An hors d'oeuvre (/ɔːr ˈdɜːrv, ˈdɜːrvrᵊ/; French: hors d'œuvre [ɔʁ dœvʁ]), appetizer, or starter is a small dish served before a meal. Some hors d'oeuvres are served cold, others hot. Hors d'oeuvres may be served at the dinner table as a part of the meal or they may be served before seating. Formerly, hors d'oeuvres were also served between courses.

Typically smaller than a main dish, it is often designed to be eaten by hand (with minimal use of cutlery).

Names

Hors d'oeuvre in French means "outside the work"—that is, "not part of the ordinary set of courses in a meal". The French spelling is the same for singular and plural usage; in English, the ⟨œ⟩ typographic ligature is usually replaced by the digraph ⟨oe⟩, with the plural commonly written hors d'oeuvres and pronounced /ɔːr ˈdɜːrvz/.

"Appetizer" is a synonym for hors d'oeuvre.

"Starter" is sometimes used to denote an hors d'oeuvre, sometimes to denote more substantial courses, known in Europe and North America as entrées.

Origins

Appetizer is an open source dock for Windows 2000, XP, Vista and 7, which allows organizing the user's shortcuts and applications. It can be customized via skins and plugins and is available in 25 languages. Various other features are available including support for keyboard shortcuts, custom icons and tray icon support. Appetizer also features a function to automatically launch certain applications when it starts.

Appetizer started as a PortableApps.com application. As such it is designed to be portable and can be installed on a USB drive or other portable device. If the standard PortableApps.com folder structure is detected on the drive, Appetizer will automatically import the user's shortcuts.

Reception

Appetizer has been reviewed by several websites and magazines. It was chosen as "freeware of the month" by UpdateStar in 2009 and was in the "top 10 of the best launchers" on Clubic. Clubic appreciated its ease of use and the small size of its executable. DownloadSquad reviewed Appetizer and noted that thanks to its open source nature, "it is easy for anyone to develop skins, plugins, or other features for the application". Likewise, LifeHacker called it a "free, polished, and highly customizable open source candidate".Softonic noted that the application didn't "really add many new functions to the Start menu" but was "a very eye-catching alternative menu" and "goes straight to the point".PC World reviewed Appetizer and noted that it "would likely be of most use when run alongside the also-free portable app suite".

Freak Kitchen is an experimental rock band from Gothenburg, Sweden, formed in 1992. Because of the high technical level of their compositions people sometimes refer to their style as progressive metal or progressive rock. Thus, they are highly experimental on composition.

History

Freak Kitchen's style of music is influenced by many genres besides the traditional heavy metal, ranging from jazz to pop. The band described their third album as "A corny little heavy-pop-rock-Latin-world-jazz-avant-garde-metal-blues-record straight from hell!". The album "Land of the Freaks", which was released in late October 2009, features a lot of Indian inspiration and the band is also joined by the two Indian musicians V. Selvaganesh and Neyveli S Radhakrishna on several tracks.

The lyrics of Freak Kitchen often contain humor and heavy criticism against capitalist society, conformity, racism and the attitude of huge record companies.

Frontman Mattias Eklundh is widely known as a guitarist of high technical ability, and live shows often contain parts where Eklundh plays the guitar using several foreign objects such as a vibrating dildo. Eklundh has also released four solo albums, Sensually Primitive (1996) (under the pseudonym Mr Libido), Freak Guitar (1999), Freak Guitar - The Road Less Traveled (2004) and Freak Guitar: The Smorgasbord (2013).