Askinosie Dark Chocolate + Coffee CollaBARation Bar

When I was a kid, I was really into reading books. That hasn't changed to this date, but my taste was far less refined and far trashier than I'd ever imagined. Eschewing the best of Chaim Potok and throwing away my parents' copies of the New Yorker, I had a friend who would supply me with the most sordid of romance novels. When I wasn't nose-deep in His Potent Rogue's Scent or The Very Virile Visigoth, I was paging my way through my grandmother's old copies of Women's World, which she would pass onto me after reading.

God, I loved those magazines. There's nothing in there that compels me to read them now, but the diet tips never failed to amaze me. It seemed like every month there was a new scientific breakthrough about how eating dark chocolate- or drinking a glass of wine, having coffee, or eating muffins, could somehow help you shed your waistline, live a hundred years, or just feel awesome. These tricks aren't new, though they are somewhat exaggerated. All of the above foods (with the exception of muffins) are rich in antioxidants and help to promote the production of certain neurotransmitters in the brain, like anandamide and other endorphins, which in turn induce euphoria.
All of these foods are also high in flavonoids, a type of polyphenol, that along with other phenolic compounds, helps affect the flavor and mouthfeel of all of these foods. And since chocolate, wine, and coffee are relatively simple compounds harvested from around the world, all will essentially have unique "varietal" characteristics, to borrow a wine term, based on their country of origin, exposure to sunlight, and other variables. So aside from their health benefits, they have the potential to be extremely varied. We've all seen the surge of interest in single origin and bean-to-bar chocolates, and wine aficionados are well aware of the importance of appellation d’origine contrôlée- the French classification of geographical indications dating back to the 15th century for wine and other food-producing regions, a standard other countries have been quick to jump upon.
So with all of this deliciously territorial information in mind, I approached the latest Askinosie CollaBARation with trepidation and curiosity. The bar is simply constructed, made with Askinosie single origin cacao from Davao, Philippines, and Intelligentsia single origin coffee, from La Perla de Oaxaca, Mexico. Like the first CollaBARation, the packaging is minimal and striking. With a scant ingredient list and two mammoth flavor profiles, I wondered if the two would mingle sultrily in my mouth or if it would be a veritable clash of the titans on my tongue. Although the bar is not studded with coffee beans, the strong scent of coffee was immediately pervasive and lingering, and the dark chocolate was smooth and crisp, snapping audibly in my hand.
This is a strong, forceful bar, definitely one that could fell the family pet if consumed by the wrong party. It goes more along the lines of something you'd want to eat slowly after dinner rather than wolf down at a Riefenstahl film. It has a very slow, cool melt and creamy texture, initially chalky on the tongue. The coffee flavors are forward and present themselves in a fruity, dark flavor, like a good dark roast, but regrettably, there are just too many good things going on and too few fillers to balance it out. I'm all for stellar combinations of flavors, but this bar just doesn't nail it. Good dark chocolate already has notes of coffee, caramel, and red fruit on its own. Adding more of these potent esters tips the scale too far and tends to be overkill. The flavor lingered and deepened on the tongue with this bar, and eventually settled with a slightly burnt, overly steeped flavor, bitter like an old cup of coffee. Albeit good coffee, but who's counting when it's that flat?

Unfortunately, the lack of sweeteners or emulsifiers, to stabilize the bar's flavor and accentuate its more subtle notes, just threw me off. Despite the richness of the bar, I couldn't eat more than two pieces. It was just too strong for my taste. While I'm normally a supporter of coffee and chocolate, the infusion of the two flavors proved to be this bar's downfall. I'd be curious to see more infusions of Intelligentsia coffee in Askinosie's bars, as they blended it superbly without any grittiness or sandy texture from the beans, but not with a cacao this forceful.

Angry Birds Fruit Gummies

Manual dexterity is not my strongest suit. My face catches flying objects better than my hands, or "trout" as I like to call them, do, and most of the time I try to fashion small bulbous garments for my arms so I can simply convince people that I don't have fingers. It would make social interaction much easier.
I was surprised when I fell in love with Angry Birds last year because I didn't expect to be good at it or enjoy it. Granted, it has the graphics and soundtrack of a more sophisticated episode of Tom and Jerry and the complexity of a four-piece puzzle, but damn it, I liked it. The marketing craze expanded a little beyond my level of caring, as I'm really not a member of the core demographic of Angry Birds feminine hygiene products or Angry Birds humidifier and filter sets, but when I saw these sweet Angry Birds gummies in a gas station, I figured my buck and a half would not be better spent elsewhere. Except on those 7-11 buffalo chicken Slurpees or whatever they're hawking nowadays.
The Angry Birds gummies come in six flavors and colors representing the six primary characters in the game- red cherry basic birds, yellow lemon fast birds, green apple pigs, purple bomb birds, blue raspberry little birds, and strawberry big birds. The scent is generic but nostalgic, and reminds me less of gummy worms and bears than of the earthy, rich fruit snacks of my youth. The flavors range from sugary to spot-on, though after a while they all start to taste the same, and each gummy is carefully molded, although I did see a few creepy deformed characters.I WIIIIIIIIIIIIN.

Basically, for players of the game, it's as entertaining and fun as eating Pokemon Kraft mac and cheese as a kid or having Power Ranger Eggo waffles for breakfast before school. The characters are appropriately colored and recognizable, a feature my compulsive mannerisms appreciate as it always wigged me out to see puce sharks or tangerine severed Scooby Doo heads in my lunch box at school.
While the flavors aren't as subtle or complex as Bissinger's bears, they have a good, meaty chew and don't put you in an immediate sugar coma. They won't replace my beloved Haribo Gold Bears, but made for an interesting change of pace. Fans of the game and fans of general adorable foodstuffs should check these out. They made for a fun photo shoot, too, with Dr. D's iPad!

Zapp's Voodoo Potato Chips

Some people are easy to please. Not me. I could never figure out the motives someone who was able to go to the movies and feel satisfied with a small popcorn, sans salt, butter, or smuggled cheese sauce, never mind passing up the litany of candies and Slurpees along the way. I can't go to a barbecue that lacks thirty flavors of mustard and ten different artisanal sausages, and I rarely order a pizza that isn't buried under a glut of toppings.

So you'd think I'd be pleased to find these potato chips, which are not only a total sensory overload with the aesthetic simplicity of a Magic Eye, but also an homage to one of life's creepiest regional quirks, voodoo. Another particularly bratty habit of mine. I'm not big on chips without dip, nor pretzels without mustard. Unadorned junk food just doesn't do it for me. Zapp's is an elusive potato chip company from some region in the US with a large concentration of sports teams. I don't know, I don't follow cricket. Whatever. It's rare to find these chips in their limited edition flavors, unless, of course, you check out Big Lots! It really is my new favorite hookup for discontinued products and hookups. This flavor, Voodoo, is less Santeria-style chicken heads and entrails and more "whoops, due to a carefully controlled employee mishap at our factory, we came out with this flavor" deal. I tell you, that shit would not fly at a CDC testing facility, no siree. Kind of uncanny how often that happens. Maybe they shouldn't hire voodoo dolls as employees any more. Note that there is unfortunately no gris-gris at the bottom of the bag. Collect them all!

While I normally try to avoid kettle chips as they invariably get stuck in my soft palate, I bought these out of a weakness for the visual design. Look at this bag and tell me you don't want to get it tattooed on your bicep, crazy-colored dolls, neon script, and all. Or at least commission a loud shirt out of the basic design. The backstory is mild in comparison, though, as are the cutesy phone order and computer graphics on the back. Opening the bag, I was immediately hit by a blast of tangy vinegar, salt, and the brown sugar paprika sweetness of barbecue. A good sign, if unoriginal. The chips are softer than the average kettle chip, although they do still fracture into a kazillion pieces upon impact and have a lot of surface area and curling to catch a good amount of seasoning in the cooking process.

The flavor is hard to pin down, starting with an acidic kick of vinegar and then morphing into a combination of sugary barbecue with an end result almost identical to the tomatoey sweetness in a bag of Herr's Heinz Ketchup chips. The chip's heavy garlic and onion influence and crisp, slightly greasy texture lend an almost chickeny flavor and feel to the chip, which is unique but not completely welcomed. It's definitely a snack with an identity crisis. I'm not beyond new combinations and ideas, but I wasn't seeing any congruent theme in this chip that made me want to go back for more. As hokey as it seems, surely a company wouldn't completely throw caution to the wind and just let the production of a flavor happen accidentally with no science behind the flavors? It was too sweet and too sharp for my liking and just didn't make a whole lot of sense.

What I really wanted with these was a kick of heat. I solved the problem by dipping them into some salsa verde until I realized that the only reason I was eating the chips was to have something as a vehicle to eat the salsa with short of pouring it into my mouth. Even with sauce added, there was just something off about these chips that didn't quite make them regular players in my lunch box.

JetPuffed PumpkinSpice Mallows

Yesterday, I may have convinved you that I do not like pumpkin. This is a lie. Of course I like pumpkin. I was referring to pumpkin the vegetable that I hate, not pumpkin the artificial flavor! And believe me when I tell you that we are getting pumpkin cuh-razy up in this bitch.

I found these yesterday in the same aisle as the pumpkin spice kisses, and when you see two adorable, seasonal candies nestled in the same area, how could you not? It would be like tearing one puppy away from its littermate. If you don't take the plunge, you're a soulless bastard. So plunge I did, into a package of Jet Puffed Pumpkinspice marshmallows. And yes, that's Pumpkinspice. On the package, it's all capitalized like a generic medication. PUMPKINSPICE, now with extended release nutmeg.

About four of these marshmallows equal one regular sized 'mallow, and they're an orange shade of taupe and roughly shaped like pumpkins. I am not a fan of the color at all. Eaten out of context, they look like a candy inspired by the most boring paint schemes available at Home Depot. Because of their squishy texture and raised shape, they end up looking more like scallops before they're cooked. As marshmallows go, I appreciate the sizing down because these are damned sugary. But because they're so small, more like mini marshmallows, they don't really hold up well to roasting. Not to say that our autumn s'more wasn't totally boss, but they dangled off the skewer and browned unevenly, which made them resemble wrinkly testicles. No joke. But the spice flavors were decent.

They didn't have the same strength as the Kisses, and had more of a weak, generic spice blend flavor. The texture of the marshmallows was also pretty inconsistent. Some were fluffy and smooth and others were strangely sticky, as though they'd leaked their spice formula, and wrinkled. While fun and festive, they weren't ideal for snacking on due to their sweetness, and would probably be better for baking in a sweet potato casserole or some killer rice krispie treats. I'm smitten by their charm, but I'm kind of bored with them. If these were stuck in a burning house and I had to choose between these or my broken coffee machine, I'd probably halfheartedly grab these until I realized they were melting in the heat and then abandon them. But I would have thought of them first.

Sukhi's Chicken Tikka Masala Naanwich

It is genuinely detrimental to shop while you're hungry. In our case, it could mean the difference between wandering in the frozen food section to grab an extra pizza to hoarding artisanal, free-range, cruelty-free chocolate bars simply because of our gay homing mechanism that insists we shop at the organic local co-op. Dating a girl is hard. But seriously, shopping when you're hungry is a terrible, terrible thing.

And like an orphaned puppy or a teenage runaway sitting sullenly in the bed of our pickup (there is no pickup) that's kind of how we ended up with this "naanwich." Like breakfast in bed and the musical stylings of Yes, it seems immaculate in theory yet proves to be disastrous in practice. Indian food? In my sandwich? According to Sukhi's, it's more common than you think. It seemed like one of those good-bad ideas. Take the messiest food you could find (was a spaghetti and meatball sandwich already taken? How about a milkshake sandwich for dessert?) and slap it in between bread. Luckily, chicken tikka masala is one of my favorite foods, and sandwichifying it only makes it more appealing to my childlike palate.
Not only is this Oprah recommended, it's microwavable. Hot damn, hello, 21st century. And may the grand reign of Oprah rest in peace. $3 and 90 seconds later, which, for the record, took me longer to calculate to microwave than I'm willing to admit, and we had our snack. According to the nutritional facts, this is a mere 310 calories, bread included, with only 6 grams of fat. Eating at an Indian restaurant, a typical serving of tikka with the naan, hefts a total of 836 calories and 42.5 grams of fat. And that's if you opt out of having it with rice. While I'm a little more willing to eat that kind of food in the winter when I can hide it under bulky jackets, in the summer it's less than desirable. Being able to satisfy that craving for creamy tikka was a definite advantage.
However, this didn't exactly deliver the type of comfort and satiation I desired. Keepitcoming Love and I split the sandwich as a snack. When it came out of the microwave, the pillowy-looking naan had dehydrated and ended up being soft and crumbly in the middle, with a fantastic herbed flavor, but chewy and tough on the edges. The ingredients were clearly top of the line and authentic, with a bold cilantro flavor permeating the filling, which was mixed with long strips of sweet onion and a thick, robust sauce. Personally, I felt that it didn't have the creaminess essential to a tikka masala. There was plenty of chicken to speak of, though it cooked unevenly and left us with a few unpleasant cold spots in each piece. While the innovation in this is mouth-watering over pedestrian PB&J and the typical turkey and cheese, there are a few too many flaws for me to buy this again. Try as I might, I just couldn't eat this without thinking, with a pang of guilt, that for a mere buck and a half more I could have gotten a loaded Roast Beef Smitty with homemade boursin cheese at State Street Deli.

McDonald's New McNugget Sauces: Honey Mustard, Creamy Ranch, Non-Buffalo, and Sweet Chili

Getting sauced at McDonald's. Man, maybe it's strange to wander in there and order four McNuggets and one of every sauce. But it's even stranger to then check to see if all the sauces are in there. AND THAT'S WHY I'M NOT REVIEWING MY OBVIOUS PREDICTED FAVORITE, SPICY BUFFALO SAUCE. GOD DAMN YOU, 16 YEAR OLD BORED EMPLOYEE. ALL THE SAUCES MEANS ALL THE SAUCES. DOES DADDY HAVE TO TEACH YOU-

Oh, sorry. I didn't see you there. I was about to relive one of my therapist's favorite childhood ex-boyfriend memories of mine, but then I remembered how anxious you were when you called me on the phone, baby girl, asking me to review the new nugget sauces. Well, here I am. Minus one sauce, but who the fuck cares, anyhow? We're here and we're droppin' dollas and chompin' chicken, son.In this photo, there are five sauces. There are supposed to be six. Two of the five sauces above are OG. This introduction is starting to look like it will be automatically harder than the hardest question on the SAT if I continue. There are four new sauces, two of which look like they're definitely repurposed Chicken Selects sauces (yeah, honey mustard and ranch, I'm talking to you.) and one of them is not so much new so much as back from the dead, last year's hit from the Winter Olympics, the sweet chili sauce itself. And the other will have to wait for another time. I don't know. My forecasting figures that it will be better than most commercially viable creamy buffalo sauces, of which there are currently zero, but not as good as the zesty/buffalo sauces from Burger King. I'll have my analysts check that out. Jesus, I'm resentful.In addition to the three new sauces, I got one of each of the current favorites, sweet and sour and barbecue. Oddly, no hot mustard, and I'm dearly hoping they haven't phased it out as of all the sauces, it's by far my absolute favorite, despite being more vinegary than hot. While I had a hankering for mustard, I tried the honey mustard. Meh. Meh to honey mustard. Years of slathering it on has dulled my senses. I want brown sugar mustard. I want maple mustard. Honey and I are on good terms, but she just doesn't do it for me any more. It had a flat flavor and a sweet, inoffensive bite. It's not hot mustard. That woman is my mistress.The ranch looked lazy and repackaged but was, to my surprise, far superior to its "select" counterpart. Not only was it thicker and completely devoid of watery texture, it had a flavor similar to sour cream and onion potato chips, which means the food scientists are doing their job. Good show. It had a slight peppery bite and visible herbs and spices and all sorts of shit. My favorite of the new ones so far.The last of the new sauces was the sweet chili sauce. As far as I can tell, this sauce hasn't been upgraded or downgraded at all. If you chopped up a three piece of Chicken Selects, tossed them with this sauce and sweet and sour, and placed them on a lettuce slice you'd have an instant Chinese-American entree of Crispy Northern Style Warrior Rolls, available at your local PF Chang's for just $14.99. And yeah, I like that sauce, much as I love Tong Sing's homemade mustard and duck sauce. It's generic but it's likeable.Overall, I'm not too impressed with the sauces, with the exception of the fact that they are genetically engineered to go perfectly with nuggets and literally nothing else. We tried the sauces on tortilla bits after we plowed through the 4 spot, but they ended up tasting crappy and made me feel cheap. On the inside. I don't understand what's so "new" about taking a leaf from Taco Bell's book and just reintroducing the same product over and over with new packaging. Bringing back an LTO is a nice perk, though. Gotta say, I expected more from McDonald's, especially with this new addition to their sauce line. Granted, it's hard to think of different kinds of sauces that the public will enjoy. Personally, I think an avocado sauce, like Subway is now trying, or a honey lime sauce would be tasty. Maybe a sauce similar to Chick-Fil-A's Polynesian. Who knows? In any case, you can do better, McDonald's. You can do better.

White Castle Surf 'n' Turf Slider

Why did we decide to go to the Bronx at midnight? We'd never been to a White Castle, New York housing the last smattering New England has to offer. The GPS had attempted mutiny by directing us not to the gentle White Castle off 95, but the cramped location in the middle of the city. And with every check cash kiosk, boarded up Boys and Girls Club, and flashing ambulance we drove by, that question became more apparent in my mind. As we reached the kingdom itself, a building as compact as one of its burgers and open 24 hours a day, I wondered if this meal would be so good as to justify it as my last.

This was not the melting pot that Murray told us about! This was empty and sterile inside, with an atonal prison-esque buzzer to open and close the bathroom and a near shootout over the price of a Saver Sack. Dorothy was not in Kansas anymore, and we were certainly far afield of Connecticut. But here we were, and as we ordered through holes in the bullet-proof Plexiglass bubble separating us from our sliders, I peered over the menu, throwing caution, food poisoning, and health to the wind and ordering an item that allowed me to desperately cling to all that I knew and loved. That item was the Surf 'n' Turf Slider, an item debuting once in the 80's and last Valentine's Day, ensuring that no fish would go uncubed and no couple would go unsevered.

As Swagger and FF, whom I now considered my two large, hairy escorts, waited for their Crave Case, I chomped down on this burger. With eight layers of goo and a little over 500 calories in such a diminutive sandwich, it almost looked like the plodding, savory counterpart to a petit four. Needless to say, the Surf 'n' Turf is unfortunately, not a little chunk of lobster plopped atop one of the Castle's trademarked patties, despite my prayers to the gods for a little chevre. Calling it Surf 'n' Turf is like calling a concoction of Barefoot Chardonnay and Crystal Light a 1er Cru Bordeaux. It is far worse than that, consisting of three buns, three slices of cheese taking the place of edible glue, two beef patties, a handful of onions, the ominous fish stick square and no less than five packets of tartar sauce to lubricate it on its way down my gullet. The equivalent of a pre-Jamie Oliver 4th grade lunch with a slider garnish on top, or so I thought.

In reality, the burger tasted less offensive than it looked, despite being the gastronimical byproduct of two cows gang-raping a mermaid. The fish was tender and provided more of a textural irregularity than any particular flavor, which was good, because halfway through the slider, I remembered that I never really liked reconstituted fish patties. But it wasn't a terribly pungent flavor, just an added layer of grease alongside the standard squishy bun and squishy meat. The cheese was surprisingly gooey and salty. My main problem with this sandwich was that, like receiving a Wagyu beef steak and covering it in barbecue sauce, this slider was inexplicably coated with a blood-like sheen of ketchup, not only all over the burger and buns, but all over the side of the box as well. This really detracted from the allure of some of the more delicate flavors I was trying to place and placed it in the category of an average fast food burger with a sickly, weak tomato flavor. As much as I hate pickles, they'd have probably done some good here with their crispness and acidity.

There's no nice way to say it: this is the creepiest burger I could have ordered in the creepiest of settings. And the burgers are deceptively small. I saw myself easily pounding down ten, but after this wildcard and two regular sliders, I felt sick. Luckily, my mood was elevated and I regained hope for the reign blanc with the joy of watching FF and Swagger eat ten burgers apiece out of their modified briefcase a la Pulp Fiction and discover the joy of the jalapeno slider. After all, it wasn't really about the food, it was about the adventure. The rest was just a bonus. And that's the way we like it.

IHOP At Home Strawberry and Cream Cheese French Toast Stuffed Pastries, Griddle 'n' Sausage Wraps, and Sausage and Cheese Omelet Crisper

I can't say that IHOP and I are very well acquainted. It might be because all the IHOP locations near me are in crappy areas of town, or out of state, or shadowed by better restaurants. The only one within a 20 mile radius of me is next to Connecticut's first and only Sonic, and when push comes to shove, I'm happier eating burgers in my car than I am eating pancakes next to high school stoners. Oh wait, the stoners flock to Denny's. Disregard that.
Because of my IHOP jeunesse, I look at my experience with the new IHOP At Home line as an anthropological study, as I have never viewed the majestic Cinn-A-Stick Pancakes in their natural, greasy habitat, nor had I watched the brilliant mating rituals of the compote and whipped topping upon a pancake horizon to create the Rooty Tooty Fresh 'n' Fruity. But I knew what to look for. One winter, long ago, Dillinger and I journeyed to an IHOP and feasted upon its bounties.
Needless to say, if eating at IHOP can be considered a journey into Bruce Chatwin-esque territories, eating IHOP At Home is like going to a pet store and playing with abandoned, slightly defective puppy mill dogs. The IHOP At Home line, which I'll abbreviate as IHOPAH, consists of three varieties of frozen breakfast-inspired items, all of them coated or fried before cooking. I took a little trip to my local Walmart Supercenter and checked them out. All of the products were cooked in what seemed like the hellfires of New Jerse- er, hell itself, in a 450 degree oven. Before cooking, they resembled edible, bulbous building blocks.
Starting with the Strawberry Cream Cheese French Toast Stuffed Pastries. The SCCFTSP look pretty when you open the package and when they're cooking, are fragrant, like fresh beignets. They consist of a slightly sweet, crispy dough that, when bitten into, yields a sauce that looks like the end result of a Strawberry Shortcake gang-related stab wound.
The sauce, which appears to be the bulk of the pastry in the photo, only occupies a scant third of the midsection. It congeals after cooling and has a mild, sweet taste when isolated from the pastry- very creamy and fruity, but when eaten together, is really buried in the fried dough flavors.The next generation in the noble line of the IHOPAH dynasty is the Griddle 'n' Sausage, the McGriddle-inspired maple, sausage, and pancake combination in yet another form thrown together in more ways than Taco Bell products. Well, don't get your hopes up, breakfast-craving late-night McDonald's goers. It's just another classic textbook example of "frequently imitated, never duplicated." The Griddle 'n' Sausage smelled like syrup when I opened the package, smelled like syrup when it was cooking, smelled like syrup when I lifted it to my mouth to take a bite, and tasted like grease and meat. What gives? I felt as though this phallic phinger phood was trying to woo me by wearing syrup-scented perfume, much as I tried to woo Keepitcoming by dousing myself in a caustic dose of BK Flame, both equaling in massive failure. Though these were juicy and salty, they gave me a headache and just tasted like fried sausages rather than pancake-wrapped ones.The last of this divine trio was the one I was most curious to try, the Sausage and Cheese Omelet Crisper. Billed as the love child between a McDonald's hash brown and a microwaved omelet, it actually tasted pretty close to its roots. The result is a somewhat bloated rectangle of egg and potato, which took the longest to cook with twenty minutes in the oven, and smelled burnt and greasy when it came out. After letting it sit for a few minutes, I found that it had crisped up and yielded a fluffy, soft interior. Okay, it was more like mushy. The exterior was the crispiest and least greasy of all three, probably because it was the only one that lacked a dough or batter around it.
With the Omelet Crisper, the crust comes from a potato-based coating which crisps up like the outside of a hash brown in the oven. The mouthfeel wasn't quite exactly like a hash brown. It was definitely more dense and floury. It's essentially a giant stuffed tater tot, which makes it delicious. Though I think that the flavor could use more sausage chunks and spices, the overall texture and sensation was definitely that of a crispy omelet. The cheese was gooey and creamy inside and the eggs were more like McDonald's egg squares, but two out of three ain't bad. This was the best of all three, which is like saying that Big Bird was the least gay of all the Sesame Street characters. Nobody wins.
That being said, none of these made me feel very good. I forgot the third and last reason for why I don't go to IHOP very often- it makes me feel bloated and gives me a headache. I have a free monthly biological reaction for those symptoms that I don't need a $10 frozen breakfast gamut of products for. I threw the bulk of these away and went for a walk. If you're not a giant lardass, they're not for you.

Osaka Takoyaki Drops

Another delicious food drop review from J-List. While we didn't have a whole lot of success from the Sasebo Burger Drops, they were novel at the very least and a ton of fun to try. This particular drop attempts to imitate a difficult Japanese dish, takoyaki. I say difficult because from the item's description of a fried ball of octopus, tempura, pickled ginger, and onions all lavishly lashed with mayonnaise, (thanks, Wikipedia!) it brings many flavors and senses to the table- somewhat difficult to emulate within the course of a small hard candy, no?

In his book, Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser describes attending a "tasting" in a food flavorist's chemistry lab and the dissociation of placing fragrance strips beneath his nose to smell a grilled hamburger, as fresh and fragrant as though it were being grilled next to him and opening his eyes to see nothing more than a small paper strip in front of him. Going into this, this was sort of what I expected to experience.

While I've never had takoyaki, I can imagine what they taste like, and this seems to be the borderline McTokyo version versus the standard street issue snack. It's not fishy, which was good because I wasn't sure my stomach could handle a fish-flavored candy, but it had a predominantly sweet, spicy flavor from the ginger, an aspect that I expected to be widely ignored. There wasn't too much more to speak of, and it lost that fried, oily flavor I thought would be most prominent. Not disgusting, but not what I expected.

Honest Tea Green Honey

Sorry for the delay in posts. With finals in full swing, I often experience crashes after pulling an all-nighter on a term paper or a take-home test. I drink coffee more than I drink tea, but was curious to add a few more beverages to my repertoire. Honest Tea sent me a few samples of their libations and I decided to test run an iced tea tonight.

With 73 calories in a 0 calorie world of artificial sweeteners and colors, does a carefully curated ingredient list matter more than nutrition? From this experience, I have deduced that the art of a beverage must lie in the flavor. If that's the case, this is more of a community college art portfolio, because it's bland, flat, and overly diluted. The tea flavor comes out strong, a bit more intense than I would have liked it had I brewed it myself, with a slight honey and sugar note at the end.

Overall, I would have liked to see a more pronounced nuance of both sweet and bitter in this. I really do like a good iced tea, I'm no hater, but just think that with such a simple and easily user-friendly beverage, measures could have been taken to make this a more unique and sophisticated drink.