECTLY CRISP AND TASTY.
Serves from 8-12 HUNGRY GUESTS.

Oh, it'll be "CRISP AND TASTY"? I guess I don't really need to know what I'm supposed to be eating then. Isn't this what happened with Soylent Green?

Still, I'll be ordering at least one.

[Consumerist]

I was standing in the morning sunlight admiring the truck when owner Tracey Santa Cruz came flying out the door of Mercado San Agustin, where she does her baking, with a stick of butter in one hand. Twenty minutes later she was standing on the bumper of the truck so I could see her Pin-Up Pastries tattoo while explaining the line of paletas she may soon debut.

Santa Cruz makes whoopie pies in flavors ranging from salt-caramel to toasted-coconut, with standard and seasonal flavors available as well. Sometimes she sells cookies and brownies, but she tries to stick with unique offerings people can't find elsewhere.

“The cake-pops are hard to make, but they’re beautiful,” said Santa Cruz while ladling container after container of marshmallow fluff into a cake mixer. “The kids love them, and, you know, people love anything on a stick.”

Tom Duncan of Whiskey Ranch BBQ helped with the design of her truck, and they often work special events together. She says owning the truck has been so much fun that she’d like to open another one that serves food other than desserts, but her lips are sealed on that for the moment.

“I get asked a lot if I have a retail location, and, to be honest, I don’t want one,” said Santa Cruz. “I think you have to go to the people.”

Santa Cruz says her sister and mother have played a huge part in getting the business going, although it took her awhile to hand over a bit of control to them.

“I’m a control freak, but I had to learn they could fill a whoopie pie as good as I could,” she says with a smile.

Desserts at Pin-Up Pastries are typically $3 each or 2 for $5. You can keep up with the truck here and here.

• Now THAT'S dedication!

Seriously, why? I like coconuts, but drinking coconut water makes me think of sipping watery boogers. And not in a good way:

In fact, the successful arrival of coconut water on these shores has more to do with yoga than you might think. The wellness trend has inspired several profitable beverage launches—inspiring massive bottled water brands like Dasani and Aquafina, alternative sports drink concoctions like Vitamin Water, and single-ingredient juices like Pom Wonderful. Both Vita Coco and close competitor Zico were launched in 2004, near the dawn of the current yoga craze, and their early success was built on the (supple, flexible) backs of yoga-loving women.

In South America and Southeast Asia, coconut water is an anytime drink for all sorts of occasions. Vita was born when its founders chatted up a pair of Brazilian women in a Lower East Side bar, getting an earful about how much the gals missed the coconut water that was a daily staple for them back home. Zico came to be when CEO Mark Rampolla, upon returning home from his job as an executive for International Paper in Latin America, found he and his wife couldn’t live without the stuff. But the key to getting the beverage off the ground in the United States turned out to be yoga and pilates fiends who became the brands’ early adopters and first American evangelists.

“We couldn’t afford a $100 million marketing campaign to reach everyone,” says Rampolla, “so we needed to start small, with a targeted audience. We found out that yoga practitioners were fans of coconut water. They understood electrolytes but thought Gatorade was the antichrist.”

Red Velvet Cupcakery at 943 E. University Blvd. will serve its last cupcake this Saturday. The other Tucson-area location at La Encantada closed about six months ago.

Is this the beginning of the end for the cupcake fad in Tucson? It's been on the slide in major cities across the country for awhile.

Personally, I'm a fan mini-desserts, and the creativity that many bakers put into cupcakes can be fun and, at times, quite beautiful. But paying $3.75 for a dessert that is chiefly frosting always stings a little, even if the cupcake in question is truly top-notch.

The first-ever Tucson Food Truck Roundup takes place Monday, Nov. 14, and a number of great local food trucks have signed up to participate.

So far MaFooCo, Jamie’s Bitchin’ Kitchen, Cyclopsicle, Street Delights, Pin-Up Pastries and KBORK are on the bill, and there’s word a few other trucks might show up, too. It all goes down at Dinnerware Artspace at 119 E. Toole Ave., and it starts at 5 p.m.

There will also be live music by Baba Marimba - which includes the kalimba stylings of Mark Holdaway - and Tarot-card reading. A portion of sales made at the event will be donated to Dinnerware Artspace, which provides all sorts of great art events and classes.

There’s more on the festival over here.

The new Dunkin' Donuts location at 7805 N. Oracle Road opens tomorrow, Wednesday, Nov. 9.

The new location is celebrating its opening (translation: tempting people to to stop in by offering freebies) by giving away free medium-sized hot or iced coffees through Tuesday, Nov. 15, limited to one beverage per person, per day.

Not much else to report on this one, except for these doughnut statistics via the public-relations firm that handles press for the doughnut juggernaut: Dunkin' Donuts sells more than 1.5 billion cups of coffee a a year and more than a billion Munchkins doughnut holes each year. Damn.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Two things I learned today:

1. Glass windows are no match for a deer on a taco hunt.
2. There is at least one taco restaurant in Alpharetta, Georgia.

[HT: The Awl]