Food Blog-less Vacation

Hi, ya! I'm back in Philly after my Christmas vacation. I visited my parents in South Carolina, then headed to the South Carolina coast for a little chill time.

We stayed on the coast at a friend's house (that house in the top picture). Yes, it does look like a shack, but that's because it pretty much is a shack. The house is a Freedman's cottage, which is a two-room home built after the Civil War and rented to newly freed slaves.Our friends are restoring the house, and have actually removed an addition to the house to bring the house back to it's original footprint, and have also gotten the house on the National Register of Historic Places. Pretty cool, since lots of these houses are under threat of being torn down (or have already been torn down) due to development.In the kitchen there is an antique electric stove. She's pretty darn cute, but, trust me, you do not want this as your every-day stove. It's basically a two-burner hot plate, and the oven part is identical to the round electric coil burner on the top of the stove, except there is a metal box surrounding it — kind of like an Easy Bake Oven.

Oh, I ate while I was away, but, other than a few food tweets, my vacation was also a vacation from blogging and making mental notes of every meal I ate. So nice, I should do it more often.We went to the beach, and also enjoyed the spectacular vistas of the marshes which are everywhere you look when you're hopping from island to island.
I climbed the lighthouse on Hunting Island, which is kinda cool, because most lighthouses aren't open to the public.
Walked through the streets filled with grand Southern mansions and Live Oaks. The houses are nice, but it's the Live Oaks that really strike my fancy. More priceless than the houses, in my opinion.We spent New Year's Eve and Day in Charleston visiting my sister and friends — and drinking a bit too much champagne and punch. We tried to take a tour of Charleston Tea Plantation, the only tea farm in the United States, but despite their lovely website listing their operation hours and holiday closures, they decided to tack on December 31 as a holiday, but not mention it online. Ugh. So, after driving out to the island where the farm is located (along with a bunch of other people who had to turn around and go back from whence they came), we decided to hop the fence and at least take a few pictures of the tea plants, which are a species of Camellias if you didn't already know that tidbit.I also spent a couple of days in Savannah visiting my best friend from high school. Ate a sub from a South African restaurant in Savannah, which was interesting, but the experience solidified my belief that Philly and the surrounding area really does reign on the hoagie / sub front. But I'm not going to talk about food on this post, even though, I guess I just did.

I haven't eaten out at any place new in Philly in almost a month (those last few posts were written a while ago), but I am ready to tackle the city again. Just give me a bit, because while I'm ready to go out and devour, I just don't get out as much in the winter, because, well, it's freakin' cold up here, and I am a whiny winter wienie!

Glad to be back, Philly! (Just wish it were summer. Sigh.)

Tirol Wine

Even though I know next to nothing about wine, I do know that Wine is not a very descriptive name for a flavor. From the package, it can be assumed that this is a red wine flavored Tirol, but even that doesn't add much.

My favorite red wine is Shiraz, which can have a strong bite, but there is a whole spectrum of red wines ranging from sweet to dry and beyond. The mystery Wine Tirol was purchased from napaJapan (4 for $3.29 US) just before Christmas, and limited quantities are still available.


The dark chocolate was of decent quality and had a bit of a chocolate liquor flavor to it. In terms of texture, it had a good snap and a slow melt on the tongue. The jelly in the center was thick and sticky like a fruit gem, but didn't taste like wine. This Tirol was more like grape jelly in dark chocolate, and while it was very good, there was no hint of that "luxurious aftertaste" the packaging mentioned.

Maybe they were aiming for dessert wine, but even that has more bite than this mild Tirol. There was a slight sourness at the finish, but it lacked the rich, complex end note that distinguishes sweet wine from grape juice. Even though this Tirol was tasty, it was misleading, so I have to account for that in my rating. This could be a good thing for those who don't like wine, but I wish Tirol had taken the concept just a bit further.

B+

Tirol Website

Avitae Caffeinated Water

Are you tired all the time?Do you sleep when you're supposed to be doing awesome stuff?Well, kiss those biceps, baby- or what WILL be, because avitae can KILL SLEEP!You want this.

Let's clear a few things up before we start the review. First off, HOLY SHIT, THAT'S A REAL WORD. I was about to lump it into my conglomerate of foor-related neologisms that are made up and usually trademarked for the sake of advertising. Notable examples include "cherimoya," (African for "tap water") and "sustainable." But seeing a familiar nominative case, I dusted off my old Latin dictionary and discovered that avitae is a clever bastardization of the Latin word for life, vitae. Close. But no cigar.The incense cone shaped bottle provides as much caffeine as a can of diet soda and as much water as a regular bottle of Poland Spring. And for a buck and change, the added boost is worth the cost. Being adamantly sworn against the bulk of energy drinks, I found that I was both bereft of the lingering aftertaste of robot piss in my mouth and also quite alert and energized during my daily treadmill and my subsequent social activities.The best part about this is the aforementioned lack of bitterness. Because the only extra ingredient differentiating this from tap water is natural caffeine, there's no additives to boost or discolor the flavor of the water in any way, thus eliminating the sour aftertaste from chemicals. This is just water, with no bells and whistles but for the caffeine. So I have the same general taste reaction to it as I do with most water- with absolutely no enthusiasm. But the added caffeine is a bonus and boosts my street cred versus showing up to the gym looking like a little girl with a can of Diet Coke. Epic win.

Goody Good Stuff Strawberries and Cream

A vegan product! I'm turning pro-health. This is actually a more beneficial stance than last year's anti-health campaign. Everyone died. This product, sent all the way from the UK, has a name that reminds me of obsolete parabolic tales about children with improbable names not following the Golden Rule and dying horribly.

"This story was in a little booklet the Corn Fluffies people had sent out. In the story some children, who were supposed not to eat some certain fruit because it was poisoned, had eaten the fruit and became sick. If they had stuck to Corn Fluffies they would not have become sick."

In that vein, Goody Good Stuff definitely has a bad run-in with a wheat thresher.But I digress. Goody Good Stuff is, despite its ill-fated moniker, quite good. The Strawberries and Cream is, by some act of God, made without dairy products. The shape is similar to Jujubes and tastes like the exact replica of Creme Savers, were they both vegan and in gummy form. To me, that's absolutely brilliant. The gummies are separated into two flavors, the strawberry and the cream, so that Monk can organize his into piles and eat them separately should he so choose. But for the rest of us, they are preferably eaten together in joyous harmony. The gummies are springy and chewy in texture and do not stick to the teeth, yet are not chalky and sticky like fruit snacks. For people with a constant supply of Wet Naps and Monk, though, there is a slight tackiness to the individual pieces. But it's okay.The strawberry tastes deliciously fruity, with a distinct strawberry flavor and a somewhat floral aftertaste. I found myself preferring the cream-flavored gummies, because not only were they milky and only slightly sweet, they were not made from that pasty, slimy marshmallow gummy mutant but also actual gummies themselves. Thank god for that.I made this hollowed out grapefruit because I wanted to create a visual and simple representation of the congruity between factories and nature of these gummies and their noble goal, thusly inching society one step closer to an all-encompassing Soylent Green dictatorship. Also, because I wanted to make a grapefruit skin suit a la Buffalo Bill. Actually, that's the only reason I did that.

On a scale of zero to Sharkies, these don't quite have the same fleshiness nor the shape of a majestic Great White, as Sharkies do, but are a delicious alternative and rank somewhere in the second-tier level of Trolli and Black Forest. I have done far too much examination into this. My dissertation shall follow. ("Mein Snak: The Rise and Fall of the Third Mike and Ike")

Bonomo Turkish Taffy

Because I was born in the nineties, there's really no way I can attest to Bonomo Turkish Taffy actually being retro. You see, the concept of retro to me applies to ephemeral and long-gone things like a young, innocent Britney Spears, String Thing and Dunkaroos as a balanced lunch (with a Tang chaser), and cel animated Disney movies. While parents of real "retro" eras waxed poetically about Woodstock, I was rocking out to Pinkerton well into my...well, right now, in fact.

Point is, it's silly to apply the phrase retro to anything that isn't thirty years or older than you currently are now, because retroactive trends are relative to the people they surround. But believe me when I tell you that this shit is retro. And Kosher to boot! Right down to the ballooned 60's font and complete lack of graphics, the archaic "crack it up" catch phrase, and the pastel colors. If it weren't for the website on the back, I'd be hard pressed to believe this wasn't directly from the 60's and that I wasn't ingesting 50 year old candy.
Thanks to my mom, an aficionado of all things vintage (she also provided the background for these photos!), I was able to try a few bars of this strange confection. Turkish Taffy isn't quite a viscoelastic fluid, but it does have a few things in common with Silly Putty. The strawberry flavored bar is that same puce pink, and the candy has to be sharply whacked against a hard surface to break the molecules apart quickly enough so that one can eat small chunks at a time. I'm talking Maxwell's Silver Hammer bashed, too. These take at least three good whacks to break into edible pieces. Whole, the bar is very difficult to break by bending or gnawing bits off and is recommended only if you're bored and waiting for your next episode of Clarissa Explains It All to stream. It is also stretchable and can be shaped into snakes and letters and crude penises. So what's separating this from being a scented, sticky Silly Putty?Actually, not much. The strawberry one, at least. It doesn't fare very well at all and ended up cracking into tiny, sharp shards that both tasted and smelled like artificially scented erasers- a powdery, generic fruit scent. The instructions commanded that you let the candy melt away in your mouth. But who has the patience to suck on candy? I certainly don't, and unless you're one of those annoying fraudful "supertasters," you won't either. Because that's bullshit. So I crunched through and found a texture similar to what I imagine dinosaurs felt in the La Brea tar pits- complete helplessness. It just stuck there and until I let it soften, there it lay.Let that be a lesson to you. It can never hurt to suck something until it gets soft in your mouth. Because otherwise, it might get stuck.

So that was the strawberry taffy. The chocolate has the same textural whimsy and a rather different flavor not unlike cocoa. Once you get over the initial chalkiness and dirt flavor of the chocolate taffy, it reaches an unsettlingly specific flavor identical to glazed chocolate doughnuts. Creepily so. I preferred this to the strawberry by far because it at least gave me a visualization of something edible I could connect it to versus the pica ramifications of the former. Fucking pica. I like these retro candies. They have a certain charm to them. They seem to last longer than today's modern candies, contain far less calories, and are nostalgic, if strangely flavored.

Dagoba Lavender Blueberry

Sometimes, a bar sounds too interesting to resist, as was the case with this Lavender Blueberry dark chocolate bar. This is my second Dagoba bar review, but the brand name still reminds me of Star Wars, and lavender reminds me more of Ron Weasley's clingy first girlfriend than the flower.

Lavender is not one of my favorite fragrances, and I have limited experience eating it, so please keep that in mind. This bar also reminded me of hawking pillow mist at my old job, so I had no shortage of useless points of reference for this review.


The dark chocolate (59%) bar had a good snap, but again, the Dagoba "perforations" didn't work for me. I could smell and sense the lavender, but the taste was mainly dominated by blueberry. I should mention that my dad said he could taste the lavender, so that might just be me.

There were bits of dried blueberry in the bar, and the tart flavor enhanced the slight fruitiness of the dark chocolate, but the chocolate itself was just a bit chalky. The finish was clean and the bar wasn't bad by any means, but I don't think I would buy this bar again.

B-

Read more reviews of this bar at Chocablog and Doug's Republic.

Dagoba website

Tsubu Tsubu Orange Hi-Chew

Hi-Chew, like most Japanese candies, undergoes more flavor changes and makeovers than Ru Paul and frequently keeps updating its line of limited edition and regional candy flavors. Needless to say, it can be difficult for a food blogger to keep up with the trends, especially with the high overseas shipping prices it costs to import them. But every so often, my local Asian grocery will have a few new flavors for me to try out.

This flavor plays off the idea of using Japanese onomotopoeia as a textural component. In this case, "tsubu tsubu" refers to the sensation of chewing little bits of something hard within something soft, similar to bubble tea or in this case, fruit rind bits. The candy is made up of a soft, chewy orange center and cream-based outer later studded with pieces of orange rind or imitation rind.If you've had Hi-Chew, you're familiar with the alluringly unique texture. It starts out rock hard and tough to chew, and then melts away into a creamy, taffy-like sweet that lasts for about a minute before you're able to swallow it. The pieces of rind don't interrupt the smoothness of the candy at all, rather, they meld quite nicely into the overall experience.The flavor is mainly orange and cream, like a slightly more intense creamsicle, but with a hint of mint at the end that reminds me of the short-lived Crest orange toothpaste with a much better execution. The little pieces of orange rind provided a slightly bitter counterpart to the sweetness of the candy and gave a nice bite to the chew. I definitely enjoyed these. They weren't the most unique or unusual Hi-Chew flavor I've tried but offered an authentic and satisfying taste.