Morinaga Ramune Melon Soda

This cute little bottle of Melon Soda flavored Ramune candy was included in the promotional package kindly provided by Tsunami.hk. This type of candy is very similar to Smarties in the United States - flavored pressed sugar pellets. I don't know anyone who gets excited about Smarties, but I don't know anyone who hates them, either.

I'll admit it - I've bought little Hello Kitty or Pokemon toys from grocery stores in Japan for myself and for souvenirs, and they often include a wrapped Ramune candy pellet. One is usually enough for me, but this Morinaga candy packs a whole 27 grams worth of pellets - 23 grams of which are sugar!


The open bottle smelled sweet and reminded me of cotton candy. The pellets chew into a very fine powder with an intensely sweet and slightly sour citric acid flavor. I didn't get any hints of melon soda, and the aftertaste was a little chalky. They were very similar to American Smarties.

Still, even though Morinaga didn't deliver on flavor, I can't say I disliked the taste. The whole bottle was too much for me to eat in one sitting, but I'm not really the target demographic. After 5 or 6 pieces, I had a nice sugar rush, but the candies became a bit cloying and I had to put the bottle away.

C+

Morinaga website

Seattle Chocolates Panoramic Pecan

Although I've seen Seattle Chocolates in my area, when I was visiting Seattle and saw this truffle bar in the Space Needle gift shop, I was compelled to buy it. The package design was very cool, and I thought it would make a good souvenir...and I ended up eating it myself. To be fair, I shared it with 3 people, but I do feel a little guilty.

I never made the connection before, but many of the Seattle Chocolates truffle bars pay homage to famous locations in the Seattle area. Some good examples are the Pike Place Espresso Bar and the Whidbey Wildberry Truffle Bar, but I haven't tried either. Panoramic Pecan promised raisins and praline pecans in dark chocolate truffle.


Because it's a truffle bar, the chocolate had a matte finish and a very soft snap. It smelled of raisins and chocolate (like Raisinettes, if you've had them). The chocolate was sweet for being dark, but it was very smooth and silky with a mildly bitter finish. I liked the texture and the flavor very well.

Did you notice that I haven't mentioned any pecans or actual raisins yet? That's because in the first of 4 quarters of the bar, there was almost nothing but chocolate. My piece had one tiny candied pecan piece, and while it was crunchy and had a nice caramelized flavor, I was pretty disappointed with the distribution.

Luckily, one of my guinea pigs let me have half of another piece later, and the experience was quite different! The plentiful nuts added a firm, sweet crunch and the raisins were tender and flavorful. It reminded me of a high quality trail mix. If only the whole bar had been like that....

B+

Seattle Chocolates website

Membrillo

Here's a fun project if your pantry if over stocked with jellies and jams from the summer canning season, but you just can't help yourself from the joys of boiling fruit and sugar: make membrillo!

Membrillo, or quince paste, is a thick, sweet fruit paste traditionally paired with Manchego, a Spanish sheep's milk cheese, but, really, don't stop at just one kind of cheese. And don't stop at cheese, either. How about using membrillo in a pastry?

If you're not familiar with quince, quince is a hard fruit related to apples and pears, and has a most beautiful, sweet floral aroma. Quince is most often cooked, as it's too sour for most people to eat out of hand.

Quince are in season now, and because I run into quince a bit at work, I decided to tackle the recipe for membrillo in the current Vegetarian Times. Extremely easy, and quite impressive when you whip out a last minute cheese plate and can brag about your homemade membrillo.You'll start by peeling, coring, and chopping the quince. Then you'll cover the quince along with a few strips of lemon peel with water, and simmer covered until tender.Whirl the quince and lemon peel around in a food processor, then add it back to the pot along with sugar and a little lemon juice.
From here, you just simmer until the puree reduces to a very thick paste and magically turns a lovely shade of pinkish orange. Tannins are the magic.Spread the paste in a parchment paper-lined container for easy lifting when the paste is done chilling and firming, then cut off a few slices to enjoy.Membrillo
adapted from Vegetarian Times
makes about 1 cup

2 quince, peeled, cored and roughly chopped
3 strips of lemon peel
sugar
2 tablespoons lemon juice

• In a medium saucepan, add quince and lemon peel. Add enough water to the saucepan to cover the quince. Bring water to a boil, then cover and reduce to a simmer. Simmer 10-30 minutes, or until tender (yours may take significantly longer to become tender depending on the fruit). Drain water from quince.
• Add quince and lemon peel to a food processor and puree. Measure the volume of the quince puree, then return quince puree to the saucepan.
• How ever much quince puree you have, add an equal amount of sugar to the sauce pan, along with 2 tablespoons of lemon juice.
  
• Simmer quince and sugar mixture over low heat, stirring occasionally, until very thick, about 45-90 minutes.
  
• Transfer quince paste to a parchment paper-lined container, and cool.
• Unmold quince paste, and slice.
  

Nacho Chilichanga Wingers

God, I love wings.

There's something so deliciously primal about eating them. Generally, I avoid foods that force me to pay to dismantle it, but wings are a serious exception. When Swagger comes for a visit, we almost always hit up the local wing joint and enjoy a ton of them over some terrible B movie or bad reality television.

These snacks intrigued me because they were both low fat and wing flavored, and wing shaped. However, it would not be possible to replace actual wings with these...things. They're unfortunately not as wing-like as I would have enjoyed.Granted, I haven't found a buffalo sauce flavored product that has really wowed me, though I did love the blue cheese glaze on Little Wings. These, unfortunately, fall into the category of imitation buffalo snacks. While they do try hard, and I admire the effort put into the little wing shapes, I just wasn't too impressed. This particular flavor is nacho chilichanga, a flavor I've never actually seen translated into wings.I think the seasoning was applied far too gently. There was a slightly cheesy flavor to these, but by no means nachoesque, and a very mild chipotle and black pepper spice at the end of each bite. It was mainly salty and had little else to offer. The texture of these was stranger than I expected, and these were tiny wings! If I was served these in a restaurant, I'd send them back because they look like squab wings. I wanted them to taste like chips or Bugles, but the overall resounding mouthfeel was a lot like stale baked potato chips. It was crisp, but a little too brittle, and crumbled as soon as I crunched in.These rated a 3/5 on the company heat scale, but I didn't find them spicy at all. Adding a little hot sauce definitely made them palatable, but I wasn't enthused enough to eat more than one or two.

Kurkure Funjabi Khadai Masala

Local international groceries are the shit. Whenever I'm in a new town or even trolling around my own town, I seek out two things: international groceries for foreign snacks and different fast food restaurants. I'm sure that I have a directory of all these places in the tri-state area. So I dragged Swagger and Dillinger to the Asian grocery (one of three) the other day after a delicious lunch at Mi Tierra and made them buy me Kurkure- the Indian equivalent of Cheetos.

Between this hilariously named "Funjabi" flavor and an old standby, Naughty Tomatoes, I was torn between which to review first. I've been saving up some salacious puns for the Naughty Tomatoes, but this one looked more limited edition, so up it went.After kicking it at the gym like Ronnie from the Jersey Shore, I came home to a roomful of roommates- perfect guinea pigs for testing this new and strange snack. The package advertised a flavor of Rajma curry, cinnamon, cloves, and black cardamom. Sounds like my kind of gig. Upon further examination, I found out that rajma, both the curry spice and part of the chip base, is kidney beans. Definitely interesting.

The Kurkure were Cheeto-like, but actually had a much better, smoother consistency, with none of those little cornmeal chunks. This could have been due to the kidney beans, but might have also been the rice meal, the main composition of the dough. The flavor is unique- the perfect representation of the foods I seek! It was much spicier than I thought, with a fresh pepper flavor and a heavy curried garlic scent and aftertaste. I tasted a lot of coriander and cinnamon.

Although I didn't taste the cardamom, there was a sweet undertone to this that really reminded me of the Spicy Sweet Chili Doritos that I enjoy on my rare Subway treks, but with a lot more heat. Interestingly enough, one of the lower ingredients on the list was cocoa solids, but I'm guessing those were unsweetened. They probably added an extra element of richness to the flavor, though.The strangest aspect of these was the nutrition. In a 120 gram bag, there are roughly 620 calories. This beats out even the worst of American snacks, and for reasons that I genuinely can't understand. Can anyone shed some light on this?

Overall, I loved these. I love curry and I love chips, so they were a real hit. I'm definitely going to try these again and get some more flavors on my shelf.

Rant - Breakfast Sides

Almost every major (and not so major) city I've been in has bruncheries that offer a vegetarian protein side like tempeh or seitan sausage for breakfast. Here in Philly, this is almost non-existent.

Now, I don't expect a traditional greasy diner to offer tempeh as a breakfast side. I'm talking to all the restaurants in Philly that already do a tofu scramble or have a tempeh club on the menu, so are obviously aware of and cater to vegetarians.

I would love a side of tempeh with my pancakes. And I especially would love to not be charged full price for the breakfast platter that I have to request have bacon or sausage removed.

Why Philly? Why?

*Picture is NOT from a menu in Philly.

Debrand's Sweet Potato Pie Chocolate Bar

Okay, kids, October is over. I'm focusing on Thanksgiving now. In past years, I celebrated Thanksgiving with my mother's side of the family, but now that I'm a grown-ass woman, I like to go to as many celebrations as I possibly can in order to ensure that I experience the full girth of Thanksgiving gluttony. I've never had a Thanksgiving that hasn't been full of crazy pie flavors and perfectly roasted turkey, but if there's one thing I'm dead set on trying before my eventual coronary, it's a Southern Thanksgiving, complete with sweet potato pie.Even if my Yankee upbringing currently prevents me from doing so, I decided to try this bar so I could gear myself up for the holiday, and was completely satisfied with the overall experience. I consider myself to have a relatively refined palate, so with a bar that attempted to emulate such a familiar and unusual flavor, I expected to be able to separate all nuances and detect any that were not present. I went into this bar with high expectations and I finished extremely satisfied.I found that this bar really emulated the best of the sweet potato, as well as accentuating it with mild yet noticeable additions that really made a difference. The crunch of toffee in this was fantastic- I love toffee. It wasn't sticky or too chewy at all, and was ground up to a perfect consistency. The potato flavor in this was creamy and mild, but earthy and obviously yam-derived. I would have liked more, but am still happy with the amount. Nicely done. The balance of milk chocolate and white chocolate added a creaminess and rich flavor without dominating the bar at all. With spices, most noticeably, cinnamon, this was a really well crafted confection.

The other thing that really attracted me to this bar was its unique portioning. Where some bars I've consumed have had pieces that were too unwieldy or too small to enjoy, this was both artful yet individually centered, with three kinds of pieces in three sizes so that one can designate how much one wishes to eat. I found it to be minimal yet impressive and was really happy with the bar. Bring this to Thanksgiving and be prepared to get all the post-feast, drunk second cousin/family friend ass you can handle. It's that good.