Pete Cashmore: Food glorious food - Hamming up a hot dog & a huge pizza!

First up, I bring you exciting news from the world of meat. Since the dawn of time, mankind has asked itself the question: What would it be like if you could somehow combine a hamburger and a hot dog?

Well, we need wonder no more, because thanks to Australian food inventor Mark Murray, the combination hamburger and hot dog is a reality. I give you. . . THE HAMDOG.

This is what the future will look and taste like. Picture if you will, a hamburger patty neatly cleft in twain down the middle by a Frankfurter sausage.

The resultant meaty delight is then served in a regulation bun with two extra bread peninsulas on either side, so as to give the sausage coverage as well as the burger. And there you have it: The Hamdog, mankind's greatest invention since the World Wide Web.

Amazingly, Mark first tried to get backing for the Hamdog as far back as 2009, on the Aussie TV show Shark Tank, which is their equivalent of Dragon's Den – and they turned him down! In the home of the barbie!

I bet they're feeling pretty silly now. Because Hamdogs are flying off the shelves in Mark's native land, and he has been granted the patent which means that he owns the Hamdog concept and stands to make a pretty penny off of it. Now all we need is for someone to come up with a workable recipe for a Hamdog pizza, and I, for one, will die a happy man.

Did someone just mention pizza? Yes, they did – it was me, just then, enabling me to segue neatly into the next topic of conversation on this week's mouthwatering menu of matters gastronomic.

For this week and this week only, I find myself wishing that I lived not in the urban paradise that is Wolverhampton, but in Dublin.

For if I lived there I would be able to try to take advantage of the unique promotional offer being run by Four Star Pizza, in which punters can win their height in pizza. And I'm six foot four. That's a lot of pizza.

Sadly, I don't live in Dublin and I'm pretty sure that the good people of Four Star Pizza won't be willing to deliver to Tettenhall. Even so, in bringing their little competition to public attention in this column, I'm hoping it will inspire one of the city's fine pizza vendors, perhaps one of the many clustered in and around Chapel Ash, to launch something similar.

As an aside, is it just me or is 'Four Star Pizza' a bit of an odd name for a fast food outlet? Four stars? Not the traditional five given out for top notch fare? Maybe I don't want 76 inches of their pizzas after all. Actually, who am I kidding, I'd want it even if they were called 'Two Star Pizza, Must Try Harder'.

So ostensibly, this next tidbit is about food too, but in a rather less happy way – it's more to do with the seemingly inexhaustible idiocy of bureaucracy and how we can all fall foul of it.

This would be funny if it weren't actually happening to someone.

A woman in Yorkshire has been forced to use food banks (that's your food connection right there, about as tenuous as tenuous gets) because she had her tax credits cut after it was revealed that she is co-habiting with someone and is in a relationship with them.

Naughty lady. Except she's not actually co-habiting with anyone and certainly isn't having intimate times with the man the tax office singled out as being her other half.

This is because the gentleman in question, Joseph Rowntree, was a prominent Quaker and benefactor who died in 1925.

Even so, the Government's tax agency weren't going to be discouraged by a minor quibble like Mr Rowntree having been dead for 91 years.

It dug its heels in and stopped the unfortunate lady's money, which left her with no option but to frequent the food bank while the whole mess was unravelled.

Another woman in the Yorkshire area found herself in a similar situation after she was accused of being in a relationship with a Mr RS McColl after her bank account revealed many transactions involving a man of that name. RS McColl, it transpires, is the name of her local supermarket.

Even so, if the Government's tax agency wish to keep trying with their unlikely match-making, they're more than welcome to try to fix me up – I'm not getting any younger and my mother has a hat she'd like to wear. All I ask is that they're still alive, and would not be averse to sharing a Hamdog pizza with me.

After all that talk of food, you could be forgiven for feeling full, even a bit sickly.

To finish then, allow me to compound those feelings by sharing with you a story that simultaneously reminds us of the infinite wonder of nature, and makes one think, 'EUGH! Gross!'

There is a species of frog in Ecuador called the Little Devil Frog, which is a pretty cool name for a frog. Now, unbeknownst to me until this week, it turns out that scientists in South America tend to use frogs a lot for their research. They – and there's no polite way of putting this – induce the frogs to throw up, and then go sifting through the subsequent undigested food to inspect the bugs, frogs being a lot better at catching bugs than humans are.

Well, one particular Little Devil last week managed to bring forth a species of ant that has never before been seen on the planet, an entirely new species. This serves as a reminder, if it were needed, that when it comes to the natural world we have barely scratched the surface.

But it also gave news providers the chance to use the headline: "DEVIL FROG VOMITS UP NEW SPECIES OF ANT." Which is not a phrase you get to hear every day.

Bon appétit, my little devil frogs!