Liv Café and Bistro at 4340 N. Campbell Ave., in St. Philip's Plaza, will soon offer evening meal service and a nice selection of beer, wine and cocktails.

Currently the café offers breakfast and lunch until 3 p.m., with coffee, smoothies and pastries available until 9 p.m. But with the recent approval of its liquor license the eatery will soon serve appetizers, light entrees and drinks all the way up until closing time.

Manager Emily King said this morning that she's still working on finalizing the cocktail list, but said the new hours and offerings should be available in about two weeks. A weekend brunch with mimosas will also be available before long.

There's more on the café over here.

The Tucson Food Day website, which I just ran across this morning, boasts quite a selection of local-food events. There's eveything from GMO-free dinners to seed swaps, with movie screenings, festivals and other events sprinkled liberally throughout.

The events all take place later this month. If it sounds like something you might be interested, check it out over here.

Those of you still mourning the loss of the midtown coffee-and-cigarettes emporium The Safehouse can breathe a bit easier (if your lungs allow it) — the Safehouse is being reborn as Black Crown Coffee Company.

We've put out a few messages to the folks behind the new shop, but what we've gathered thus far is this: Black Crown's opening is a labor of love — the shop's Facebook page already has an album full of Tucsonans who are just showing up to offer a hand at scrubbing the smoke and ash off of the walls, rebuilding the interior, and helping however they can.

If this Reddit post (and a bit of Facebook sleuthing) is anything to go off of, the fellow behind the shop's opening is Scott Hinsch, also known to Safehouse regulars as "Big Juicy."

If anyone has any more information, drop us a line.

It's prickly-pear season and Ken Harvey, the executive chef at Loews Ventana Canyon Resort at 7000 N. Resort Drive is making the best of it. He's using the vibrantly colored fruit in a variety of interesting ways, according to a few e-mails I've gotten from the resort's public relations people in recent weeks:

Thanks for your interest in Chef Harvey. The dishes I'm aware of are a salad, a popsicle, a margarita and an ice tea all using the prickly pears.

A few days went by and I got another missive explaining all the ways Chef Harvey is using the delicious little desert fruits:

One of the juices served at brunch uses prickly pear juice and watermelon juice

Prickly pear is used with sauerkraut in the Canyon Cafe "Reuben"

It's used in a prickly pear salad dressing: prickly pear juice, sweet vinegar (apple cider or red wine), oil, raspberries or strawberries

The juice is also cooked down with sugar to create a glaze for chicken and fish

That's what I'm talking about. There's more on the resort and its restaurants over here.

Just in time for your weekend hot-wing satisfaction, the new location of Buffalo Wild Wings at 4329 N. Oracle Road is open. Not much else to say on this one. Dig in Tucson. There's more on the chain restaurant here.

• Beans and rice! It's what's for dinner (and lunch).

What is freedom? Is it the right to think what you want, say what you want, sleep with who you want? Does it include eating what you want or participating in social activities? And how is any of this related to the fact that I am fucking starving and about to jump ship on this ridiculous $4 a day food challenge?

What I've realized is that without the freedom to eat what you want you are often ostracized from social activities. No lunches out. No after-work beers or appetizers. No pitching in for the coffee run while your coworkers chirp and skip down the hallway with fists full of money. You couldn't even afford to have somebody over for supper on this budget, unless your dinner date was o.k. with noodles and butter. Instead, you end up alone with a Tupperware of beans and rice like some sort of a leper. I wish I was kidding, but it actually feels a little bit like that. Food in this culture is as much about socializing as anything else, and if you don't have the cash for it, you don't get to play. It's as simple as that.

And, honestly, $20 a week doesn't really buy anything. Sure, I've got pancake mix, but I couldn't afford syrup. The jalapenos I bought are wilted - I'm totally eating them tonight anyway - and it takes three hours to cook the beans so I have something to put on the tortillas. The bananas are browning; the garlic is holding up pretty well. Technically I still have 70 cents left in my budget, so I guess I could actually afford a tomato for the top of my bean tacos, but it would cost me $2 in gas to go to the store. Being poor sucks. Period. Actually, exclamation mark.

How did it become like this? People freak out if you even hint at taking their guns away, yet families can have their ability to nourish themselves snagged away by tragedy and poverty and nobody gives a shit but a few non-profits and programs like SNAP, which nurse them along on an endless wave of just-getting-by. It's a shame. I'm all for the idea of people working hard to get what they want, but forcing people to live on this budget is wrong. It's like a war of attrition against the poor, but what if the poor lose? I keep wondering if these are the sort of "entitlement" programs the Republicans keep talking about, because I just don't feel very entitled right now.

Anyway, I've got beans to soak and minutes to count until this whole ordeal is over. It's only been four days. To all of the people struggling to get by, please know that, in my own very small way, I get it right now. You deserve better. That is all.

A bit more checking - and a tip from Tucson Weekly contributor Eric "Swede" Swedlund - has shed a bit more light on what's going into several spaces in the vicinity of 300 E. Congress St., where those science exhibits have been held for the past year or two.

Liquor license applications have now been filed for three different establishments in that area. A place called Proper is apparently going in at 300 E. Congress. Another place called Diablo Burger is going in at 312 E. Congress St. and a bar called Good Oak Bar is slated for the space at 316 E. Congress St.

Ummm ... wow? Three new places in addition to Lulu's Shake Shoppe, which opens in mid-October, and the new restaurant Saint House that's going in where Sharks Bar used to be. Vaudeville Cabaret is also being converted into a new bar and live-music venue called Voodoo Jack's and let us not forget about the new bar JunXion and the yet-to-be-named restaurant at 50 E. Broadway Blvd. also opening in the area.

The building on the corner of South Sixth Avenue and 35th Street, where the extremely short-lived but awesome place Tako Burger used to be, is gearing up for another round of restaurant action.

There are signs hanging on the building indicating that a new restaurant is setting up there. I was driving pretty fast when I saw them, but distinctly saw the word "pollo" as I zipped by. That leads me to believe that a Mexican joint that serves some sort of chicken is on the way. See how easy this investigative food-reporting stuff is?

Anyway, it's nice to see that old building back in action. Let's hope this restaurant fares better than Tako Burger did.

It appears local restaurant and bakery Beyond Bread has been nominated to participate in the upcoming World Food Championships, which is billed as the "highest-stakes food competition in the world." From an e-mail received today:

Dear Adam,

Recently, your best sandwich winner Beyond Bread from Tuscon Weekly Best of Tuscon 2011 was selected to compete at the World Food Championships. The World Food Championships, hosted by Adam Richman, will take place at Bally's, Paris and Caesars Palace, on Nov 1-4, 2012 and will pit the winners of the biggest and best food competitions and contests against each other for a championship title and a total prize purse of $300,000.

After two days of living off $4 a day I can tell you that it pretty much completely sucks. And not for just the reasons one would assume - less-than-full stomach, lack of choices, sense of impending doom - but for a whole grocery list of other reasons I'd never even thought of. (It felt so good to type "grocery list" just now. There is something very sad about that).

I've got plenty of food to make it through the week. There's still around $17 worth of lentils and potatoes and bananas and instant pancake mix and I've gotten by with much less than that before. What's really got me squirming, though, is what a flimsy excuse for a survivor I have become in the past several years. A spoiled little twit, really, and but a husk of the cheap-living man I used to be.

For one thing, somewhere along the way I became dependent on coffee, which is expensive and not in this week's budget. So I walk around hating things I shouldn't and wandering aimlessly when focus is sorely needed. I've also been pretty much an asshole most of the week, partially because the banana pancakes don't stick to my ribs like I thought they would and partially because I simply can't have what I want, when I want it, like a flimsy little twit. I don't like this version of me, but it makes me realize how entitled I feel regarding little treats like coffee and snacks between meals.

It's also got me thinking about some of the things people said when I first wrote about all this. One of the comments was from a guy who worked at a Circle K and watched people come in on the first of the month to buy a ton of junk food with food stamps. Well, guess what: After two days of nothing but brown rice, baked potatoes and instant pancakes, I feel like doing that. If I were forced to live on this same food budget for a few months I would certainly buy tons of sugary crap. I don't even like sweets, but it just sounds good right now. Why is that?

The other thing is that I actually have a little bit of money, so if I started actually starving I could just ditch this whole thing and go to Los Betos. People on the brink of poverty don't have that option, and it takes a ton of work and good fortune to work a life back up to the point of financial well being. It's a strange scary feeling and I'm only feeling this in a tangential way for a limited amount of time. It makes me want to hug my parents for struggling their way out of poverty. It makes me want to give every single mom or dad a money order for $50,000 and a handwritten apology from Mitt Romney and anyone who supports him. I'm serious. Or hypoglycemic.

So, as you can tell, this little jaunt through living on SNAP benefits has already driven me crazy and bent my mind so terribly that I can't stop writing run-on sentences about the most miniscule understanding of what it must be like to be living in poverty today. I thought I understood, but I didn't.

Now, if anybody needs me, I'll be having some more lentils and rice. If beer were in my budget right now, I would purchase as much of it as humanly possible. What have I become?